"Mr. Renault?"
"Madam?"
She picked up her plumed fan impatiently and snapped it open.
"If you don't stop being meek and answering 'Madam' I shall presently go distracted. Call me something else—anything—just to see how we like it. Tell me, do you know my first name?"
"Elsin," I said softly, and to my astonishment a faint, burning sensation stung my cheeks, growing warmer and warmer. I think she was astonished, too, for few men at twenty-three could color up in those days; and there was I, a hardened New Yorker of four years' adoption, turning pink like a great gaby at a country fair when his sweetheart meets him at the ginger bower!
To cover my chagrin I nodded coolly, repeating her name with a critical air—"Elsin," I mused, outwardly foppish, inwardly amazed and mad—"Elsin—um! ah!—very pretty—very unusual," I added, with a patronizing nod.
She did not resent it; when at last I made bold to meet her gaze it was pensive and serene, yet I felt somehow that her innocent blue eyes had taken my measure as a man—and not to my advantage.
"Your name is not a usual one," she said. "When I first heard it from Sir Peter I laughed."
"Why?" I said coldly.
"Why? Oh, I don't know, Mr. Renault! It sounded so very young—Carus Renault—it sounds so young and guileless——"