"In my eyes, yes."
"And you would wish me to be kept a prisoner at home just because one man looked at me?"
"I don't want any one to look at you but me!" Then he comes a little closer to her and compels her, by the very strength of his regard, to let her eyes meet his. "Do you like Ryde?" he asks, somewhat imperiously. "Monica, answer me."
It is the second time he has called her by her Christian name, and a startled expression passes over her face.
"Well, he was nice to me," she says, with a studied hesitation that belongs to the first bit of coquetry she has ever practised in her life. She has tasted the sweetness of power, and, fresh as her knowledge is she estimates the advantage of it to a nicety.
"I believe a man has only to be six feet one to have every woman in the world in love with him," says Desmond, wrathfully, who is only five feet eleven.
"I am not exactly in love with Mr. Ryde," says Monica, sweetly, with averted face and a coy air, assumed for her companion's discomfiture; "but——"
"But what?"
"But, I was going to say, there is nothing remarkable in that, [as] I am not in love with any one, and hope I never shall be. I wonder where Kit can have gone to: will you get up there, Mr. Desmond, and look?" Breaking off a tiny blade of grass from the bank near her, she puts it between her pretty teeth, and slowly nibbles it with an air of utter indifference to all the world that drives Mr. Desmond nearly out of his wits.
Disdaining to take any heed of her "notice to quit," and quite determined to know the worst, he says, defiantly,—