"Good for you! That's because you work too hard at your old history of music."—By this time each knew all the details of the other's research—"You ought to have somebody right at hand to make you take vacations and have a good time once in a while. You're too conscientious."
Then, because he was quite frank and unconscious himself, he went on with a simplicity which the most accomplished actor could not have counterfeited, "That's what I'm always telling Maggie—Miss Warner. She's the girl I'm engaged to."
He did not at the time remark, but afterward, in another land, he was to recall with startling vividness the quick flash of her clear eyes upon him and the fluttering droop of her eyelids. She finished her éclair quietly, remarking, "So you are engaged?"
"Very much so," answered Harrison, leaning his back against the pine-tree and closing his eyes, more completely to savor the faint fragrance of new life which rose about them in the warm spring air, like unseen incense.
Miss Midland stood up, shaking the crumbs from her skirt, and began fitting her gloves delicately upon her slim and very white hands. After a pause, "But how would she like this?" she asked.
Without opening his eyes, Harrison murmured, "She'd like it fine. She's a great girl for outdoors."
His companion glanced down at him sharply, but in his tranquil and half-somnolent face there was no trace of evasiveness. "I don't mean the park, the spring weather," she went on, with a persistence which evidently cost her an effort. "I mean your being here with another girl. That would make an English woman jealous."
Harrison opened his dark eyes wide and looked at her in surprise. "You don't understand—we're not flirting with each other, Maggie and I—we're engaged." He added with an air of proffering a self-evident explanation, "As good as married, you know."
Miss Midland seemed to find in the statement a great deal of material for meditation, for after an "Ah!" which might mean anything, she sat down on the other side of the tree, leaning her blonde head against its trunk and staring up into the thick green branches. Somewhere near them in an early-flowering yellow shrub a bee droned softly. After a time she remarked as if to herself, "They must take marriage very seriously in Iowa."
The young man aroused himself, to answer sleepily: "It's Illinois where I live now—Iowa was where I grew up—but it's all the same. Yes, we do."