She gently received and retained both his hands in hers. "One often does feel dull after a journey. Ah! but I have missed you."
"It has only been two weeks—"
"And you have come back with that same weary look on your face," she said, anxiously. "Agapit, I try to put that look in the back of my mind, but it will not stay."
He lightly kissed her fingers, and drew a chair beside his own for her. "It amuses you to worry."
"My cousin!"
"I apologize,—you are the soul of angelic concern for the minds and bodies of your fellow mortals. And how goes everything in Sleeping Water? I have been quite homesick for the good old place."
Rose, in spite of the distressed expression that still lingered about her face, began to smile, and said, impulsively, "Once or twice I have almost recalled you, but I did not like to interrupt. Yours was a case at the supreme court, was it not, if that is the way to word it?"
"Yes, Rose; but has anything gone wrong? You mentioned nothing in your letters," and, as he spoke, he took off his glasses and began to polish them with his handkerchief.
"Not wrong, exactly, yet—" and she laughed. "It is Bidiane."
The hand with which Agapit was manipulating his glasses trembled slightly, and hurriedly putting them on, he pushed back the papers on the table before him, and gave her an acute and undivided attention. "Some one wants to marry her, I suppose," he said, hastily. "She is quite a flirt."