"Don't ask me to analyze it, Louise, or it might come apart in my hands and I shouldn't be able to put it together again, being so new at the craft," replied Blythe, whimsically. She found it very natural and agreeable that he should call her Louise; she had been conscious, in truth, of a deep-down little fear, now dissipated, that he might resume calling her Miss Treharne. She felt that she would not have cared for "Miss Treharne" any more—from him.
They fell silent again for a little while, during which Blythe, infected by the furtiveness which had actuated Louise a little while before, once slightly drew rein in order to steal an unobserved oblique glance at Louise's gleaming auburn hair, which refused to be confined under her three-cornered Continental hat of felt, but moved in rebellious, slipping coils under the impact of the occasional gusts of wind; and he wanted, too, to get the effect of her cameo face outlined against a patch of unusually dark shrubbery slightly ahead of them. His plotting, however, was a dead failure. She caught him in the very article of making this cribbed momentary inspection, and she laughed outright.
"Draw alongside, please," she commanded, and he noticed for the first time the all but indistinguishable slant of her full eyes when they were possessed by laughter. "You are not to criticize the fit of Laura's habit on me, as of course you were doing."
"Of course," said Blythe, more or less unconsciously delivering himself of a white one. "Additionally, I was wondering—" He paused a bit abruptly.
"Well?" inquired Louise.
"You won't be annoyed?" said Blythe. "I was wondering just what you used to think and do, and sing, and say, when, in your last-previous incarnation, Titian was spending all of his hours painting your face and hair."
"Now," replied Louise, smiling, "you are showing a suspicious proficiency for one who claims to have uttered his first compliment only three minutes ago. Annoyed? Why should I be? One might even become used, in the course of nineteen years, to the possession of green or blue or purple hair; so that I scarcely ever think of my ensanguined locks unless I am reminded of them."
"I think," said Blythe, musingly, "that you have the gift of cheerfulness."
"Oh," replied Louise, purposely misunderstanding him, "it doesn't take such an inordinate amount of resignation, really, to tolerate one's own red hair."
"I deny that it is red," said Blythe, assuming an impressive judicial air. "In fact, to employ a perfectly useless legal term, I note an exception to that statement. It isn't red. It's—it's the tint of an afterglow; an afterglow that never was on land or sea."