"Just what I don't wish him to think," she said, with singular decision.
"Was there ever!" cried Grace, holding up both hands. "Well, this love is an odd thing! What instinctive coquetry! Like John Milton's Eve,
'All conscious of your worth,
You would be woo'd, and, not unsought, be won.'
I don't understand this disguising love under a show of coldness—seeming to hate where the heart pants and glows with devotion. Oh, if this be love, I'll none of it. Here is the pencil, and there is a fair sheet, and the moon is patiently holding her silver lamp for you; will you write?"
"I will, to gratify you, cousin Grace;" she said, taking the pencil and placing her fingers lightly on the paper which lay in the window.
"To please me! very well, be it so. Who could have believed, a quarter of an hour ago, that I should have had to coax you to send a line to Robert Lester! You may well hide your telltale face."
Kate bent her head over the gilded sheet and began to write, or, at least, to make characters with her pencil, when Grace, impatient at her slow progress, looked over her shoulder and exclaimed,
"Why, what are you writing? Lester Robert, Robert Lester, Robert Lester, Lester Rob—."
Kate glanced at what she had written, hastily run her pencil through it, and said, with a mortified laugh,
"I had forgotten what to write."