"But you could have!"
Neither spoke for a few minutes. Nikolai made no pretense of not understanding. Only a slight flush came momentarily into his face, and left it paler by contrast. "I am not sure," he said at last. "But I should have liked to try."
"Of course! I knew that when you cabled us to wait till you came—But Joan don't know it yet. Funny, isn't it, when she's so smart? She thinks you feel toward her like a cross between a teacher and a fond father.—'Father'—my eye! She don't catch you lookin' at her sometimes the way I do!"
"Do I—look at her?"
Archie nodded expressively. "I suppose I understand, because I'm in love myself. And she don't"—he swallowed hard—"because she isn't."
"Not yet, perhaps," said the other slowly. "Give her time, my boy."
"Time? I've given her time." Archie heaved a great sigh. "Now I mean to give her something else. I mean to give her a chance. She never really had a chance before, Mr. Nikolai. I—I kind of got her off her guard, when she was takin' the count. It wasn't sporting of me."
The other, moved, laid a hand on his knee. In moments of emotion the foreign blood showed in such slight demonstrativeness. But Anglo-Saxon Archie stiffened, and the hand was at once removed.
"She's too fine for me, you see," he went on. "Too sort of delicate.—I read somewhere that china vases and brass vases couldn't float down a stream together without the china ones getting smashed (though why vases would be floating down a stream anyway, I don't know!). But I'm brass, you see, and she's china. I thought it might be all right after the twinnies came. I still think it might have been, if they—" Again he swallowed hard.
Nikolai nodded.