“Thank you!” she repeated significantly, with meaning.
“You’re welcome,” he said courteously. “Very pretty country about here, isn’t it?”
“You mustn’t keep Mrs. Terhune waiting,” was her reply.
“Well, you see, I hate to go back and disappoint her. She wanted so much to see you. She’s always talking about you.”
He positively jumped at the look he got from Mildred.
“Is she?” the girl asked, with a cold, unpleasant smile.
“Yes,” he said. “She—”
“Then please tell her that Will—Mr. Mallet—is coming back very soon. I’ll let her know, of course, when the wedding is definitely arranged. Just now I’m very busy with my preparations.”
Dacier was not lacking in wit. He didn’t believe a word of this, but he was so sorry for the girl, he so much admired her fine pride, that he answered in the most convincing way. He remembered everything he had ever heard about Mallet, and he spoke of him seriously, with interest. He asked about the florist project, and talked to Mildred as to a girl authentically and eternally engaged. It was the nature of the fellow to make himself agreeable. He did it without effort, and almost without motive—although he was by no means unsusceptible to Mildred’s grave beauty.
She was disarmed. She scarcely noticed that he went on walking beside her to the very gate of her little garden, so absorbed was she in her talk about Will. Dacier still didn’t believe her, but he was not at all amused. He thought it very pitiful that she should bring out this phantom lover, should lean upon this straw man, when she herself was so strong, so splendidly alive.