"I'm not the sort of feller that can help missing his friends," he guardedly said, but his tongue felt dry and unwieldy.
Usually people were not so niggardly as that with their compliments to Anne, and as she held a half-piqued silence Boone knew that she was offended, so his next question came with a stammering incertitude.
"You are a friend of mine, aren't you?"
She rose then from the rock where she had been sitting and stood there lance-like, with her chin high and her glance averted. To his question she offered no response save a short laugh, until the pulses in his temples began to throb, and once more he closed his eyes as one instinctively closes them under a wave of physical pain.
Boone had made valiant and chivalrous resolves of silence, but he had heard a laugh touched with bitterness from lips upon which bitterness was by nature alien.
"Anne!" he exclaimed in a frightened tone, "what made you laugh like that?"
Then she wheeled, and her words came torrentially. There was anger and perplexity and a little scorn in her voice but also a dominant disappointment.
"I mean, Boone Wellver, that I don't know how to take you. Sometimes I think you really like me—lots. Not just lumped in with everybody that you can manage to call a friend. I have no use for lukewarm friendships—I'd rather have none at all. You seem to be in deadly fear of spoiling me with your lordly favour."
The boy stood before her with a face that had grown ashen. It seemed incredible to him that she could so misconstrue his attitude; an attitude based on hard and studied self-control.
"You think that, do you?" he inquired in a low voice, almost fierce in its intensity. "Do you think I'm fool enough not to take thankfully what I can get, without crying for the moon?"