‘You are very fond of flowers?’
‘Oh yes—and people waste them so. At my cousin’s ball last week there were five thousand roses. I saw them in the morning; they were quite dead.’
‘Did you not see them at night?’
‘At night, no; how could I? I am not in the world; I never shall be. Sometimes they tell me to be an hour in the reception-rooms after dinner; that is all; I do not care for it.’
‘But do you not wish for the time of balls to come? Every young girl does.’
‘I try never to think about it,’ she said simply. ‘I know it will never come for me.’
There was a resignation in her words which was more pathetic than any regrets.
Then with the colour hot in her cheeks again, remembering that she was speaking too much to a stranger, she opened the little gate in the arbutus walk which led into the grounds of Millo. ‘I thank you very much,’ she murmured. ‘I assure you I will never come again.’
‘And unless you come again, I assure you that you will tell me tacitly that I have had the misfortune to displease you,’ said Othmar, as he held open the gate, and bowed low to her; he saw that it would be only unkindness to detain her or to accompany her. She was as uneasy as a bird which has flown by mistake into a conservatory.
‘I will come to the church to-morrow,’ he added. ‘Do you not sing there sometimes?’