“How often have you felt like this within the last few months—towards some one or other?” she asks.
Alas! How dangerous a thing to let the brother of the adored one know too much! Dick meant no harm; he never knew how his tales would affect me; but evidently he has jested at home about my amours, and now I am regarded by his sister either as a Don Juan or a perpetually love-sick sentimentalist. And the worst of it is that there are some superficial grounds for either theory.
“Ah,” I cry, “you have heard then of my wanderings in search of the ideal? But I have only just found it!”
“How can you be sure of that?” she asks, a little smile appearing in her eye like a sudden break in a misty sky. “You haven't known me long enough to say. In a month you may make a jest of me.”
“I am serious at last. I swear it!”
“I am afraid you will have to remain serious for some time to make me believe it,” she replies, the smile still lingering. “When any one has treated women, and everything else, flippantly so long as you, I—”
She hesitated.
“You do not trust them?”
“No,” she confesses.
“If I am serious for six months will you trust me then?”