“Capital!” she murmured pleasantly, as though she found nothing extraordinary in the idea. “So you’re really new at the game.”
“Well, I’ve stolen before, if that’s what you mean, but I didn’t get much fun out of it. I suppose after the first fatal plunge the rest will come easier.”
“I dare say that’s true,” she assented. There was real witchery in the girl’s light, murmurous laugh.
It seemed impossible to surprise her; she was taking him as a matter of course—as though sitting on a wall at night, and talking to a strange young man about stealing was a familiar experience.
“I’ve joined Robin Hood’s band,” he continued. “At least I’ve been adopted by a new sort of Robin Hood who’s travelling round robbing the rich to pay the poor, and otherwise meddling in people’s affairs—the old original Robin Hood brought up to date. If it hadn’t been for him I might be cooling my heels in jail right now. He’s an expert on jails—been in nearly every calaboose in America. He’s tucked me under his wing—persuaded me to take the highway, and not care a hang for anything.”
“How delightful!” she replied, but so slowly that he began to fear that his confidences had alarmed her. “That’s too good to be true; you’re fooling, aren’t you—really?”
His eyes had grown accustomed to the light, and her profile was now faintly limned in the dusk. Hers was the slender face of youth. The silhouette revealed the straightest of noses and the firmest of little chins. She was young, so young that he felt himself struggling in an immeasurable gulf of years as he watched her. Apparently such sophistication as she possessed was in the things of the world of wonder, the happy land of make-believe.
“Keats would have liked a night like this,” she said gently.
Deering was silent. Keats was a person whom he knew only as the subject of a tiresome lecture in his English course at college.
“Bill Blake would have adored it, but he would have had lambs in the pasture,” she added.