“Are you an authority on trees?” Wheeler spoke without a smile.
“Hardly that; but I was brought up in the country, and I know something of them. Your daughter loves the country, too.”
“Oh, yes—we all do.”
The tone was courteous, but the whole air of the man was so melancholy, his cheerfulness so palpably assumed, that Genevieve felt sorry for him, as well as inordinately curious to know what was the matter.
But her sympathy was the stronger impulse, and with a desire to entertain him, she said, “Come for a few steps in the garden, Mr. Wheeler, won’t you? Come and show me that quaint little summer-house near the front door. It is the front door, isn’t it? It’s hard to tell.”
“Yes, the north door is the front door,” Wheeler said slowly, as if repeating a lesson. “The summer-house you mention is near the front door. But we won’t visit that now. Come this other way, and I’ll show you a Japanese tea-house, much more attractive.”
But Genevieve Lane was sometimes under the spell of the Imp of the Perverse.
“No, no,” she begged, smilingly, “let the Japanese contraption wait; please go to the little summer-house now. See, how it fairly twinkles in the last gleams of the setting sun! What is the flower that rambles all over it? Oh, do let’s go there now! Come, please!”
With no reason for her foolish insistence save a whim, Genevieve was amazed to see the look of fury that came over her host’s face.
“Appleby put you up to that!” he cried, in a voice of intense anger. “He told you to ask me to go to that place!”