"No; bothering you into an engagement—which is sometimes a serious affair, but not always fatal," he said frankly. "Come, Miss Kitty, don't be hard on me! It's not much to ask——"
"Oh, isn't it?" interjected Kitty with fine irony. "Thank you. Captain Barnard."
"If you were in love with me—absurd idea, of course! but I'm just putting the case—I'd come and sit with you and give you any amount of chances."
Kitty heard her father's returning footsteps, and she stood up and looked from side to side, and then at this meekly audacious young man, with a mixture of astonishment and bewilderment—and something else I cannot define—in her really wonderful eyes.
"Well, of all the cool——" she said again. But he cut her short.
"That's all right," he said breathlessly; "thank you ever so much. Your father's coming. I'm to be here at eleven o'clock every morning."
"And you think," said Kitty, as hurriedly, "that, by simply sitting here and regarding you in that absurd attitude, I shall fall in——?"
"Oh, no; not at all. Fortune will have pity on me and give me an opportunity for seeing you for a minute or two alone. Besides, perhaps—I only say perhaps, mind!—you might be induced to lunch at an A.B.C. shop," he jerked out in a rapid whisper, as the innocent parent returned with his yellow ochre.