But he knew that for the first week or two she was engaged about half her time in reading his own works, for his mother had come herself to the library for them.
“Sweetheart is so anxious to read them, but she would not come herself lest she should disturb you,” she said.
“Good little girl!” her son muttered, dryly, and went on with his scribbling; but more than once that day he wondered if Thea was reading his books, and how she liked them.
“But I shall not ask her, since she is so silly as to pretend to be afraid of me,” he thought, severely; and tried to dismiss her from his mind, chafing to himself at the persistency with which her image came between him and his work.
Why should the blue eyes haunt him so when they scarcely saw each other save at the table, for he spent half of his time in his library, the other half walking or riding unsociably by himself, with now and then an evening at the Author’s Club or theater. Thea and his mother rode a great deal, too, but it was always in the elder lady’s two-seated pony-phaeton, which she drove herself. There was only room for two, and in any case Mrs. de Vere would not have asked him to make one of the party. She vaguely felt that Norman was not to be annoyed for the sake of a simple school-girl who seemed to him a mere child.
Norman saw it all—his mother’s care that he should not be bothered by Thea, and the girl’s entire acquiescence. Before she came he would have been pleased to know that it would be this way. It piqued him now.
“I do not want her to fear me now—she confided in me so sweetly when she was a child,” was the excuse he made to himself for his pique.
But Thea firmly determined on being “good,” as she phrased it—gave him not the least trouble. She subdued her joyous spirits when he was by; she did her daily practicing on the piano when he was out for his walk; when the neighbors began to call, and the young people found her out, she was demurely social; she held firmly in check the gayety that in Virginia had earned her the title of coquette.
“He said he believed in me, and he shall have no cause to change his mind,” the girl said to herself, when the temptation to be recklessly gay assailed her.
She had grown morbidly anxious to appear at her best in those dark eyes, whose grave glances haunted her dreams by night and her thoughts by day.