Bob took another long breath. “Please don’t ask me,” he pleaded after an ominous pause. That wasn’t not telling the truth; it was only temporizing.
The violet eyes gleamed dangerously. “I’m just a little bit curious,” said the girl in the same annihilating tone. “In the light of subsequent proceedings, you will understand! And as Mrs. Ralston’s niece! Aunt doesn’t quite realize things yet. The others have spared her feelings. I haven’t, of course, gone to her. Aunt and I never ‘talk over’ our guests.” Proudly.
That made Bob wince. He looked at her with quite helpless eyes. “Maybe she will order me off the premises before long,” he said eagerly. “I have already been considering the possibility of it. Believe me,” earnestly, “it would be the best way. Can’t you see I’m—dangerous—positively dangerous? I’m worse than a socialist—an anarchist! Why, a Russian nihilist couldn’t make half the trouble in the world that I can. I’m a regular walking disturber. Disaster follows in my path.” Bitterly. “Some people look upon me as worse than the black plague. Now if your aunt would only turn me out? You see I can’t go unless she does. Got to think of that even-tenor-of-my-way! But if she would only quietly intimate—or set the dog on me—”
The girl gazed at him more steadily. “I wonder if the judge and the doctor and Mrs. Vanderpool aren’t right, after all?” she observed slowly. “Let me look in your eyes, Mr. Bennett.” Bob did. Miss Gerald had heard that one could always tell crazy people by their eyes. She intended to sift this matter to the bottom and therefore proceeded with characteristic directness. Folk that were—well, “off,” she had been told, invariably showed that they were that, by a peculiar glitter.
Miss Gerald gazed a few moments critically, steadily and with unswerving intention. Bob withstood that look with mingled wretchedness and rapture. He began to forget that they were just the eyes of a would-be expert on a mental matter, and his own eyes, looking deeper and deeper in those wonderful violet depths (he stood so she got the benefit of the moonlight) began to gleam with that old, old gleam Miss Gerald could remember in the past. Bob had never talked love in those blissful days of yore, but he had looked it.
“I don’t see any signs of insanity,” said the girl at length with cold assurance. That gleam wasn’t a glitter. Nothing crazy about it! She had seen it too often in other men’s eyes, as well as in Bob’s—not perhaps to such a marked degree in other men’s eyes,-but sufficiently so that she was fairly familiar with it. “You look normal enough to me.”
“Thank you,” said Bob gratefully.
“And that’s just why”—a slight frown on the smooth fine brow—“I don’t understand. Of course, a man not normal, might have answered as you did me (I’m not thinking of it as a personal matter, you will understand).”
“Oh, I understand that,” returned Bob. “I’m just a problem, not a person.” She made him quite realize that. She made it perfectly and unmistakably apparent that he was, unto her, as some example in trigonometry, or geometry, or algebra, and she wanted to find the “solution.” He was an “X”—the unknown quantity. The expression on her patrician features was entirely scholastic and calculating. Bob now felt the ardor of his gaze becoming cold as moonlight. This wasn’t a lovers’ bower; it was only a palestra, or an observatory.
“You haven’t answered me yet,” she said.