"Not to-day," said Dolly.
"Why not to-day? I can get the gate opened."
"You forget it is Sunday, Mr. St. Leger."
"I do not forget it," said he, throwing himself down on the bank beside her. "I came here to have the day with you. It's a holiday. Mr. Copley keeps a fellow awfully busy other days, if one has the good fortune to be his secretary. I remember particularly well that it is Sunday. What about it? Can't a fellow have it, now he has got it?"
The blue eyes were looking with a surprised sort of complaint in them, yet not wholly discontented, at Dolly. How could they be discontented? So fair an object to rest upon and so curiosity-provoking too, as she was. Dolly's advantages were not decked out at all; she was dressed in a simple white gown; and there were none of the formalities of fine ladyism about her; a very plain little girl; and yet, Lawrence was not far wrong when he thought her the fairest thing his eyes had ever seen. Her eyes had such a mingling of the childlike and the wise; her hair curled in such an artless, elegant way about her temples and in her neck; the neck itself had such a pretty set and carriage, the figure was so graceful in its girlish outlines; and above all, her manner had such an inexplicable combination of the utterly free and the utterly unapproachable. Lawrence lay thinking all this, or part of it; Dolly was thinking how she should dispose of him. She could not well say anything that would directly seem to condemn her father. And while she was thinking what answer she should make, Lawrence had forgot his question.
"Do you like this park?" he began on another tack.
"Oh, more than I can tell you! It is perfect. It is magnificent. There is nothing like it in all America. At least, I never saw anything like it there."
"Why not?" said Lawrence. "I mean, why is there not anything like this there?"
Then Dolly's face dimpled all up in one of its expressions of extreme sense of fun.
"We are not old enough," she said. "You know when these trees were young, our land was filled with the red men, and overgrown with forests."