"Well?"
"Well—well then—I shouldn't be as thankful as I am this instant for—for many things that I can't have more of."
She straightened herself and favored me with a curious look that melted at last into a puzzling smile.
"I don't understand you," she said. With a shade more of encouragement in her voice I had been near to forgetting my honor as a truce-observing enemy. I was grateful, indeed, afterwards, that her wish to understand me was not sufficiently implied to bring me thus low.
"Neither do I understand the morbid psychology that finds satisfaction in cheating at solitaire," I succeeded in saying. "I never can see how they fix it up with themselves."
"I believe you think and talk a great deal of foolishness," said Miss Kate, in tones of reproof; and with this she was off the porch before I could rise.
She wore pink, with bits of blue spotting it in no systematic order that I could discern, and a pink rose lay abashed in her hair.
[CHAPTER XXVIII]
THE ABDICATION OF THE BOSS
There is no need to conceal that I was by this time put to it for matters to think upon not clearly related to myself; in other words for matters extraneous to my neighbor's troublesome daughter. In sheer self-defence was I driven to look abroad for interests that would suffice without disquieting me. I was now compelled to admit that there was plainly to be observed in Miss Kate Lansdale something more than a mere winning faith in my powers of self-control. It was difficult at first to suspect that she actually meant to try me to the breaking point. The suspicion brought a false note to that harmony of chastened grief wherein, I had divined, she meant to live out her life. It seemed too Peavey and perverse a thing that she should, finding our truce honorably observed by myself, behave toward me as if with a cold design to bring me down in disgrace—as a proof of her superior powers and my own wretched weakness. Yet this very thing was I obliged regretfully to concede of her before many days. And it was behavior that I could palliate only by reminding myself constantly that she was not only a woman but the daughter of Miss Caroline, and by that token subject inevitably to certain infirmities of character. And still did she at times evince for me that shyness which only enhanced my peril.