An expression singularly like alarm flitted through those radiant orbs, but the explanation came in her cry: “Not yet! Not yet! When you come back to England next time. Then I shall know so much more. How perfectly wonderful of you to have passed those terrible examinations—I don’t mean that it was wonderful for you, although so many fail, but you have so much to distract your mind from study. Where do you expect to go first?”
“Oh, St. Petersburg, Rome, Constantinople.”
“It is like you not to want to go back to Paris or to be sent to Washington. All of those capitals must be so perfectly interesting.”
It was a few moments before he realized that she had deftly led the conversation far from literature and was making him talk about himself. He deliberately returned to his exploitations, for nothing in life now interested him as much as the mind hidden behind that full luminous brow, those unfathomable eyes. He had taken a long drive the night before, thinking of Styr and sharply realizing that life without mental companionship would be insupportable. There had been a return of those half-comprehended mutterings of a deeper companionship still, and the whisper that Styr alone held the key to a locked room in his soul; but he was by no means inclined to force the lock and analyze the contents of that room, being vaguely but uneasily conscious that if he did he should suddenly find himself shot out of his present harbour into stormy seas. He had concluded that if this beautiful and accomplished girl really possessed an intellect that could be cultivated to understand and companion his own, and would marry him, he should be an ingrate to ask more of life.
“Why ‘not yet’? Do you forget that I am only twenty-four? I really know nothing at all. If it were not for the fact that nobody ever forced me to study and I put in a good part of the time reading in the library at Ordham, and again, if I had not happened to be much attracted by the Continental theatre, I should be quite ignorant.”
“Really?” She opened her eyes at this paradoxical jumble in a fashion which suggested the old simile, “saucer.” “You have the reputation of being quite too frightfully clever.”
“I wish I were! It is merely that I am not athletic. All my numerous relations are, and they think that as I am not, I must have contracted the vice of brains. But it is all a mistake. I am sure you could teach me. Let us read Meredith together.”
She looked as if about to cry. “I—I—have been dying to read Meredith,” she faltered; “but mother does not think he is quite proper. She does not approve very much of novels, anyway. I console myself with history and memoirs,—and—and—I—well—”
Her cheeks were stained with a beautiful color. She dropped her long eyelashes, hesitated for a full minute, during which Ordham—why, he could not define—held his breath, then raised her eyes to his with a glance of dazzling, of unmistakable coquetry. Its effect, after her long period of indifference, was electrical, and the remark which followed that direct appeal of youth to youth made him turn white.
“Let us talk about that fortnight in Munich,” she almost whispered. “I was so desperately in love with you, poor little soul; and you—you were not quite indifferent. You might have written me one little letter.”