She turned her eyes upon him slowly, with an air of suspicion and curiosity.
“Nothing is the matter,” she said gravely, and turning down a whole half-leaf of the book before her to keep the place, she closed it carefully, and handed it to him with an affectation of solemn indifference. “I have been reading,” she added with decision.
George looked at the title of the ponderous volume, and observed that it was The Complete Works of Xenophon. He opened it without a smile at the page she had turned down, and remarking that it was about half-way through the volume, said she had got on very well if she had read so much in one evening.
“I skipped a little—the dry parts,” she observed modestly, but in such a tone that it was impossible for George to tell whether she meant to be taken seriously or not.
“Dry!” he exclaimed, raising his eyebrows, “why, he is the very lightest of light reading. Xenophon was the most frivolous man I ever knew; he was at school with me.”
She crawled to the foot of the bed, and stretching over the rail to the dressing-table, on which George had placed the volume, she recovered it with a violent muscular effort, and turned back the leaves to the title-page.
“This book was published in 1823; so you are much older than you told me you were, I see,” she said simply, while George, unable to contain himself longer, burst out into a long laugh, and made a dive at her, which she evaded like a squirrel, still staring at him with unmoved gravity, so that his mirth died away in wonderment and in a rush of tenderness as he perceived the pathos of this futile plunge into the mazes of learning.
As he recovered his gravity the expression of her mobile face also changed; after a moment’s shy silence their eyes met, and each saw the other through a luminous mist.
“What are you crying for?” she asked tremulously; and in a moment flung herself impulsively into his ready arms. “Why didn’t you marry Ella?” was her next question, shot suddenly into his ear in the midst of an incoherent outburst of the passionate tenderness that glowed ever in his heart for her.
“Marry Ella!” said he, feeling a shock of surprise at the remembrance that he had indeed once offered to make the good little blue-stocking his wife. “Why, what makes you ask such a question as that? Are you jealous?”