"Why should I go there to be made miserable? You can go and dance with Ryde to your heart's content, but I shall spare myself the pain of seeing you. Did you say you wanted your sister? Shall I call her now? I am sure you must want to go home."
"I don't," she says, unexpectedly; and then a little smile of conscious triumph wreathes her lips as she looks at him, standing moody and dejected before her. A word from her will transform him; and now, the day being all her own, she can afford to be generous. Even the very best of women can be cruel to their lovers.
"I don't," she says, "not yet. There is something I want to ask you first," she pauses in a tantalizing fashion, and glances from the grass she is still holding to him, and from him back to the grass again, before she speaks. "It is a question," she says then, as though reluctantly, "but you look so angry with me that I am afraid to ask it." This is the rankest hypocrisy, as he is as wax in her hands at this moment; but, though he knows it, he gives in to the sweetness of her manner, and lets his face clear.
"Ask me anything you like," he says, turning upon her now a countenance "more in sorrow than in anger."
"It isn't much," said Miss Beresford, sweetly, "only—what is your Christian name? I have been so longing to know. It is very unpleasant to be obliged to think of people by their surnames, is it not? so unfriendly!"
He is quite staggered by the excess of her geniality.
"My name is Brian," he says, devoutly hoping she will not think it hideous and so see cause to pass judgment upon it.
"Brian!" going nearer to him with half-shy eyes, and a little riante mouth that with difficulty suppresses its laughter. "How pretty! Brian," purposely lingering over it, "with an 'i' of course?"
"Yes."
"I'm so glad I know yours now!" says this disgraceful little coquette, with a sigh of pretended relief. "You knew mine, and that wasn't fair, you know. Besides,"—with a rapid glance that might have melted an anchorite and delivered him from the error of his ways,—"besides, I may want to call you by it some day, and then I should be at a loss."