"Yes! what brought you?" says Miss Kavanagh, most disgracefully going over to the other side, now that danger is at an end, and Tommy has planted his impromptu tomahawk in a bed close by.
"Do you want to know?" says he quickly.
The fingers have been removed from his shoulders, and he is now at liberty to turn round and look at the charming face beside him.
"No, no!" says she, shaking her head. "I've been rude, I suppose. But it is such a wonderful thing to see you here so soon again."
"Why should I not be here?"
"Of course! That is the one unanswerable question. But you must confess it is puzzling to those who thought of you as being elsewhere."
"If you are one of 'those' you fill me with gratitude. That you should think of me even for a moment——"
"Well, I haven't been thinking much," says she, frankly, and with the most delightful if scarcely satisfactory little smile: "I don't believe I was thinking of you at all, until I turned the corner just now, and then, I confess, I was startled, because I believed you at the Antipodes."
"Perhaps your belief was mother to your thought."
"Oh, no. Don't make me out so nasty. Well, but were you there?"