"Then," I said by and by, "why aren't you bicycling—or walking—this afternoon?" I wanted to have the position quite clear. If she could spend three days with him in succession, why not a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth?
"I had to give that note to you," she said.
"Ah, the note! I forgot that.... Have you any idea what's in it?"
She blushed crimson, flamed with reproach. All the same, I contrasted her shameless deception of her parents with this point of honour about peeping into an unsealed note to myself. These heaven-born young beauties draw the line in such odd places.
"I never thought——", she said, biting her lip; and I hastened to set her right.
"Good heavens, Jennie, you can't think that I meant that! I meant in a general way, what the subject of it is."
"I know what he thinks," she said, the fierce colour slowly retiring again.
"Well, what does he think?"
"He thinks you were perfectly ripping to him the other night, about not doing anything till you saw him again, and when I told him you were ill he was awfully upset, and tore a page out of his sketch-book and wrote the note that very moment."
The devil!... But I went on.