“The song don’t tell. Cried a bit, I daresay. They were the fellows: kiss and go. But it’s the looking for a thing—a something... Sometimes I think I am a sort of Gambucino myself.”
“No woman can hold you, then,” she began in a brazen voice, which quavered suddenly before the end.
“No longer than a week,” he joked, playing upon her very heartstrings with the gay, tender note of his laugh; “and yet I am fond of them all. Anything for a woman of the right sort. The scrapes they got me into, and the scrapes they got me out of! I love them at first sight. I’ve fallen in love with you already, Miss—Bessie’s your name—eh?”
She backed away a little, and with a trembling laugh:
“You haven’t seen my face yet.”
He bent forward gallantly. “A little pale: it suits some. But you are a fine figure of a girl, Miss Bessie.”
She was all in a flutter. Nobody had ever said so much to her before.
His tone changed. “I am getting middling hungry, though. Had no breakfast to-day. Couldn’t you scare up some bread from that tea for me, or—”
She was gone already. He had been on the point of asking her to let him come inside. No matter. Anywhere would do. Devil of a fix! What would his chum think?
“I didn’t ask you as a beggar,” he said, jestingly, taking a piece of bread-and-butter from the plate she held before him. “I asked as a friend. My dad is rich, you know.”