"Of course I know you haven't the least idea of doing any such a thing," said Louise, earnestness showing through her composure. "Won't you please stop your aimless ransacking and come over and talk with me?"
"But," said Laura, seating herself by Louise, "I am afraid I am too anxious to scold somebody—either you, here and now, or John Blythe, by a few stinging words sent under the sea, or—or anybody I can lay my tongue or pen to! Really, I am baffled by what you say, Louise. Of course the man has asked you time and again, since we've been over here, to marry him?"
"He scarcely writes about anything else," replied Louise, smothering a smile over Laura's intense but uninformed earnestness.
"And don't I know," pursued Laura, with a mystified rapidity of utterance, "that he made his incoherent, almost unintelligible declaration to you on the very day before we sailed—didn't I see him as he left, treading on air, and hear him emit the entranced gibberish that customarily mounts to a man's lips at such a time? And you received his declaration as if you had been timing its arrival, and you told me two minutes after he had gone that you loved him. Then what in the wide world is the—" Laura threw up her hands with a baffled gesture that was almost comic. "I confess myself completely daunted, dear. Won't you tell me what it is all about?"
Louise regarded Laura with steady, reflective eyes.
"You know how I appreciate your fine, generous impulsiveness, dear," she said to the older woman. "But you must have thought, haven't you, that it would not be fair for me to marry John Blythe?"
Another film of mystification appeared on Laura's widened eyes.
"Fair?" she almost whispered in her amazement. "How do you mean—'fair'? Fair to whom—to yourself or to John?"
"To him," said Louise. "Of course it would not be fair to him. I cannot see how there could be two views as to that."
Laura, arms folded, rose and lithely crossed the room several times, knitting her brow. Then she sat down again beside Louise.