"I'm afraid I can't. I'm rather busy this morning."
"Really," said Mr. Twist, in a voice of concentrated sarcasm. But it had no effect on Anna-Felicitas. She continued to contemplate him with perfect goodwill.
He hesitated a moment. What could he do? Nothing, that he could see, before the young man; nothing that wouldn't make him ridiculous. He felt a fool already. He oughtn't to have pulled up. He ought to have just waved to them and gone on his way, and afterwards in the seclusion of his office issued very plain directions to Anna-Felicitas as to her future conduct. Sitting by the roadside like that! Openly; before everybody; with a young man she had never seen twenty-four hours ago.
He jammed in the gear and let the clutch out with such a jerk that the car leaped forward. Elliott waved his stick again. Mr. Twist responded by the briefest touch of his cap, and whirred down the road out of sight.
"Does he mind your sitting here?" asked Elliott.
"It would be very unreasonable," said Anna-Felicitas gently. "One has to sit somewhere."
And he laughed with delight at this answer as he laughed with delight at everything she said, and he told her for the twentieth time that she was the most wonderful person he had ever met, and she settled down to listen again, after the interruption caused by Mr. Twist, with a ready ear and the utmost complacency to these agreeable statements, and began to wonder whether perhaps after all she mightn't at last be about to fall in love.
In the new interest of this possibility she turned her head to look at him, and he told her tumultuously—for being a sailor-man he went straight ahead on great waves when it came to love-making—that her eyes were as if pansies had married stars.
She turned her head away again at this, for though it sounded lovely it made her feel a little shy and unprovided with an answer; and then he said, again tumultuously, that her ear was the most perfect thing ever stuck on a girl's cheek, and would she mind turning her face to him so that he might see if she had another just like it on the other side.
She blushed at this, because she couldn't remember whether she had washed it lately or not—one so easily forgot one's ears; there were so many different things to wash—and he told her that when she blushed it was like the first wild rose of the first summer morning of the world.