The young man laughed back heartily, even noisily. He was delighted at his success.
"Won't you tell me your name?" he said pleadingly. "Mine's Brown, Richard Shelby Brown's the whole of it, but Dick is what everybody uses at home. I come from Georgia and that's the best state in the union except yours. I'm working as salesman with a wholesale firm over on Broadway not far from here—I'll show you the place if you'll walk over there. I'm twenty-five years old and I don't drink, brought up prohibition and won't touch the stuff. Now, please, it's your turn. Won't you tell me your name?"
Hertha still stood hesitating, pushing one foot over the other, clasping her hands together in her muff and striving to decide in her mind what to do. She looked so shyly pretty that the young man watching her, his heart in his mouth, felt that the sentence would be beyond his deserts if she sent him away. Yet he would have gone without question, so much a lady did she seem, so far above the social circle attainable by Richard Shelby Brown. She in her turn was thinking it would be easy to go and escape all questionings; and yet easier to let him have his way, at least to recognize him, not continually to pass him if they met; and easiest of all just to stand there, looking down at her muff or up at the church and the white clouds piled back of it; and then, at length to say, still not looking at him, "My name is Hertha Ogilvie."
"That's a lovely name, and Georgia, too. You came from that state, didn't you, Miss Hertha?"
"No, my family came from Florida."
"That's queer, for it's a Georgia name."
"Didn't any one ever leave Georgia for Florida?"
She was looking up at him now, her brown eyes shining, a little smile on her lips.
"I can't conceive it," he said in a loud, jovial voice to hide his own embarrassment. She was far above him, he felt sure, in birth and breeding. "It's a fine name, I know that. I wish we could find we were kin."
"Everybody is kin in the South," she said decidedly, anxious to leave the subject of family. And then, pointing to the gate, asked, "What has that boy trailing after him?"