"You remain, madame."
She flushed with displeasure.
"And yet," he said, smiling, "if the hero of that book replied as I have you would have smiled. That is the false light the moon of romance sheds in competition with the living sun." He shrugged his broad shoulders, laughing: "The contrast between the heroine of that romance and you proves which is the lovelier, reality or romance——"
She bit her lips and looked at him narrowly, the high colour pulsating and dying in her cheeks. Under cover of the very shield that should have protected her he was using weapons which she herself had sanctioned—the impalpable weapons of romance.
Dusk, too, had already laid its bloom on hill and forest and had spun a haze along the stream—dusk, the accomplice of all the dim, jewelled forms that people the tinted shadows of romance. Why—if he had displeased her—did she not dismiss him? It is not with a question that a woman gives a man his congé.
"Why do you speak as you do?" she asked, gravely. "Why, merely because you are clever, do you twist words into compliments. We are scarcely on such a footing, monsieur."
"What I said I meant," he replied, slowly.
"Have I accorded you permission to say or mean?"
"No; that is the fashion of romance—a pretty one. But in life, sometimes, a man's heart beats out the words his lips deliver untricked with verbal tinsel."