"Ah, my dear, I'm not quite ready to tell. It's a romance, as you will agree when you hear it. What's the matter?"
For Kitty instead of showing any proper, cousinly enthusiasm was looking at him with a frown of petulant vexation.
"Then why couldn't you have come home six months, even three months earlier? Young, good‑looking, and, as I now discover, rich, or about to be. Oh, it is too bad!"
He gazed at her in amazement. "My dear Kitty," in playful humility, "even if your flattering estimate of me is true, I don't see why you should be so disgruntled about it."
Her April face broke into smiles, and yet she sighed. "Oh, Bobby, because, because I'm afraid the fairy princess is bespoke. Yes," nodding at his astonishment, "I have a fairy princess in mind, one in whose welfare I am deeply interested."
"Oh," comprehendingly, "one of your protégées, whom you are trying to marry off. I assure you once and for all, Kitty, that such will not do for me. I want the real thing in fairy princesses; under an enchantment, detained in the home of a wicked ogre; all that, you know, and lovely and forlorn."
She looked at him oddly. "If you only knew how you confirm my impression."
"Of what?"
She paid no attention to him. "I wish I knew certainly. She won't tell until she gets ready, but it looks very much as if she were engaged to Wilfred Ames. You remember him, do you not?"
Hayden thought deeply a moment. "A big fellow? Very light hair, blue eyes?"