"Will you always be so hard-hearted?"
Josephine, embarrassed, evaded the question, and with a show of gaiety to hide her confusion, remarked:
"This is an awfully nice place of yours."
The pugilist answered her by describing the calm and simple delights of a country life in the springtime, and, slipping his arm round her supple waist, asked her softly:
"As you consented to come this far with me, why did you repel me afterwards? Why resist me so stubbornly?"
"I was a trifle tipsy yesterday," she replied. "I don't know what I did or why I came here with you." And then, with a touch of sadness: "Naturally, finding me in such a place you took me for a——"
"Sure enough," replied the American, "but I can see you are not like the others."
"And what attracts me to you," continued Josephine, "is that you are not a brute. Why, yesterday evening, if you had wanted, when we were alone together, eh?"
And she gave Dixon such a queer look that he asked himself whether she did not regard him as absurd for having respected her.
"I like you very much," he said, "more than any other woman. In a month from now I shall be off to America. I have already a good deal of money and I shall earn much more out there. If you will come with me, we won't part any more. Do you agree?"