"And you fed them?"
"Regularly," says Archibald, telling a fearful lie deliberately, as from the day he read that note to this he has never once remembered the feathered friends she mentions, and even now as he speaks has only the very haziest idea of what she means.
"I am glad of that," regarding him searchingly. "It would make me unhappy to think they had been neglected."
"Don't be unhappy, then," returning her gaze calmly and unflinchingly: "they are all right: I took care of that." His manner is truthful in the extreme, his eyes meet hers reassuringly. It is many years since Mr. Chesney first learned the advantage to be derived from an impassive countenance. And now with Lilian's keen blue eyes looking him through and through, he feels doubly thankful that practice has made him so perfect in the art of suppressing his real thoughts. He has also learned the wisdom of the old maxim,—
"When you tell a lie, tell a good one,
When you tell a good one, stick to it,"
and sticks to his accordingly.
"I am so pleased!" says Lilian, after a slight pause, during which she tells herself young men are not so wretchedly thoughtless after all, and that Archibald is quite an example to his sex in the matter of good nature. "One of my chiefest regrets on leaving home was thinking how my birds would miss me."
"I am sorry you ever left it."
"So am I, of course. I was very near declining to do so at the last moment. It took Aunt Priscilla a full week to convince me of the error of my ways, and prove to me that I could not live alone with a gay and (as she hinted) wicked bachelor."