"How do you like my new frock, Johnny?" she asked.
She slipped out of her cloak, dropping the magazine into a chair with it, and walked across the room, with an exaggerated air of haughty grandeur. The soft gray folds of the gown swept over the carpet. There was a hint of rose-color in it that caught the lamp-light. Elizabeth glanced teasingly over her shoulder at the Pretender, who turned abruptly away. He was a very poor sort of Pretender, after all, and he feared the mocking gaze of those gray eyes. They might read the secret in his own and laugh at it. He picked up the magazine she had dropped and began turning over its pages, just to show his lofty disapproval, Elizabeth felt sure.
John proceeded to make sarcastic remarks upon her appearance, while his admiring eyes belied his tongue. But Elizabeth and John had never outlived the habits of their reserved childhood, and found it necessary always to keep up a show of indifference lest they reveal the deep tenderness between them. Lizzie looked frightfully skinny in the dress, he announced, and her neck was too long by a foot. Besides, as her medical adviser, he felt it his duty to tell her that she would likely get tangled up in that long tail and break some of her bones.
"I'll bet a box of chocolates you can't tell the color of it," Elizabeth said. She was glancing nervously at Charles Stuart. He was surely near the place in the magazine. The guessing grew lively, John finally giving his verdict that the dress was "some sort of dark white," when Elizabeth saw Charles Stuart pause and read absorbedly.
"It's your turn, Stuart," she cried, to gain time. "John's color-blind."
Charles Stuart glanced up. It was no easy task this, examining Elizabeth's gown, under the fire of her eyes.
"Another new dress," he said evasively. "I suppose that woman has been taking you to another Green Tea this afternoon."
From the day Mrs. Jarvis had made Elizabeth her paid companion, Charles Stuart had taken a strong dislike to the lady, and always spoke of her as "that woman."
"A 'Green Tea,'" groaned Elizabeth. "Charles Stuart MacAllister! It sounds like something Auntie Jinit would brew at a quiltin'. It's positively shameful not to be better acquainted with the terms of polite society."
"Well, here's something I can appreciate," he said, still avoiding her glance and turning to the magazine again. "Listen to this. It's as pretty as the dress."