“I would have thanked him more cordially, only I didn’t want him to catch my hand and squeeze it tight, and look at me as if he thought that I was very pretty! Somehow I don’t believe his wife would like it. She seems cold enough, especially to that Miss Blue that the doctor is always chaffing.”
She had wandered away by herself, out of sight and hearing of the poor lunatics disporting themselves in the sunshine, and now she sat down beneath a tree to rest, a lovely picture on which one man’s eyes rested in rapture, as if he, too, like the superintendent, thought her pretty.
He came slowly to her side.
“Do I intrude, Miss Somerville?”
She glanced up into the eyes of Doctor Rupert, deeply, darkly, beautifully blue, behind the glasses he habitually wore, and met a winning smile. Her cheeks dimpled and turned a warm pink as she faltered:
“Oh, no. Will you have a seat?”
He sat down on the bench at the farthest end, not to startle her, and held out a bunch of pansies.
“The gardener just gave them to me. Aren’t they lovely? Will you have them?”
Their hands touched as she accepted them, and a thrill of pleasure shook either heart. She had been thinking him handsome a long time, in spite of the glasses and the long curling hair down on his coat collar, that gave him rather an elderly air, though the eyes behind the glasses were quite young and merry.
“Why does it always seem to me as if I had met you before I came here? Where did you come from?”