“I am so glad to see you.”
Philip murmured something in reply and they were seated.
That was all. It was so different from the meeting as Philip had a hundred times imagined it.
“It has been very long,” said Philip, who was devouring the girl with his eyes, “very long to me.”
“I thought you had been very busy,” she replied, demurely. Her composure was very irritating.
“If you thought about it at all, Miss Mavick.”
“That is not like you, Mr. Burnett,” Evelyn replied, looking up suddenly with troubled eyes.
“I didn't mean that,” said Philip, moving uneasily in his chair, “I—so many things have happened. You know a person can be busy and not happy.”
“I know that. I was not always happy,” said the girl, with the air of making a confession. “But I liked to hear from time to time of the success of my friends,” she added, ingenuously. And then, quite inconsequently, “I suppose you have news from Rivervale?”
Yes, Philip heard often from Alice, and he told the news as well as he could, and the talk drifted along—how strange it seemed!—about things in which neither of them felt any interest at the moment. Was there no way to break the barrier that the little brown girl had thrown around herself? Were all women, then, alike in parrying and fencing? The talk went on, friendly enough at last, about a thousand things. It might have been any afternoon call on a dear friend. And at length Philip rose to go.