“You’ll keep your word?” interrogated Huey as he left.
“Like a book, Mr. Gosper! Never you fear! I’m not the girl to back out!”
And as he passed into the street Huey’s melancholy face bore the first smile it had worn for many days.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE LOVERS
Bertha had chosen her favourite Botanic Gardens for the scene of her courtship, and it was there that her daily meetings with Alec took place. She found, perhaps, in the surroundings, a little compensation for that want of poetic feeling that even her partiality had to admit on the part of her lover.
On his side, from either the association with Bertha, or that mind-awakening which not infrequently arises with the amorous sentiment, he often surprised himself by quite original observations.
Bertha noted this change in him with the hope of the sanguine woman who trusts to mould her husband in the way that good husbands should go. If she could only wean him from those hateful horses, that was her dream.
They were walking side by side. She would not take the arm he offered.
“It was too countrified!” she said, and he submitted.
“How beautiful the lawns look to-day, Alec?”