"But now?"
"Hang it! you'd try a saint's temper," growled he, wrinkling his brows into a most unsanctified frown, and letting her go with such a sudden abruptness that she stumbled a little, and in the effort to maintain her footing on the narrow plank the basket slipped from her arm, and would have fallen into the water had not Lee caught it, with a dexterous turn of his wrist.
"See now, Ruth," he said, as he restored it to her, his eye grown radiant again in his pride at his clever legerdemain, "if you're not at my mercy after all. Might I not have been revenged for your refusal, and helped myself to a peep into this mighty particular basket, if I wasn't honour bright from top to toe?"
The mysterious basket.
"But you are, Lawrence, aren't you?" challenged she, with a strange earnestness, that sent his eyes, which were gazing into hers, back to the basket; "and evil be to him who evil thinks," she went on. "And—"
"Oh, plague take it!" he interrupted impatiently; "what are you driving at? Now for the basket. Come."
"You really care to see inside it?"
"Not a straw, my dear child," he said loftily. "'Tis full of emptiness, I daresay. That's just what delights you girls more than anything; teasing and tantalizing a fellow all about nothing."
"Ay, but there is something in it. Something I was bringing to the Hall on purpose to show you, and—and to ask your opinion about. And yet—and yet—" she went on wistfully, "I hope you won't be able to—to give me one."
"Why, my dear girl," rejoined he with a superior smile, "how mighty mysterious we are, to be sure!"