"Weary of you!" she laughs. "Ah! that gives me a pretext to quote poetry to you," and she repeats, with a very faint tremor in her voice, the delicious lines of Mrs. Osgood:
"Weary of you! I should weary as soon
Of a fountain playing its low lute tune,
With its mellow contralto lapsing in
Like a message of love through this worldly din."
He looks down into the faintly flushed face with a light, triumphant smile she does not see. He knows as well, and better than herself, how much she means the poetry that she has repeated in that light, jesting tone.
"Thank you," he answers only. "I wish I could think you meant it."
She stoops suddenly and breaks off a half-dozen great purplish velvet pansies from a bed on the side of the patch, and puts them into his hands.
"'There's pansies—that's for thoughts,'" she says, gayly. "Think what you will."
"May I think that you love me?" he queries, audaciously, as only Bruce Conway can do.
"I have said think what you will," she answers, growing suddenly crimson. "But why are you throwing my pansies away?"
A faint flush crimsons his fair forehead, too. Their eyes look at each other as he answers:
"I—I do not like pansies; they are too sad. Sometimes when I stroll down this path with my morning cigar, Lu, they look up at me bathed in glittering dew, and—I am not romantic, child, but they always remind me of blue eyes swimming in tears."