“But we can try,” she exclaimed with eager optimism. “Which is Claverly?” she looked blandly up and down the Yard.
“It isn’t here; it’s down there on Mt. Auburn Street.” Beverly indicated the direction.
“Not on the ‘campus’? Oh, dear!” said Billy’s cousin. There was dismay in her tone and on her broad disc of a face.
“No; but it’s very easy to find. Anybody will show you,” Beverly answered. He thought it was an excellent moment in which to bow himself away.
“Anybody?” she said softly, transfixing him with one of her oblique leers. She was a terribly arch woman.
Her kinship with Fields, and the assumable respectability that went with it, together with her abandoned trust in Harvard chivalry, didn’t make her any less awful in Beverly’s eyes. They were merely the complement of her already well-developed genius for imposition; they made her impossible to evade,—a something inevitable.
“I’m sure he won’t be there now,” repeated Beverly, helplessly. “We’re all so busy to-day; we haven’t a moment to ourselves,” he added furtively.
“Yes, yes, I know,” assented Billy’s cousin; “but it’s my only way to find him before evening. I can leave my card and arrange a rendezvous. I wouldn’t interfere with his plans for the world; I have a horror of being a burden. I’m such a perfectly independent little body!” She arose and gave Beverly the fan with the gesture of a lady fair bestowing her colours upon a knight who yearned. “Is it far?” she asked.
“No,” answered Beverly, shortly. “It isn’t far.”
“Then let us saunter—oh, so slowly—and drink it in.” She closed her eyes and breathed as one overcome by the sensuous beauty of the surroundings.