A slight flush stained his smooth, sunburnt skin; then he laughed.
“A little afraid,” he admitted; “I find you dangerous, but not in the way you mean. I—I do not mean to offend you——”
But she smiled audaciously at him, looking prettier than ever; and his heart gave a surprised little jump at her unsuspected capabilities.
“Why are you afraid of me?” she asked, looking at him with her engaging little smile. In her eyes a bewitching brightness sparkled, partly veiled by the long lashes; and she laughed again, poised there in the sunshine, hands on her hips, delicately provoking his reply.
And, crossing the chasm which her coquetry had already bridged, he paid her the quick, reckless, boyish compliment she invited—a little flowery, perhaps, possibly a trifle stilted, but very Southern; and she shrugged like a spoiled court beauty, nose uptilted, and swept him with a glance from half-closed lids, almost insolent.
The sentry in the holly and laurel thicket stared hard at them both. And he saw his major break off a snowy Cherokee rose and, bending at his slim, sashed waist, present the blossom with the courtly air inbred through many generations; and he saw a ragged mountaineer girl accept it with all the dainty and fastidious mockery of a coquette of the golden age, and fasten it where her faded bodice edged the creamy skin of her breast.
What the young major said to her after that, bending nearer and nearer, the sentry could not hear, for the major’s voice was very low, and the slow, smiling reply was lower still.
But the major straightened as though he had been shot through and through, and bowed and walked away among the weeds toward a group of officers under the trees, who were steadily watching the pass through their leveled field glasses.
Once the major turned around to look back: once she turned on the threshold. Her cheeks were pinker; her eyes sparkled.
The emotions of the Special Messenger were very genuine and rather easily excited.