“Will you ever be serious, child?”
Ethel took her sister’s head in her hands and turned it gently, so that she might look into the other’s face.
“Is it possible that you are serious, Kate?” she asked, in tender wonderment.
The elder girl laughed, and lifted herself to sit on the sofa beside Ethel.
“No, no; of course it isn’t possible,” she said, and put her arm about the invalid’s slender waist. “But he’s great fun to talk to. I chaffed him to my heart’s content, and he saw what I meant, every time, and didn’t mind in the least, and gave me as good as I sent. It’s such a relief to find somebody you can say saucy things to, and be quite sure they understand them. I began by disliking him—and he is as conceited as a popinjay—but then he comprehended everything so perfectly, and talked so well, that positively I found myself enjoying it. And he knew his own mind, too, and was resolved to say nice things to me, and said them, whether I liked or not.”
“But did you ‘like,’ Kate?”
“No-o, I think not,” the girl replied, musingly. “But, all the same, there was a kind of satisfaction in hearing them, don’t you know.”
The younger girl drew her sister’s head down to her shoulder, and caressed it with her thin, white fingers.
“You are not going to let your mind drift into anything foolish, Kate?” she said, with a quaver of anxiety in her tone. “You don’t know the man. You don’t even like him. You told me so, even from what you saw of him on the train coming from New York. You said he patronized everybody and everything, and didn’t have a good word to say for any one. Don’t you know you did? And those first impressions are always nearest the truth.”
This recalled something to Kate’s mind. “You are right, puss,” she said. “It is a failing of his. He spoke to-day almost contemptuously of his partner—that Mr. Tracy whom I met in the milliner’s shop; and that annoyed me at the time, for I liked Mr. Tracy’s looks and talk very much indeed, I shouldn’t call him uncouth, at all.”