"Of course—when I'm not away!" His eyes challenged her, and she met the sally with a gurgle of laughter.
"Oh, I meant—when you're not away," she bridled.
He watched the wild-rose color sweep to her temples—and stepped nearer.
"But you haven't told me a thing of yourself—yet," he complained.
She sighed—and at the sigh an unreasoning wrath against an unknown something rose within him.
"There's nothing to tell," she murmured. "I'm just here—a nurse to Master Paul and his brother." Denby's wrath became reasoning and definite. It was directed against the world in general, and his aunt in particular, that they should permit for one instant this glorious creature to sacrifice her charm and sweetness on the altar of menial services to a couple of unappreciative infants.
"Oh, I'm so sorry!" he breathed, plainly aglow at the intimate nearness of this heart-to-heart talk. "But I'm glad—you're here!"
Once more, before he turned reluctantly away, he gazed straight into her blue eyes—and the game was on.
It was a pretty game. The young man was hard hit, and it was his first wound from Cupid's dart. Heretofore in his curriculum girls had not been included; and the closeness of his association with his father had not been conducive to incipient love affairs. Perhaps, for these reasons, he was all the more ardent a wooer. Certainly an ardent wooer he was. There was no gainsaying that—though the boy himself, at first, did not recognize it as wooing at all.
It began with pity.