She looked at me oddly and bit her lip. But her eyes were dancing and the delicious dimple in her cheek twitched on the verge of laughter. She shook her head.
"Indeed I did not." And again came that odd look in her face as though she were studying, kind of balking, don't you know. By Jove, she was perfectly dazzling!
"My dearest!" slipped softly from me as I held the hat.
She stared. Then once more that canary peal of merriment.
"Oh, dear!" Then her face sobered and she almost pouted. "Now you mustn't—please, really—it gets so tiresome. Don't you American, or rather, you Harvard men, ever talk anything to a girl but love? Why, it's absurd." She smiled, but her lashes dropped reproof. By Jove, I was taken back a little! Evidently she was piqued with me about something, but what the devil was it? And then I thought I had it.
I slipped nearer—to the edge of the chair.
"I didn't know you were in town to-day—'pon honor, I didn't. Billings never said a word about it," I explained. "Why, dash it, I would have given anything to have known."
She looked at me with a queer little smile, stroked her little lip with the point of one gloved finger and looked across the river at the Palisades. Dash the Palisades! Never could see any sense in them, anyhow!
"Oh, thank you, but Elizabeth and I didn't know ourselves until last evening that we would make the New York trip. She wanted to hear a suffragette lecture at the Carnegie, and I had some shopping to do."
And she just gave me one of those calm, self-contained, thoroughbred sort of smiles that are harder to get past than a six-foot hedge. What the deuce was the matter with the girl? Something had changed her; yet I knew that nothing could really change her at heart—never.