“I could not help it, Red Riding Hood,” he said, with a deprecatory gesture. “It is that Rubicon Meadows cloak. I am sure you won’t blame me when you look in the glass and see how fascinating you are.”
His light tone aggravated the extent of his transgression; and with cheeks on fire and in a suffocated voice she stammered: “How dare you do so? You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
He had not heard her. His two hands were gently laid on her shoulders, and in a voice of ineffable tenderness he was repeating under his breath, “My little wife, my little wife.”
Nina was frightened, confused, and tried to push his hands away, but he quietly restrained her. “Darling,—since those solemn words were spoken over us yesterday,—is there a difference?”
“Yes—no,” she stammered, wildly. Then as he still caressed her, and regarded her with the new, strange expression that fascinated and yet repelled her, she exclaimed, wildly: “’Steban, don’t, oh, don’t, don’t. Don’t be serious. Please let me go. I do not love you, really. Not enough to live with you all the time. Don’t say such things to me. I am in earnest. I am.”
He stared sadly at the hand she had caught and was holding in both her own, then he drew it from her and turned to the doorway.
“I don’t blame you,” she whispered against his shoulder; “but you must not speak in that way to me. You make me frantic. I suppose it was the cloak.”
“Yes, it was the cloak,” he said, quietly. “I beg your pardon, Nina. It was certainly the cloak.”
“I will take it off,” she said, hurriedly, and she threw it across her arm.
“Little goose,” and he wrapped it over her shoulders, tied it under her chin, then in his old brotherly manner drew the hood over her head and tucked in the curls that had always held out a fluttering temptation to him when his little sweetheart donned the cloak to stroll with him to the gate of the Rubicon Meadows house.