“Whew!” whistled Basil softly. “What’s Captain O’Connor been saying to get her little temper up?”
“Nothing, only you’re so silly, and I haven’t the patience to talk to boys.”
Basil proceeded to do a little sum on his fingers, looking abnormally grave.
“Umph! thirty-five I should think,” he said musingly, “though you hardly look it. No chicken that! eh—what?”
Paddy was obliged to burst out laughing.
“Do you know I think you’re improving rather,” she told him. “You aren’t half such a namby-pamby coxcomb as you were when I first came to London at Christmas.”
“Not easy when you’re about,” he commented, adding, “I think we might be said to have formed a mutual improvement society. If you only knew what you looked like that first night! A sort of antediluvian Joan of Arc! I thought you were the oddest fish I had ever come across.”
“Why Joan of Arc?”
“Because you had war in your eyes from the first moment we met. I didn’t recognise it so quickly then as I should now, but I couldn’t help seeing you didn’t mean to waste much cousinly affection on me.”
“I thought you were an awful idiot,” she remarked, with smiling candour.