“Twenty questions,” he repeated, ignoring her rebuke. “Why, I have not heard that mentioned for years. It is a favorite game in Radnor, isn’t it?”
“I am sure I don’t know,” she said wearily; “I know very little about Radnor.”
“And I less,” he said. “I’ve been away so much of the time. But there were certain things taken into my innermost being in my youth, along with the air I breathed, I suppose, that no amount of absence will eradicate.”
“For instance?” she said, with feigned interest, for her mind kept wandering off to her recent interview with Miss Ware, and she wished she had not allowed him to accompany her.
“Well, the question of residence, you know. The few acres of sacred soil in Radnor on which it is permissible to live. I remember as a little boy how my nurse only allowed me to play with children whose parents lived on the water side of Crana Street or the sunny side of Belton Avenue. Any other than those and the streets immediately intersecting was beyond the pale of civilization, even to her. It is odd, isn’t it?” smiling down at her.
“What is odd, the fact or your acceptance of it?” There was a little ring in her voice which struck the man’s alert ear.
A look of surprise came into his handsome dark face. “Am I walking too fast for you, Miss Dale?” he asked, pleasantly.
That was the second time he had put aside a thrust of hers with some trifling, irrelevant remark, and it tended to heighten rather than soothe her growing irritation.
“I think,” she said, stopping abruptly on the corner, “that I shall say good morning to you here. I do not happen to live in that sacred locality you mention, and I would not for worlds take you beyond the pale.”
“Miss Dale,” he gasped, “you don’t think I abide by any such nonsense—you are doing me a great injustice. Surely you are not going to dismiss me!”