“Then wait and see. But hope isn’t dead yet, Freckles. (Let me see; yes, there’s your one freckle that made me call you Freckles. Remember?) I’ll have to find the Diary, or rewrite it,—unless, of course, I—”
“Oh, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.” Romany bounced back into her hair, her maribou, and the rumpled pillows.
“Don’t say that!” he cried dramatically. And Romany caught at a straw. She sat up again.
“You care?” she said. “You do care. Oh, Bertrand, why are you making me suffer so? I don’t understand. Darling, is it because you’re jealous?” She threw both arms recklessly around his neck and clung to him with the wild strength of a drowning person. “Did he think his little Romany had really gone away and left him? Did he think she cared about all the other mans? Why, his poor little girl only thought the big man had got tired of her. She did, darling. Truly, she did.”
Whittaker slowly and carefully, with all the force of his hands, disengaged her arms, but, once disengaged, he found his own of necessity engaged in holding her.
“Brat!” he said, on a low, half-laugh, and kissed her lightly.
“Oh,” she breathed with a relieved sigh that rose, softly, from the bottom of her heart. “It’s so long since you called me that. I love it. How silly of us to quarrel, Bertrand. And be jealous! After all these years. To think you could ever have been so cruel as to pretend to tell about Durian to bring me back. Couldn’t you have found a pleasanter way, darling?”
Whittaker regarded her obliquely through half-shut eyes.
“What about Crawford?” he asked.
She had the grace to color.