She smiled reminiscently.
"What sticks we were! What a silly life! I really have the most delightful feeling, as though I were starting things all over again, as though there were all sorts of wonderful adventures before me."
Julien looked at her quickly. There was no woman in the place half so good-looking or with any pretensions to such style. He was conscious of an odd twinge of jealousy.
"You'll have no trouble in finding adventures," he remarked a little grimly.
Her eyes flashed back an answer to his thought.
"Bless you, I don't want anything to do with men! Fancy having been engaged to you and to Samuel Harbord! What further thrills could possibly be in store for me?"
"Well, I don't know," Julien retorted. "I suppose if I was a stick, there must have been something about you which induced me to be one."
"Not a bit of it," she objected. "You were a solemn, studious, gentlemanly, well-behaved, well-conducted prig—very much a male edition of what I was myself. What a life we should have lived together!… Here's your friend. You know, I rather like the look of him. He's so delightfully untidy. I should think he belongs round about the new world, doesn't he?"
"He's a working journalist," Julien answered, "a very clever fellow and a good friend of mine."
"Then I shall adore him," Lady Anne decided,—"not because he is a good friend of yours, but because he is a working journalist. Why, I saw him sitting waiting for you the day you came and wished me that touching good-bye," she added. "I liked him even then. It seemed so sweet of him to come and help you through that terrible ordeal."