"Have I?" Lightly, she laughed. "I probably have caught the habit from the sea. Environment does influence character, psychologists say."
"Nevertheless, you are not fickle."
"How do you know? Even if I were, to change one's mind is no crime," she went on in the same jesting tone. "The wind bloweth whither it listeth, and the good God does not condemn it for doing so."
"But you are not the wind."
"Perhaps I am," she flashed teasingly. "Or I may have inherited qualities from the sands that gave me birth. They are forever shifting."
"You haven't."
"You know an amazing amount about me, seems to me, considering the length of our acquaintance," she observed with a tantalizing smile.
"I do," was the grim retort. "I know more than you think—more, perhaps than you know yourself. Shall I hold the betraying mirror up before you?"
"The mirror of truth? God forbid! Who of us would dare face it?" she protested, still smiling but with genuine alarm. "Now do let me run along and send off the messages. I must not loiter here talking. You are forgetting that you're ill. The next you know your temperature will go up and Doctor Stetson will blame me."
"My temperature has gone up," growled Stanley Heath, turning his back on her and burying his face in the pillow with the touchiness of a small boy.