“Well, I’ll talk some more about you, if you’ll give me a little time to think.”
“I think you are very impertinent. I don’t wish to talk about myself. Just because I asked your advice in my difficulties, you assume that I’m a little egoist—”
“Oh, please don’t—”
“Don’t interrupt. I’m very much offended, and I’m glad we are never going to meet. Just as I was beginning to like you, too,” she added, with malice. “Good-bye!”
“Good-bye,” he answered mournfully.
But his attentive ears failed to discern the sound of departing footsteps. The breeze whispered in the tree-tops. A sulphur-yellow bird, of French extraction, perched in a flowering bush, insistently demanded: “Qu’est-ce qu’il dit? Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?”—What’s he say? What’s he say?—over and over again, becoming quite wrathful because neither he nor any one else offered the slightest reply or explanation. The girl sympathized with the bird. If the particular he whose blond top she could barely see by peeping over the rock would only say something, matters would be easier for her. But he didn’t. So presently, in a voice of suspiciously saccharine meekness, she said:—
“Please, Mr. Beetle Man, I’m lost.”
“No, you’re not,” he said reassuringly. “You’re not a quarter of a mile from the Puerto del Norte Road.”
“But I don’t know which direction—”
“Perfectly simple. Keep on over the top of the rock; turn left down the slope, right up the dry stream bed to a dead tree; bear right past—”