She shook her head.
“I’m not going to humor you far enough to even pretend to take you seriously,” she declared.
“Not even for Vance’s sake? Of course, I know you don’t care for him, particularly, but I do; he has been like a brother to me, Miss Richardia; really he has. And we ought to make him realize what he is about; it’s—er—it’s a sort of duty, don’t you think?”
“If I should tell you what I think I am afraid it might sound dreadfully unkind, Mr. Carfax. You seem to have had very little experience with women.”
“Oh, but I have, you know,” he burst out. “I—I’m in love, myself—with—with some one I can’t possibly marry. That ought to make you feel sorry for me, and I’m sure it does. Perhaps you are in a similar situation yourself; in love with some one else, I mean. In that case——”
Miss Richardia had risen, and the mocking mood was once more firmly intrenched behind her laughing eyes.
“You have given me a most delicious half-hour, Mr. Carfax, and in the days to come, when I feel particularly blue, I shall always have it to look back to and remember. You are not expecting me to say any more than that, are you? I can’t, you know, because I have an appointment with a pupil, and I shall have to go and keep it.”
Carfax had risen with her. “I’m perfectly delighted to be your laughing-stock,” he asserted gently. “You’ll let me come and be it again? Thanks, awfully.” And when she was gone he sat down like a man who has been through a pass perilous, and smoked three of the imported cigarettes in rapid succession.
That evening, returning from the hard day’s work on the repairs, the owner of the Ocoee found Carfax awaiting him in the office headquarters at the foot of Pisgah. Uncle William’s dinner, served as soon as Tregarvon had taken his bath, was not provocative of conversation; and even afterward the talk, revolving around the repairs and the mystery, was only desultory. It was not until Tregarvon was smoking his bedtime pipe that he dug the one important thing out of his mind and flung it at his companion.
“You spent the day at Highmount, I suppose?”