"Well, Mr. Ogre-Guardian, are you going to be at the pier to wish us bon voyage?" she asked Blythe.
Blythe stared at her. Laura stared back at him.
"Do you mean to tell me," exclaimed Laura, laughing, "that, after you've been here more than a solid hour, Louise has not told you? In heaven's name, what else could you two have been talking about?"
"Don't keep me oscillating on this—this ten-thousand-revolutions-to-the-minute fly-wheel, please, Laura," said Blythe, blankly. "What are you talking about?"
"Then it is true that Louise hasn't told you we are going abroad next week?"
"Next week?" Blythe's jaw fell.
"Why, I thought surely she would have finished asking your guardianly permission—and everything by this time," said Laura, shaking a finger at Louise. "But I can see how it is going to be: she means to wheedle me into asking her guardian all the terribly difficult things."
"But are you really going so—so scandalously soon?" inquired Blythe, for a moment genuinely glum. "Why, New York will seem like some miserable tank town plunged in Stygian darkness without you and——"
"Oh, finish it!" dared Laura when he came to a sudden halt. But Blythe did not, for already his mind was grasping the fact that the plan was a good one, as Laura's plans generally were. He did not try to convince himself that he would not miss them both sorely; Laura for her cordial, unexacting friendship and camaraderie and Louise because——He knew equally well why he should miss Louise, but there was a shyness about this man even in his self-communings, and so he did not go to the bottom of that in his summary reflection on the project. Laura's keen eye detected that there was something distrait in Louise's manner with Blythe, and, wondering, she made another escape in order to permit Blythe to make his devoirs to one instead of to two. Blythe took Louise's hands in his and gradually, by mere silent compulsion, drew her averted eyes into a direct line with his own, which were smiling and alight with an utter frankness.
"Louise," he said, going straight to the point, "I know what is in your mind and why you are holding me at a little more than arm's length. I am glad to say, although I am a little sorry that you do not already know it, that you are absolutely wrong; not hopelessly wrong, because you are going to see the matter differently when you are less troubled in mind than you now are. I wish such an idea had not entered your mind. I believe it would not have entered your mind had you known me better."