"I don't care what they say."
"If I weren't an old friend," she returned with crooked lip, "you might be made to care. I have brought the money you were kind enough to lend me; I'll give it you when I have unpacked—to-morrow night."
My body sank into a stillness that might well have betrayed its mind's confusion to a close observer. Had she lingered satirically, meaningly, on those two last words? "I don't want the money, Fanny: aren't you generous enough to accept a gift?"
"Well," said she, "it needs a good deal of generosity sometimes. Surely, a gift depends upon the spirit in which it is given. That last little message, now—was that, shall we say, an acceptable gift?" Her tones lost their silkiness. "See here, Midgetina," she went on harshly, "you and I are going to talk all this out. But I'm thirsty. I hate this spawning sun. Where are the nectarines?"
Much against my will I turned my back on her, and led her off to the beehives.
"One for you," she said, stooping forward, balancing the sheeny toe of her shoe on the brown mould, "and the rest for me. Catch!" She dropped a wasp-bitten, pulpy fruit into my hands. "Now then. It's shadier here. No eavesdroppers. Just you and me and God. Please sit down?"
There was no choice. Down I sat; and she on a low wooden seat opposite me in the shade, her folded parasol beside her, the leaf-hung wall behind. She bit daintily into the juicy nectarine poised between finger and thumb, and watched me with a peculiar fixed smile, as if of admiration, on her pale face.
"Tell me, pretty Binbin," she began again, "what is the name of that spiked red and blue and violet thing behind your back? It colours the edges of your delicate china cheeks. Most becoming!"
It was viper's bugloss—a stray, I told her, shifting my head uneasily beneath her scrutiny.
"Ah, yes, viper's bugloss. Personally I prefer the common variety. Though no doubt that may stray, too. But fie, fie! You naughty thing," she sprang up and plucked another nectarine, "you have been blacking your eyebrows. I shouldn't have dreamt it of you. What would mother say?"