"You can't possibly imagine her effect on me. I'm not a man."
"But won't you take anything—about her—from me? You know I'm really not a fool—not even very impressionable."
"Oh, no!" she said impatiently, "no—of course not."
"Pray, why?"
"There are other things to reckon with." She looked coldly beyond him out of the window. "A man's intelligence when he is in love—how far can one count on it?"
There was nothing but silence for that or perhaps the murmured "Oh, I don't agree," with which Lindsay met it. He rode down her logic with a simple appeal. "Then after all," he said, "you're not my friend."
It goaded her into something like an impertinence. "After you have married her," she said, "you'll see."
"You will be hers then," he declared.
"I will be yours." Her eyes leaped along the prospect and rested on a brass-studded Tartar shield at the other end of the room.
"And I thought you broad in these views," Lindsay said, glancing at her curiously. Her opportunity for defense was curtailed by a heavy step in the hall, and the lifted portière disclosed Surgeon-Major Livingstone, looking warm. He, whose other name was the soul of hospitality, made a profound and feeling remonstrance against Lindsay's going before tiffin, though Alicia, doing something to a bowl of nasturtiums, did not hear it. Not that her added protest would have detained Lindsay, who took his perturbations away with him as quickly as might be. Alicia saw the cloud upon him as he shook hands with her, and found it but slightly consoling to reflect that his sun would without doubt re-emerge in all effulgence on the other side of the door.