“Think it over, while I’m seeing after Frances, and we can finish our talk when I come back.”
“But look here”—Morris, colouring deeply, had caught up with her in one or two long strides—“it sounds a most rotten thing to ask—but—but what will Rosamund think? She—she must know perfectly well that—that——” He began to stammer helplessly, and Bertha’s level tones came with cheery common sense to his rescue.
“My dear boy, Rosamund is a very pretty girl who has been out a year and a half, and has met with quite a reasonable amount of admiration. She is much too sensible to take things seriously until they really become so.” She hastily dismissed from her recollection certain of the strictures recently passed upon Rosamund in conversation with Nina Severing.
“Don’t you think I’m in earnest, then?” demanded Morris.
Bertha looked at his flushed, youthful face, ardent with indignation.
“I’m quite sure that you are,” she said quietly, “and it depends on you not to let Rosamund become so, or at any rate think herself so. I am going to trust her to your honour, Morris.”
On this lofty note she left him, going into the house with a certain rapidity of step that might have suggested some anxiety not to spoil a good exit.
But Morris was a great deal too much absorbed in his own reflections to draw any such conclusions.
He paced up and down the front of the house, his hands in his pockets.
He did not analyze his sensations, and so escaped the humiliating knowledge that his principal emotion was one of satisfaction at Bertha’s admirable understanding. He wished that his mother could have heard her.