“Oh, sweet story-teller!” said Mr. Armour with a low, happy laugh. “You fear nothing on earth, and you cannot play Desdemona, so do not try. You don’t wish me to see Joe,” and catching her up in his arms he hurried up the gentle acclivity, bending his face teasingly down to hers.
“If I ask you what Joe has been doing and why you are so subdued this evening, shall I hear another pretty prevarication?” he inquired, putting her down at the veranda steps.
“No,” she said gravely, and as he stood beside her in the now rapidly falling snow, she mentally ran over her painful experience of the evening. Should she shock Armour with an account of the treachery of his wayward brother? No, a thousand times no.
“I am disturbed about something,” she said at last deliberately, “but I do not care to talk about it.”
“Will you tell me to-morrow?” he asked eagerly.
“No, nor the next day, nor any day,” she replied. “I beg that you will not make a mystery of it. Some one has offended me—and been forgiven. After to-night I shall put the matter out of my thoughts.”
Armour’s face grew dark as he listened to her. “Perhaps it is as well not to tell me,” he muttered: “I should not forgive so easily.”
CHAPTER XXX
LOVE WILL BUILD HIS LILY WALLS
Late in the afternoon of St. Patrick’s Day, Camperdown, in a smart new buggy that he had bought to please Zilla, but with Polypharmacy—whom he had refused to give up—harnessed to it, was driving along Barrington Street, that runs in a wavering line through the town and out into the country.
Since early morning there had been several kinds of weather—as is usually the case in Halifax on the seventeenth of March. The parade and demonstration in honor of the saint had been held in a driving snow-storm. Then followed brilliant sunshine and a high wind that rattled the masses of wires suspended over the streets, and tossed to and fro the banks of dead white snow heaped in billowy ridges against the black and muddy earth.