"A friend of mine—my very dearest friend."
"More good business. I think I'll go down and talk to her. What's her name?"
"Rose."
"What's the rest of it? I can't start in that way, you know. Bad form."
"Bernard—Rose Bernard."
As quickly and silently as he did everything else, the young man went down-stairs, and the piano stopped, but only for a moment, as he requested her, with an airy wave of the hand, not to mind him. When she finished the old song she was playing, he called her by name, introduced himself, and invited her out into the garden, because, as he said, "walls not only have ears, but telephones."
"Say," he began, by way of graceful preliminary, "you look to me as though you had sense."
"Thank you," she replied, demurely.
"Sense," he resumed, "is lamentably scarce, especially the variety misnamed common—or even horse. I'm no mental healer, nor anything of that sort, you know, but it's reasonable to suppose that if the mind can control the body, after a fashion, when the body is well, it's entitled to some show when the body isn't well, don't you think so?"
Rose assented, though she did not quite grasp what he said. His all pervading breeziness affected her much as it had Allison.