She raised her head, with the quick movement he had observed was a trick of hers.
“Yes; so it is!” she said, laughing a little; “and I don’t know yours either. My name is Bridget Ruan.”
“Irish?” he asked. “Of course—I see you are! Oh, I’m forgetting my part of it. My name’s Carey.”
“Bridget was my grandmother’s name,” she said. “She was Irish, but she married an Englishman. They say I’m like her, but I never saw her; she died before I was born.... And so you’re starting to-morrow for all the wonderful, beautiful places in the world? Ah,” with a long breath, “how I envy you! You will just pass on from one lovely country to another. It will be like a royal progress, with all the bother of royalty left out.”
He smiled. “I shall put in a little work at intervals, I hope; just to accentuate the joy of the progress.”
“Work?” she repeated, knitting her brows a little. “What work?”
“Oh!—writing.”
Bridget turned to him with sudden interest. “You write?” she said eagerly. “Where? What sort of things?—do tell me! Novels?”
“No, I never perpetrated a novel. Verses sometimes, articles, various things. They are signed ‘L. C.,’” he added.
“Oh,” her face flushed with eagerness, “then I know them! I’ve read several of them!” She paused, there was a thrill of excitement in her voice. The articles, she remembered, had charmed her. She had read them many times. There was about them a rather intoxicating breath of vitality, a somewhat incongruous, but wholly charming play of fancy, which had delighted her. It seemed to her the most intensely interesting and exciting thing in her experience, to be actually talking to the man who wrote them.