She thanked him mockingly for the promise, watching him from amused eyes. After a moment she said:
"I ought to arise and go forth with timbrels and with dances; but, do you know, I am not inclined to revels? There has been a little—just a very little bit too much festivity so far. . . . Not that I don't adore dinners and gossip and dances; not that I do not love to pervade bright and glittering places. Oh, no. Only—I—"
She looked shyly a moment at Selwyn: "I sometimes feel a curious desire for other things. I have been feeling it all day."
"What things?"
"I—don't know—exactly; substantial things. I'd like to learn about things. My father was the head of the American School of Archæology in Crete. My mother was his intellectual equal, I believe—"
Her voice had fallen as she spoke. "Do you wonder that physical pleasure palls a little at times? I inherit something besides a capacity for dancing."
He nodded, watching her with an interest and curiosity totally new.
"When I was ten years old I was taken abroad for the winter. I saw the excavations in Crete for the buried city which father discovered near Præsos. We lived for a while with Professor Flanders in the Fayum district; I saw the ruins of Kahun, built nearly three thousand years before the coming of Christ; I myself picked up a scarab as old as the ruins! . . . Captain Selwyn—I was only a child of ten; I could understand very little of what I saw and heard, but I have never, never forgotten the happiness of that winter! . . . And that is why, at times, pleasures tire me a little; and a little discontent creeps in. It is ungrateful and ungracious of me to say so, but I did wish so much to go to college—to have something to care for—as mother cared for father's work. Why, do you know that my mother accidentally discovered the thirty-seventh sign in the Karian Signary?"
"No," said Selwyn, "I did not know that." He forbore to add that he did not know what a Signary resembled or where Karia might be.
Miss Erroll's elbow was on her knee, her chin resting within her open palm.