“No, Mr. Nettlepoint.”
“Ah very little. He’s very considerably my junior, you see.”
She had a fresh pause, as if almost again for my elegance; but she went on: “He’s younger than me too.” I don’t know what effect of the comic there could have been in it, but the turn was unexpected and it made me laugh. Neither do I know whether Miss Mavis took offence at my sensibility on this head, though I remember thinking at the moment with compunction that it had brought a flush to her cheek. At all events she got up, gathering her shawl and her books into her arm. “I’m going down—I’m tired.”
“Tired of me, I’m afraid.”
“No, not yet.”
“I’m like you,” I confessed. “I should like it to go on and on.”
She had begun to walk along the deck to the companionway and I went with her. “Well, I guess I wouldn’t, after all!”
I had taken her shawl from her to carry it, but at the top of the steps that led down to the cabins I had to give it back. “Your mother would be glad if she could know,” I observed as we parted.
But she was proof against my graces. “If she could know what?”
“How well you’re getting on.” I refused to be discouraged. “And that good Mrs. Allen.”