"Yes, if you will keep still long enough," he answers, provokingly, and openly amused at the impatient anger, so like that of a sadly spoiled child.
Irene folds her bare white arms over her heaving breast, and shuts her red lips tightly over her busy little tongue; but her eyes look through him with a glance that says plainer than words:
"Go on, now, I'm waiting."
With a stifled laugh, he obeys:
"Mr. Brooke said that he had been most unexpectedly called away on a little matter of business, but that he would certainly return inside an hour and take you to the ball."
He expected some expression of disappointment, but he was scarcely prepared for the dire effect of his communication.
Irene ran precipitately to the darkest corner of the room, flung herself down on a sofa, and dissolved into tears.
Feminine tears are an abomination to most men. Our hero is no exception to the rule. He fidgets uneasily in his chair a moment, then rises and goes over to the window, and listening to the low, sad murmur of the sea tries to lose the sound of that disconsolate sobbing over there in the dark corner.
"I never saw such a great, spoiled baby in my life," he says, vexedly, to himself. "How childish, how silly! She's as pretty as a doll, and that's all there is to her!"
But he cannot shut out easily the sound of her childish weeping. It haunts and vexes him.