There was a pause during which in much inward trepidation I avoided meeting her eyes. Then Polly added thoughtfully, “I think that was a very good reason.”
In our many talks the name of the Fletcher Farrells had never been mentioned. I had been most careful to avoid it. As each day passed, and their return imminent, and in consequence my need to fly grew more near, and the name was still unspoken, I was proportionately grateful. But when the name did come up I had reason to be pleased, for Polly spoke it with approval, and it was not of the owner of Harbor Castle she was speaking, but of myself. It was one evening about two weeks after we had met, and I had side-stepped the Lowells and was motoring with Polly alone. We were talking of our favorite authors, dead and alive.
“You may laugh,” said Polly, and she said it defiantly, “and I don't know whether you would call him among the dead or the living, but I am very fond of Fletcher Farrell!”
My heart leaped. I was so rattled that I nearly ran the car into a stone wall. I thought I was discovered and that Polly was playing with me. But her next words showed that she was innocent. She did not know that the man to whom she was talking and of whom she was talking were the same. “Of course you will say,” she went on, “that he is too romantic, that he is not true to life. But I never lived in the seventeenth century, so I don't know whether he is true to life or not. And I like romance. The life I lead in the store gives me all the reality I want. I like to read about brave men and great and gracious ladies.”
“I never met any girls like those Farrell write about, but it's nice to think they exist. I wish I were like them. And, his men, too—they make love better than any other man I ever read about.”
“Better than I do?” I asked.
Polly gazed at the sky, frowning severely. After a pause, and as though she had dropped my remark into the road and the wheels had crushed it, she said, coldly, “Talking about books——”
“No,” I corrected, “we were talking about Fletcher Farrell.”
“Then,” said Polly with some asperity, “don't change the subject. Do you know,” she went on hurriedly, “that you look like him—like the pictures of him—as he was.”
“Heavens!” I exclaimed, “the man's not dead!”