I looked at her for a full minute without answering. From underneath her sealskin turban hat her blue eyes were looking full into mine, and a mocking smile was playing around her delicate lips. Surely she was beautiful enough to drive any man mad.
"No, Lady Olive is not dangerous to me," I answered, deliberately; "you are."
A curious change came over her face as she uttered the word. The mocking smile became almost a tender one, and a delicate flush tinged her soft cheeks. But the greatest change was in her eyes. For a moment they flashed into mine with a light shining out of their blue depths which I had never dreamt of seeing there, a soft, warm, almost a loving light.
"You are a silly boy," she said, in a low tone, and the colour deepening all the while in her cheeks. "How dare you talk to me like this?"
Ah, how dared I? She might well have asked that if she had only known.
"I don't know," I said, recklessly. "I shall say more if I stay here any longer."
"You? Ah, Captain Hasleton, how beautiful! However did you manage to find so many?"
Captain Hasleton shut up his penknife and commenced tying the bundle of bulrushes together.
"Ah, you may well ask that, Miss Devereux," he said, laughing; "it would take too long to narrate all the horrors I have faced in collecting them. First of all, endless frogs resented my intrusion by jumping up and croaking all round me. Then I stood in constant peril of a ducking. You should have heard the ice crack! And last, but by no means least, I've cut my finger. Nothing but half-a-dozen waltzes to-night will repay me."
Maud laughed gaily.