"Do you mean that you will not have me for your friend, ma'amselle, because I was born in Boston, and because my father fell fighting for the Stars and Stripes?"
"A friend? What is that, monsieur?" she queried, naïvely; and Markham, to whom the conversation was perfectly audible from his corner of the card-table, looked around, and said, teasingly:
"It is something that you will never be able to keep, ma'amselle, by reason of your pretty face. All your friends will become your lovers."
"Hold your tongue, Colonel Markham; I was not talking to you, and it's ill manners to break into a conversation," said the girl, shortly.
She broke off a white camellia from a vase near her, and held it lightly between her taper fingers as she again addressed herself to the journalist:
"I like your word 'friend.' It has a nice sound. But I don't quite understand."
"I must try to explain it to you," he replied, smiling. "I may tell you, since Markham has broached the subject, that the poets have said that friendship is love in disguise, but the dictionary gives it a more prosaic meaning. Let us find it as it is in Webster."
"Webster?" stammeringly, and Mme. Lorraine looked around with her disagreeably sarcastic laugh.
"Monsieur Van Zandt, you bewilder my little savage. She can not read."
But a light of comprehension flashed instantly into the puzzled eyes. She pulled Eliot's sleeve.