"Go on," said Vera calmly.
"And there's—well, the conventional way."
Vera smiled. "I can't imagine Tam doing anything conventional," she said.
Elizabeth jumped up with a laugh, walked to the little bare dressing-table and began brushing her hair.
"Why do you laugh?" asked Vera.
"The whole thing's so curious," replied the girl. "Here's a man who is head-over-heels in love with you—"
"In love with me!"
Vera Laramore went red and white by turns and lost, for a moment, her grasp of the situation, then grew virtuously indignant, which was a tactical error for if she were innocent of such a thought as that which her friend expressed she should have been either amused or curious.
"How can you talk such rubbish? Tam and I are jolly good friends. He is a real fine man, as straight as a die and as plucky as he's straight. He has more sense, more judgment—" She was breathless.
"Spare me the catalogue of his virtues," said Elizabeth drily. "I grant he is perfection and therefore unlovable. All that I asked you out of sheer idle curiosity was: How is your friendship to be rounded off?"