"I don't think so," replied Baird. "The men who knew him as a boy say he was always as he is now. He lived in the Arabian desert for two years."
"Why didn't he stay?" laughed Mildred. "That life would exactly suit him."
"It did," said Stanley. "But his father died, and he had to come home and support his mother—until she died. That's the way his whole life has been. He drifts in the current of circumstances. He might let himself be blown away to-morrow to the other end of the earth and stay away years—or never come back."
"But how would he live?"
"On his wits. And as well or as poorly as he cared. He's the sort of man everyone instinctively asks advice of—me, you, his valet, the farmer who meets him at a boundary fence, the fellow who sits nest him in a train—anyone."
Mildred did not merely cease to dislike him; she went farther, and rapidly. She began to like him, to circle round that tantalizing, indolent mystery as a deer about a queer bit of brush in the undergrowth. She liked to watch him. She was alternately afraid to talk before him and recklessly confidential—all with no response or sign of interest from him. If she was silent, when they were alone together, he was silent, too. If she talked, still he was silent. What WAS he thinking about? What did he think of her?—that especially.
"What ARE you thinking?" she interrupted herself to say one afternoon as they sat together on the strand under a big sunshade. She had been talking on and on about her career—talking conceitedly, as her subject intoxicated her—telling him what triumphs awaited her as soon as she should be ready to debut. As he did not answer, she repeated her question, adding:
"I knew you weren't listening to me, or I shouldn't have had the courage to say the foolish things I did."
"No, I wasn't," admitted he.
"Why not?"