The Duke looked up at his friend in indescribable astonishment. Lester Vane went on—
“Such a scene, Miss Grahame, heightened by those associations your own glowing thoughts could supply, would naturally furnish an ample excuse for an absence so much regretted by all present. May I suggest that you should adopt it, rather than confess to an afterdinner nap?”
“And dreams of pumpkin pie,” interposed Helen, with sarcastic bitterness, and a very formal bend. She understood his allusion; it brought a scarlet flush on her cheek, and made her eye flash like a diamond. Her lip curled scornfully as she replied to him, and if the sarcastic tone she adopted was unnoticed by others, it was not lost upon him.
“Mr. Vane,” she added, not concealing an expression of disdain, “I prefer to adhere to the vulgar truth. There are people to whom such a course is inconvenient, but I find it less troublesome than to have to coin a number of small prevarications. I am afraid I am rather an unromantic individual. I catch cold, and have bad fits of sneezing come on, when I am foolish enough to be tempted by some poetical enthusiast to enjoy the beauty of a moonlight night, shadowy trees, rippling waters, and sighing breezes. On those occasions there is always a quantity of mist about, moist exhalations, powerfully suggestive I assure you Mr. Vane, of influenza. Moonlight scenes are very pretty things at the Opera, or in a picture, but the reality is really very trying to the constitution.”
“The vewy weflections I have frequently made myself,” burst forth the Duke with much vivacity. ‘’You enwapchaw me, Miss Gwahame, youaw impwes-sions squaw so wondwously with mine. Moonlight nights aw vewy damp aflaws; I nevaw venchaw upon one without a heavy boat cape, a box of cigaws, and a pawson to play the twumpet, to keep me awake, nevaw!”
“You surprise me, Miss Grahame,” said Vane, nettled by the tone she assumed. “I imagined that your temperament was highly sentimental and poetical.” There was a hidden meaning even in these words. Helen detected so much; though she did not at the moment perceive the object at which the shaft was levelled; she replied quickly—
“You have been premature, Mr. Vane, in forming your estimate of my character. I am not so easily read as my sister Evangeline. She is imbued with romance, as, no doubt, you have before this discovered. She trusts to seeming, poor child—I do not.”
For a moment her eye fastened itself piercingly upon him. She then took the Duke’s ready arm, and advanced up the salon to a magnificent harp, to fulfil a promise made by her to the Duke at dinner. As she did so, she looked for Evangeline, but she had quitted the room when Lester Vane rose up to greet her, and she liked not her disappearance.
Lester Vane looked after Helen as, with queenly dignity, she paced the room, leaning upon the arm of his bulky, ungraceful friend, all the brighter and more beautiful for the contrast.
“I am right,” he mused; “I am on the track; she chafes at the very mention of garden and moonlight. My experiment, too, succeeds—two suns may not shine in her hemisphere—she is already jealous of my attention to her little, simple, innocent sister. There is power in that. I will use it. I will have her completely in my grasp.”