The strange lady was silent, too. It may have been that she felt she had been a little imprudent in her invitation to the cavalier, hero though he was. Leaning back against the cushion, she gazed pensively out of the window at the streets and traffic, lost in thought. Her companion stared fixedly at the stolid back of the chauffeur: that, at least, was real and a corrective.
It was the lady who spoke first, and with a sympathetic engaging accent, nicely calculated to stir the most sluggish blood.
"Well?" she said.
Lionel awoke from his trance and turned. "Ah!" he murmured, and seized her hand. He raised it to his lips and kissed it with a passionate reverence. "Ah!" he said again, and "Ah!" punctuating the exclamations with tender salutes.
"You should not do that," reproved the lady, though her voice betrayed neither astonishment nor indignation. "It is foolish." She laughed musically.
"Foolish!" echoed Lionel with a fine contempt. "Madam, it is anything but that. If this be foolishness, then youth and joy and a careless heart are folly, and woman is folly——"
"I thought that men were agreed upon that," she said.
"Cynics and pedagogues may hold the heresy," admitted Lionel, "but not the happy, the young and the wise."
"Your youth and happiness are patent," she retorted, "but how am I to be sure of your wisdom?"
He laughed.