“I think it was at a Mr. Johnson's—or WITH a Mr. Johnson—or perhaps at one of those Spanish ranches—I think he mentioned some name like Pico!”
Louise looked at him wonderingly for an instant, and then gave way to a frank, irrepressible laugh, which lent her delicate but rather set little face all the color he had missed. Partially relieved by her unconcern, and yet mortified that he had only provoked her sense of the ludicrous, he tried to laugh also.
“Then, to be quite plain,” said Louise, wiping her now humid eyes, “you want me to understand that you really didn't pay sufficient attention to hear correctly! Thank you; that's a pretty English compliment, I suppose.”
“I dare say you wouldn't call it 'philandering'?”
“I certainly shouldn't, for I don't know what 'philandering' means.”
Mainwaring could not reply, with Richelieu, “You ought to know”; nor did he dare explain what he thought it meant, and how he knew it. Louise, however, innocently solved the difficulty.
“There's a country song I've heard Minty sing,” she said. “It runs—
Come, Philander, let us be a-marchin',
Every one for his true love a-sarchin'
Choose your true love now or never. . . .
Have you been listening to her also?”
“No,” said Mainwaring, with a sudden incomprehensible, but utterly irrepressible, resolution; “but I'M 'a-marchin',' you know, and perhaps I must 'choose my true love now or never.' Will you help me, Miss Macy?”