But she answered, quite gently, now: "No, Mr. Kendrick, I don't trample on that. No girl would. I simply—know you are mistaken."
"In what? My own feeling? Do you think I don't know—"
"I know you don't know. I'm not your kind of a girl, Mr. Kendrick. You think I am, because—well, perhaps because my eyes are blue and my eyelashes black; just such things as that do mislead people. I can dance fairly well—"
He smothered an angry exclamation.
"And skate well—and play the 'cello a little—and—that's nearly all you know about me. You don't even know whether I can teach well—or talk well—or what is stored away in my mind. And I know just as little about you."
"I've learned one thing about you in this last minute," he muttered.
"You can keep your head."
"Why not?" There was a note of laughter in her voice. "There needs to be one who keeps her head when the other loses his—all because of a little winter moonlight. What would the summer moonlight do to you, I wonder?"
"Roberta Gray"—his voice was rough—"the moonlight does it no more than the sunlight. Whatever you think, I'm not that kind of fellow. The day I saw you first you had just come in out of the rain. You went back into it and I saw you go—and wanted to go with you. I've been wanting it ever since."
They moved on in silence which lasted until they were within a quarter-mile of the bonfire, whose flashing light they could see above the banks which intervened. Then Roberta spoke:
"Mr. Kendrick"—and her voice was low and rich with its kindest inflections—"I don't want you to think me careless or hard because I have treated what you have said to-night in a way that you don't like. I'm only trying to be honest with you. I'm quite sure you didn't mean to say it to me when you came to-night, and—we all do and say things on a night like this that we should like to take back next day. It's quite true—what I said—that you hardly know me, and whatever it is that takes your fancy it can't be the real Roberta Gray, because you don't know her!"