“Could you and I sit down over here by ourselves?” she asked.
He smiled, always amused by her increasing confidence and affection, and always a little touched by it, so plainly she revealed herself, so quaintly—sometimes very quietly and shyly, sometimes with an ardent impulse too swift for self-conscious second thoughts which might have checked her.
So they seated themselves in the carved compartments of an ancient choir-stall and she rested one elbow 227 on the partition between them and set her rounded chin in her palm.
“You pretty thing,” he said lightly.
At that she blushed and smiled in the confused way she had when teased. And at such times she never looked at him—never even pretended to sustain his laughing gaze or brave out her own embarrassment.
“I won’t torment you, Sweetness,” he said. “Only you ought not to let me, you know. It’s a temptation to make you blush; you do it so prettily.”
“Please——” she said, still smiling but vividly disconcerted again.
“There, dear! I won’t. I’m a brute and a bully. But honestly, you ought not to let me.”
“I don’t know how to stop you,” she admitted, laughing. “I could kill myself for being so silly. Why is it, do you suppose, that I blu——”
She checked herself, scarlet now, and sat motionless with her head bent over her clenched palm, and her lip bitten till it quivered. Perhaps a flash of sudden insight had answered her own question before she had even finished asking it. And the answer had left her silent, rigid, as though not daring to move. But her bitten lip trembled, and her breath, which had stopped, came swiftly now, desperately controlled. But there seemed to be no control for her violent little heart, which was racing away and setting every pulse a faster pace.