"I don't see what else it can mean—do you?—when we're engaged."
"But are you really in love—?"
"Now really, Mr. Lanyard! do you think it's polite to be so bowled over by the very idea that Morphy could have fallen in love with simple little me?"
"But you—?"
"Well . . ." The suppliant accents of a child caught misbehaving confessed: "you know I've always been crazy about emeralds."
Lanyard let a little space of silence be eloquent for him. When he spoke again it was in another tone, rather a brusque one: "But why the devil did you do that?"
"Oh, I don't know!" Folly sighed in plaintive resentment of such bullying. "He kept asking me, and I didn't know what else to do . . . You weren't there, and I was lonely, and it was raining . . ."
XXII
With the portentous sweep of a sorcerer's wand one wing of the screen doors nearby swung wide to deliver to Lanyard's stunned recognition the last person in the world he had cared to see just then, a presence of florid allurement en grande toilette. He rose in resignation, telling himself he might have been better prepared, would have been had Folly's most recent confidence broken upon his understanding with force less scandalizing—that the interruption was after all timely, since beyond doubt it saved him from speaking his mind too plainly on the theme of Morphew as a husband meet for Folly.