‘I don’t think that it ought to be so,’ said Ben.
‘And Laurie has his current, too,—quite different. I should like to find out about Laurie. It is he I know least about,’ said Mary, with a little sigh.
And then Ben smiled. ‘I should like to hear,’ he said, ‘what you know about me?’
What did she know about him? Nothing,—and yet everything, Mary thought.
‘Sometimes one divines,’ she said.
‘And sometimes one divines all wrong,’ said Ben.
Then there followed a pause. It was a very exciting game of fence so far as she was concerned. But she felt instinctively it was not safe to keep it up.
‘Godmamma will not come down to luncheon,’ she said, ‘but in the evening I hope she will be all right again. And when Alice is here and the children they will be a great help. Alice is not clever, you know, but she harmonises things somehow. I wonder if it is because she is musical.’
‘You harmonise things, too, and you are not particularly musical,’ said Ben.
‘Oh, me!’ Mary turned away, not caring to discuss that subject. He was always so nice to her,—so frank and affectionate. ‘If he were to marry Ruth Escott now, or Helen Cookesley, how nice it would be to be a sister to her!’ Mary thought! but Millicent! Could he be thinking of Millicent now? He had got up from his chair, and was looking out with a certain wistfulness—or at least what would have been wistfulness in a woman, who has always to wait for any one she particularly wishes to see. A man can go forth and seek, and has no call to be wistful; but then it was only according to feminine rules that Mary, so long unaccustomed to anything else, could form her thoughts.