CHAPTER X
CHANCE
She considered him with guileless eyes. He was too good-looking, too attractive, too young, and far too much pleased with himself. That was the impression he gave her. And, as he was, in addition, plainly one of her own sort, a man she was likely to meet anywhere—a well-bred, well-mannered and agreeable young fellow, probably a recent undergraduate, which might account for his really inoffensive breeziness—she felt perfectly at ease with him and safe enough to continue imprudently her mischief.
"If you are going to begin at the beginning," she said, "perhaps it might steady your nerves to repeat your own name very slowly and distinctly. Physicians recommend it sometimes," she added seriously.
"My name is John Seabury," he said, laughing. "Am I lucid?"
"Lucid so far," she said gravely. "I knew a Lily Seabury——"
"My sister. She's in Paris."
"Yes, I knew that, too," mused the girl, looking at him in a different light—different in this way that his credentials were now unquestionable, and she could be as mischievous as she pleased with the minimum of imprudence.
"Do you ever take the advice of physicians," he asked naïvely, "about repeating names?"