“I am twenty-two,” she said. “It seems strange that two people whose ideas of life are as far apart as the Poles should have come together like this even for a moment. I do not understand it at all. Did you expect that I should tell you just what I saw in the clouds that night?”
“No,” he answered, “not exactly. I have spoken of my first interest in you only. There are other things. I told a lie about the bracelet and I followed you out of the boarding-house and I brought you here, for some other for quite a different reason.”
“Tell me what it was,” she demanded.
“I do not know it myself,” he declared solemnly. “I really and honestly do not know it. It is because I hoped that it might come to me while we were together, that I am here with you at this moment. I do not like impulses which I do not understand.”
She laughed at him a little scornfully.
“After all,” she said, “although it may not have dawned upon you yet, it is probably the same wretched reason. You are a man and you have the poison somewhere in your blood. I am really not bad-looking, you know.”
He looked at her critically. She was a little over-slim, perhaps, but she was certainly wonderfully graceful. Even the poise of her head, the manner in which she leaned back in her chair, had its individuality. Her features, too, were good, though her mouth had grown a trifle hard. For the first time the dead pallor of her cheeks was relieved by a touch of color. Even Tavernake realized that there were great possibilities about her. Nevertheless, he shook his head.
“I do not agree with you in the least,” he asserted firmly. “Your looks have nothing to do with it. I am sure that it is not that.”
“Let me cross-examine you,” she suggested. “Think carefully now. Does it give you no pleasure at all to be sitting here alone with me?”
He answered her deliberately; it was obvious that he was speaking the truth.