“You are too much for me, John,” Adam admitted, shaking his head in puzzlement. “You are a strange boy.”
“I thought it was all explained,” Garde replied, anxious to get him quieted on the subject. “How far should you say it is to Boston?”
“I think I begin to work it out a little,” the man went on, musingly. “It’s because you remind me of some one I have known.”
“Do I?” said Garde, half afraid of her question. “Of whom?”
“I don’t quite know,” he confessed, looking at her earnestly. “And yet I ought to be able to tell. It was some one I liked, I am sure.”
“As much as you did your sweetheart?”
Adam seemed not to hear this question. “Your complexion,” he resumed, “makes me think of a sweet maid I knew at Jamaica.”
“Oh!”
“And yet your eyes are like those of a lovely French damsel that I met, one time.” Here he sighed. “Your hands bring back a memory of a charming Countess at the court of Charles. Some of your ways make me think of a nice little Indian Princess I once knew; while your ankles—but you don’t care to hear about your ankles.”
Garde was duly shocked. She knew not what to think of Adam, who was revealing such astonishing epochs in his life. This was terrible. Yet she wished, or almost wished, he had gone on, just a little further, though she dared not encourage him to do so, right as it might be for her to know it if his heart had strayed elsewhere, at any time during his absence. She was alarmed, curious, piqued. She forgot that she was a boy to whom he had spoken.