"Your favorite poet, I suppose, my little cousin; but come, what were you so anxious to say to me when I came in just now?"
"Oh, Arthur, you cannot surely have forgotten. I wanted to speak to you about that beautiful fainting lady in the Academy."
"Perhaps I have not forgotten, Adèle." Arthur turned away from his cousin as he spoke, for he did not wish her to see the sudden flush which not all the proud consciousness of manhood and superiority had been strong enough to restrain.
"Well," he continued after a pause, as his cousin remained thoughtfully silent, "I do remember; but what of her?"
"I have been thinking of her, Arthur." Adèle's eyes looked sorrowful. "And whenever I think of her I remember those miserable houses, the shabby black dress and the quiet sadness in her face. Oh, Arthur, do you think it would be possible to help her in any way?"
"For you it might be," said Arthur with an appearance of sudden interest. "Unfortunately," he added bitterly, "women have the habit of looking upon any attempt at friendliness in one of the opposite sex as a species of insult."
This was rather too much for Adèle. With every respect for her cousin and fiancé, he was still too young, in her estimation, to be capable of exciting indignation in the breast of any woman. She laughed merrily: "I like your vanity, sir. As if any one could be insulted with you! You would have to pin on a false moustache, draw your hat over your brows to hide those ingenuous-looking eyes of yours, and button an enormous rough great coat up to your chin, before any one—any stranger, I mean—could imagine you even grown up. Why I look ages older than you!"
Adèle got up and looked at herself in the mirror.
"Yes, ages!" she repeated, with provoking emphasis and in eager expectation of a delightful torrent of self-vindication from her cousin. They often indulged in this kind of wordy war, and Adèle's feminine volubility and quickness of wit generally gave her the advantage.
No answer came from Arthur to the rash challenge. He was standing behind her, not looking into the mirror, but, as though utterly unconscious of her light words, gazing away into vacancy. Adèle caught sight of his face in the mirror, and a sudden silence seized her, for even as she spoke she saw that in her young cousin's face which warned her he was a boy no longer.