"Did you notice how perfect this heliotrope is?" she asked, looking down, not at him, but at the blossoms on the lapel of her jacket.
"It is pretty," he answered, wondering how soon his evil star would lure him on to say the wrong thing.
His apparently indifferent manner piqued her still further. "If you feel very good, and are sure you are going to be good all day, I will give you a piece," she said, separating one spray from its fellows.
Van Tassel sprang to his feet, and in a second Mildred's fingers were upon his coat.
"The round world is just a rattle to her, and you are one of the bells on it that jingle when she moves you."
Clover's words were sounding warningly in his ears. He could not help it. He only prayed to jingle in tune, for moved he was to the depths of his being.
"You like heliotrope very much?" he asked, not daring to look below her cool, fair forehead.
"Yes. Sometimes, I think, best of all; but," with a sigh, "it goes quickly." And she dropped her hands and moved back.
"Like all the happiest moments of life," said Jack, and something leaped from his brown eyes that actually surprised Mildred, coming out of the long train of indifferent days.
"Oh, if Jack is like that," she thought, and a new respect grew in her for the man who ruled himself, and refused to submit to her caprice.