“I think I had better go,” he agreed, reaching out for it; “your opinion of me is not easy to forget, and—”
He had taken hold of his hat; but Jill’s small fingers had closed upon the brim on the other side, and kept their hold determinedly.
St. John desisted at once; it was incompatible with his dignity to struggle over his headgear.
“At your pleasure, Miss Erskine,” he said.
“It’s very strange,” mused Jill in a tone of innocent speculation; “do you know that until to-day I had always considered you handsome? What a difference it makes to a face whether it is smiling or glum.”
“One can’t keep up a perpetual grin,” he retorted, but his countenance relaxed a little despite his effort to appear unmoved, and seeing her advantage she followed it up, turning a scene which had been growing painfully strained into a comedy by her deft handling of the situation.
“No; not unless it is natural to one, which is even a greater affliction. I once heard of a man who had his nose broken for laughing at a quarrelsome individual in the street. As a matter of fact he wasn’t laughing; it was only that Nature had endowed him with a perpetual and unavoidable grin. But you are not at all likely to get your nose broken from a similar cause.”
“I should hope not,” he returned with disagreeable emphasis.
“Is mine on my face still?” enquired Jill putting up her hand to feel. “Why! it actually is. Funny, but I thought you had snapped it off. It is there, isn’t it?”
She went quite close to him and held up her face for inspection with a look in her eyes that St. John would have been more than human, or at any rate not genuinely in love, had he resisted. He made no attempt to; he just took the small face between his two hands and kissed it. And then they sat down together on the twill covered box to spoon a little, and afterwards talk matters over from a practical, common sense view, as Jill declared; though it would have been more sensible had they left the spooning and talked matters over first.