"What sort of a girl do you think she is—Nita Raseley, I mean?" asked Rachel.
"Oh! I don't know—the ordinary kind of girl—why?"
"She seems to want to know me. Says that she hasn't many friends. Is that true? I thought she had heaps——"
"You never can tell with girls. You're all so uncertain about one another—devoted one moment and enemies the next."
"Are we?" said Rachel slowly. "I don't think I'm like that—Oh! how hot it is!" She lay back against the grass with her arms behind her head.
"Do you like me?" Roddy said suddenly.
"I?... You!"
She slowly sat up and he saw at once that she knew now what he was going to say. At that moment, sitting there, staring at him, with her breasts moving a little beneath her white dress and her hands pressing flatly against the grass, in her agitation and the look in her eyes of some suddenly evoked personality that he did not know at all she was more elusive to him than she had ever been—
She was frightened—and also glad—but the change in her from the girl he had known all the summer was so startling that he felt that he was about to propose to someone he had never seen before.
"Do I like you?" she repeated slowly, and her lips parted in a smile.