"Then why in the world didn't you telegraph me?"
"As if I would!" exclaimed Miss Elliston with an indignant sniff.
"That was the arrangement, you know."
"Oh, good gracious, hear the man! What a coarse, masculine mind you have, my ownest! You call yourself an interpreter of human character, but what do you really know of the maiden of bashful twenty-six? Nothing!"
"Well, well, my dear," said Harry easily, "have it your own way. I daresay it all turned out much better so. I was able to do up the Spanish churches thoroughly, and I had a lovely time in England. Just fancy, of all the hundreds of people I met there I can't think of a single one, from beginning to end, who said I had a coarse masculine mind."
"Brute," murmured Miss Elliston, apparently to Harry's back collar button.
"I suppose," she observed, jumping up a little later, "that you were really right in the beginning. That first evening, you know."
"Oh, I'm quite sure of it. How?"
"When you said I couldn't talk that way to you without being in love with you. I expect I really was, though the time hadn't come for admitting it, even to myself. In fact, I was so passionately in love with you that I couldn't bear to talk about it or even think about it, for fear of some mistake. If I kept it all to myself, you see, no harm could ever have been done."