His attempt at levity was obviously weak; she looked straight into his eyes, with the steady gaze of a simple, earnest nature shocked by a current quite strange to it. She did not understand him, and she did. Her fine intuition gathered swiftly together a hundred shreds of impression received from him during their recent growing intimacy. He was a patrician, as she vaguely made him out, a man of wealth, whose family was great. He belonged among people of gentle birth and high attainments. She magnified him so that he was diffused in her imagination, as difficult to comprehend as a mist in the morning air—and as beautiful.
"You make fun of me," she said, very deliberately, letting her eyes droop; then she looked up again suddenly and continued, with a certain naive expression of disappointment gathering in her face. "I have been too free with you. Father Beret told me not to forget my dignity when in your company. He told me you might misunderstand me. I don't care; I shall not fence with you again." She laughed, but there was no joyous freedom in the sound.
"Why, Alice—my dear Miss Roussillon, you do me a wrong; I beg a thousand pardons if I've hurt you," he cried, stepping nearer to her, "and I can never forgive myself. You have somehow misunderstood me, I know you have!"
On his part it was exaggerating a mere contact of mutual feelings into a dangerous collision. He was as much self-deceived as was she, and he made more noise about it.
"It is you who have misunderstood me," she replied, smiling brightly now, but with just a faint, pitiful touch of regret, or self-blame lingering in her voice. "Father Beret said you would. I did not believe him; but—"
"And you shall not believe him," said Beverley. "I have not misunderstood you. There has been nothing. You have treated me kindly and with beautiful friendliness. You have not done or said a thing that Father Beret or anybody else could criticise. And if I have said or done the least thing to trouble you I repudiate it—I did not mean it. Now you believe me, don't you, Miss Roussillon?"
He seemed to be falling into the habit of speaking to her in English. She understood it somewhat imperfectly, especially when in an earnest moment he rushed his words together as if they had been soldiers he was leading at the charge-step against an enemy. His manner convinced her, even though his diction fell short.
"Then we'll talk about something else," she said, laughing naturally now, and retreating to a chair by the hearthside. "I want you to tell me all about yourself and your family, your home and everything."
She seated herself with an air of conscious aplomb and motioned him to take a distant stool.
There was a great heap of dry logs in the fireplace, with pointed flames shooting out of its crevices and leaping into the gloomy, cave-like throat of the flue. Outside a wind passed heavily across the roof and bellowed in the chimney-top.