“Don’t talk nonsense.”
“You are far too good—to me.”
He seemed not to feel the prick of any point in her emphasis. “I can’t have you talking of goodness as between you and me—it’s foolishness,” he said lightly. Then as she opened her lips, “I forbid you even to think of it.”
“I think of nothing else,” she answered gently.
Instead of giving her proper credit for that, Louis sent a wandering eye over his shoulder. Actually, he was making an excuse of listening to that blatant Gedge bellowing about the “damnable delay.”
She looked at Cheviot with a frank perplexity that before she knew it had gone over into longing. Is he going to decline to make the least little bit of love to me because I’m away from home? Is that the “sort o’ watchman” he’s going to be? Oh, dear!
“Do you know what time it is?” The watchman pulled out his watch.
“I don’t care the very least in the world what time it is.”
“That’s just what always happens when the sun shines all night. It’s very demoralizing.”
Demoralizing! That after all those hours of strain in the foul atmosphere below, that she should be willing to stand here awhile in the crisp and radiant morning talking to him; talking more gratefully than ever she had done in her life—“demoralizing!” He wasn’t even now attending to her. “Why do you allow Gedge to bother you so? It isn’t like you,” she said. Still he wore that tantalizing air of listening to the orator on the rope coil. “What difference can it make to you anything a man like that may say?”