"How should you like to work with letters and signs instead of figures? By the way, Miss Faith, your sevens are too much like your nines, and if you drew a check for $500 with that five, you might find yourself paying out $800."
She coloured again, but bowed her head in assent, quite ignoring in her interest in the subject the extravagance of the supposition by which he illustrated it.
"You shall not say that again, Mr. Linden."
"Don't pledge yourself for me," he said smiling,—"I am a lawless kind of person, as perhaps you have found out. But if I were to spend one minute well on the first day of the year, and each succeeding day add to my well-spent minutes so many more as the year was days old—how much of December would be well spent?"
But Faith could not tell.
"You see what is before you—" Mr. Linden said; "you must work that out, Miss Faith, in more ways than one. Well tell me this—Which is nearest to us now,—my sister Pet or the Khan of Tartary,—supposing her in Rome and him in his own dominions?"
Faith coloured again, a good deal, and with some sorrow.
"I am glad you asked me," she said;—"I want you should know it,—but I don't know anything about that, Mr. Linden. I know a little, of course," she said correcting herself, "but I couldn't answer you."
"But why can't you understand," he said looking at her, "that I am just some old, torn, dog-eared book of questions that you are looking into for the first time? I don't like to be made to feel like a bran new schoolbook."
Faith looked at him, and probably the words "old, torn, and dog-eared" made a peculiar contrast, for her eye flashed and in spite of everything she laughed, her musical little laugh.