The voluble lady launched out into an indefinite number of questions and suggestions of remedies.
"Mother," said Ida, with a flash of her eyes and an accent which caused not only that lady but several others to look toward her with a little surprise, "if you have anything further to say to me in regard to my health, please say it in my own room."
Van Berg glanced towards her several times after this, and was compelled to admit that whatever fault he might justly find, the face with which she confronted him that morning was anything but weak and trivial in its expression.
But her icy reserve and coldness did not compare favorably with Miss Burton, who had now fully regained her smiling reticence, acting as usual as if the only law of her being was to utter genial words and to bestow with consummate tact little gifts of attention and kindness on every side, as the summer sun without was scattering its vivifying rays.
Chapter XXI. A Deliberate Wooer.
Miss Burton's bearing toward Van Berg was very friendly, but he failed to detect in her manner the slightest proof that she had ever thought of him otherwise than as a friend. There was no sudden drooping of her eyelashes, or heightening of color when he spoke to her, or permitted his eyes to dwell upon her face with an expression that was rather more than friendly. He could detect no furtive glances, nothing to indicate that she had caught a glimpse of that secret so interesting to every woman that she would look again, though cold as ice toward the man cherishing it. Nor was there the slightest trace of the constraint and reserve by which all women who are not coquettes seek to check, as with an early frost, the first growth of an unwelcome regard. Her manner was simply what would be natural toward a gentleman she thoroughly respected and liked, with whom her thoughts, for no hidden cause, were especially preoccupied.
Why then had she looked at him so strangely the preceding evening? Why had she apparently shrunk from the expression of his face, as if she had seen there a revelation so sudden and overwhelming that she trembled at it as a shy, sensitive maiden might in recognizing the fact that a strong, resolute man was seeking entrance to the very citadel of her heart? He felt himself utterly unable to explain her action.
What was more, he was puzzled at himself. The sympathy he felt for Miss Burton the previous evening had not by any means left him, but it was no longer a strong and absorbing emotion. His pulse was as calm and quiet as the breathless summer morning. He was conscious of no premonitory chills and thrills, which, according to his preconceived notions of the "grand passion," ought to be felt even in its incipiency. He even found himself criticising her face, and wondering how features so ordinary in themselves could combine in so winning and happy an effect; and then he mentally cursed his cold-bloodedness, and positively envied Stanton in whose manner, in spite of his efforts at concealment, an ardent affection began to manifest itself.
During the day it occurred to him more than once that her course was changing toward Stanton. There was no less return on her part of his light bantering style of conversation. Indeed, she seemed to take great pains to give a humorous twist to everything he said, as if she regarded even the words in which he tried to unfold his deeper thoughts as mere jests. But Van Berg imagined she began to make herself more inaccessible to Stanton. She entrenched herself among other guests in the parlor; she took pains to be so occupied as to make him feel that his approach would be an interruption; and whenever they did meet at the table and elsewhere, it appeared as if she were trying to teach him by a smiling, friendly indifference that he was not in her thoughts at all.
The positive coldness and aversion Ida sought to manifest toward Van Berg would not have been so disheartening as Miss Burton's device of seeming to be so agreeably preoccupied with other people that she could not or would not see the offering Stanton was eager to lay at her feet.