"No, and to you, especially!" said Lord Blair. "As well talk to a stone image. You know nothing of love or women."
Austin Ambrose smiled, a peculiar smile.
"Not the least," he said, cheerfully and placidly. "Love and women are not in my line. Wine and weeds and a good suit of trumps now—but tell me about her, for I know you are dying to. You saw her?"
"Yes, I saw her," assented Lord Blair, with a long sigh.
"And is that all?" asked Ambrose carelessly, but with a certain quick, attentive look in the corner of his cold gray eye. "Simply raised your hat and said 'good-day!'"
"No, by the Lord, no! I spent an hour with her—I think—I don't know—I lost all count of time, of everything."
"You talked to her? Did you mention that you had lost your senses—I mean your heart?"
"No chaffing about her, Austin," said Lord Blair, almost sternly, and with the look of passion that came so readily to his frank eyes. "Yes, I did tell her that I loved her!" he said, after a moment's pause.
Austin Ambrose looked over Blair's head without a particle of expression in his eyes.
"And may one ask how she took it?" he said, as carelessly as politeness would permit, but with his attention acutely on the alert. "What did she say?"