To tell you the truth, no matter whose nephew he had happened to be, I don’t believe that Mildred could have helped being nice to him. Very few people could. She let him into her neat little sitting room, and she felt concerned, as any properly constituted woman would have felt, because he was dripping wet. She made him a cup of tea, and, having an hour to wait for the next pupil, sat down to talk to him. Dacier was good at talking.
After he had gone, she was not sorry that he had said he would come again. The smoke of his cigarette lingered in the room, and was not disagreeable. The sound of his voice lingered, too, and perhaps the memory of his audacious, blue-eyed, sunburned face. It was as if a fresh breeze had blown through her neat, lonely little house.
Come again he did, the very next evening, and he made of it the single happy, jolly evening in a long succession of solitary ones. They sat out on the veranda, with the moon shining; and if he had not the respectful humility she had found in other young men, he was none the less interesting for that.
He had no poems to read, as Will Mallet had had. Indeed, he knew little about poetry, or music, or any of the arts; but he said he would like to learn, if she would teach him. When he was going, he asked what time he should come the next day.
“I don’t think you had better come to-morrow,” she said, a little regretfully.
He pointed out that his holiday wouldn’t last forever, and that it did him good to come and hear her talk. He gave other unreasonable reasons, and he did come the next day, and the day after, as well.[Pg 107]
Before a week had passed, Mildred saw that this must be stopped. It made her angry—so very angry that she nearly wept over it alone at night.
“I suppose he thinks, and Mrs. Terhune thinks, that he’s doing a kindness to a poor, forlorn, jilted old maid,” she thought. “He’s entirely too sure of himself. He takes it for granted that I’m glad to see him all the time. He thinks—”
Her ideas of what he thought distressed her beyond measure. That evening, when he appeared again, he found her very cool and aloof—even on the moonlit veranda, and even while he made his best efforts to amuse her.
“Mr. Dacier,” she said suddenly, “I’m very sorry, but I think you’d better not come any more.”