“Wait! I don’t wish it to know me!”
“But if you——”
The girl’s slight gesture checked him, although her smile became humorous and friendly:
“Please! We need not discuss my future. Only the past!” She laughed: “How it all comes back to me now, as you speak—that crazy evening of ours together! What children we were—two years ago!”
Smilingly she clasped her hands together on the table’s edge, regarding him with that winning directness which was a celebrated part of her celebrated personality; and happened to be natural to her.
“Why did I not recognise you immediately?” she demanded of herself, frowning in self-reproof. “I am stupid! Also I have, now and then, thought about you——” She shrugged her shoulders, and again her face faltered subtly:
“Much has happened to distract my memories,” she 48 added carelessly, impaling a strawberry, “—since you and I took the key to the fields and the road to the moon—like the pair of irresponsibles we were that night in June.”
“Have you really had trouble?”
Her slim figure straightened as at a challenge, then became adorably supple again; and she rested her elbows on the table’s edge and took her cheeks between her hands.
“Trouble?” she repeated, studying his face. “I don’t know that word, trouble. I don’t admit such a word to the honour of my happy vocabulary.”