“Tell them what you like,” she said. “I can’t talk to you any longer,” she added. “It will be noticed.”
“I won’t tell them anything,” he said. “But I’ll be here a week from tonight at this time if it doesn’t rain, and the week after that if it does, and every week for the rest of the summer until you say positively you will not come.”
“Haven’t I said that?” she asked.
“No.”
She got up, shrugged her shoulders and walked away.
Silly!... Silly!... Silly!...
That was what John kept saying to himself without subject or predicate. It was the way he felt. The situation was absurd. His part in it was ludicrous. They were all a lot of sillies,—save one. What he really minded was the sense of having come off badly with her. She was not the wistful, longing prisoner people imagined her to be. He could not make out precisely what she was. She was under restraint. Not only had she not denied this; she had treated it as a fact. But her attitude seemed to be simply that it was nobody’s business. Meddling was unwelcome. And such puerile interference as he represented had been treated as it deserved, with high disdain. Never had he met a girl with so much bite and tang. Well, however, it was not all to the bad. She might have cut him away clean. Instead, she had left it as it was.
“I think she will come,” he said to his friends.
“Have you seen her?” they asked.
“Yes. I’ve talked to her.”