"Is it necessary to insult me?" bristling.
"Ah, but you found it necessary to insult me!" she retorted.
"In what way?" staring at her in astonishment.
"By making love—such love! You nearly blow your brains out for a silly American girl, and then have the impertinence to ask me—me, the Princess Gloria von Schattenberg—to marry you, informing me casually that your heart is dead and cold."
"But your heart is dead and cold, too," he argued fatuously. "And you were not willing to accept me. It seems that we are in the same boat. We offered too little, and we asked too much."
The Princess was momentarily silenced by his logic; womanlike, however, she refused to let things end in a logical conclusion.
"I am terribly angry with you," she persisted, nevertheless, with what Trafford could have sworn was a veritable wink.
"So I was led to suppose," he replied, rubbing his head.
His words and their accompanying action, tickled the Princess's risibilities, always lying just beneath the surface. She bit her lips in a desperate effort to control, but in a moment her fine, fearless laugh rang out merrily in the deserted street. Trafford gazed in amazement at his volatile companion, and then he laughed, too.
"Don't imagine that I am not angry because I'm laughing," declared the Princess. "I have—unfortunately, perhaps—a painfully acute sense of humour. I very often laugh when I am feeling most deeply."