'You have sent her home with her nurse to bed, I suppose?' suggests he reproachfully. 'I sometimes think that you are a little hard upon Prue.'
Hard upon Prue! She, whose one thought, waking and sleeping, is how best to put her strong arm round that fragile body and weakling soul, so as to shield them from the knocks of this rough world! This, too, from him, who has introduced the one element of suffering it has ever known into Prue's little life.
'Am I?' she answers quietly; but her cheek burns.
'There is no one that suits me so well as Prue,' says the young man sentimentally, looking up to the sky.
'"She's like the keystone of an arch,
That doth consummate beauty;
She's like the music of a march,
That maketh joy of duty!"'
Peggy's eye relents. He may mean it—may be speaking truth—it is not likely, as he seldom does so; but after all, the greatest liars must, during their lives, speak more truth than lies. One is prone to believe what one wishes, and he may mean it.
'There is no one that I am so fond of as I am of Prue,' pursues he, with a quiver in his voice.
'You have an odd way of showing it sometimes,' says she, in a softened tone.
'Are you alluding to that?' asks he, glancing carelessly over his shoulder at the kiosk. 'Pooh! I hated it. I shall get milady to pull it down some day. I was so glad when you and Talbot came up: it was so dark, and I felt the earwigs dropping on my head.'