"I—there was no reason, of course, only I k-kept seeing you without trying to——"
"Me?"
"Certainly. I couldn't help seeing you, could I?"
"Not if you were looking at me," she murmured, pressing her muff to her face. Perhaps she was cold.
Again it occurred to him that there was something foolish in her reply. Certainly she was a little difficult to talk to. But then she was young—very young and—close enough to being a beauty to excuse herself from any overstrenuous claim to intellectuality.
"Yes," he said kindly and patiently, "I did see you, and I did hope that you were going to the Austins'. And then I bumped into somebody and there you were. I don't mean," as she raised her pretty eyebrows—"mean that you were Bailey. Good Lord, what is the matter with my tongue!" he said, flushing with annoyance. "I don't talk this way usually."
"Don't you?" she managed to whisper behind her muff.
"No, I don't. That conductor's jargon seems to have inoculated me. You will probably not believe it, but I can talk the English tongue sometimes——"
She was laughing now—a clear, delicious, irrepressible little peal that rang sweetly in the frosty air, harmonising with the chiming sleigh-bells. And he laughed, too, still uncomfortably flushed.