"No; I'm not coming along. I'm too comfortable where I am. Is this woman somebody you haven't told me of, Max?" she persisted, looking at him from under half-closed lids.
"Your somebodies are always thin air, little girl; you know everything I have ever done in my whole life," Max answered gravely. She had for the last two weeks.
Lucy threw up her hands and laughed so loud and cheerily that an habitue taking his morning constitutional on the boardwalk below turned his head in their direction. The two were at breakfast under the awnings of Lucy's portico, Bones standing out of range.
"You don't believe it?"
"Not one word of it, you fraud; nor do you. You've forgotten one-half of all you've done and the other half you wouldn't dare tell any woman. Come, give me her name. Anybody Sue knows?"
"Nobody that anybody knows, Honest John." Then he added as an after-thought, "Are you sorry?" As he spoke he rose from his seat and stood behind her chair looking down over her figure. She had her back to him. He thought he had never seen her look so lovely. She was wearing a light-blue morning-gown, her arms bare to the elbows, and a wide Leghorn hat—the morning costume of all others he liked her best in.
"No—don't think I am," she answered lightly. "Fact is I was getting pretty tired of you. How long will you be gone?"
"Oh, I think till the end of the week—not longer." He reached over the chair and was about to play with the tiny curls that lay under the coil of her hair, when he checked himself and straightened up. One of those sudden restraints which had so puzzled Lucy had seized him. She could not see his face, but she knew from the tones of his voice that the enthusiasm of the moment had cooled.
Lucy shifted her chair, lifted her head, and looked up into his eyes. She was always entrancing from this point of view: the upturned eyelashes, round of the cheeks, and the line of the throat and swelling shoulders were like no other woman's he knew.
"I don't want you to go, Max," she said in the same coaxing tone of voice that Ellen might have used in begging for sugar-plums. "Just let the mortgage and old Morton and everybody else go. Stay here with me."