That was what she actually said; but what those eloquent, innocent eyes seemed to say was, "Can you read what we have to tell you? Don't you know what a simple and confiding soul appeals to you?—clear as the daylight in its truth. Cannot you look through us and see the trusting, tender soul within?"
"Perhaps we had better wait for Colonel Ross," said he; and there was a little pronoun in this sentence that he would like to have repeated. It was a friendly word. It established a sort of secret companionship. It is the proud privilege of a man to know all about railway tickets; but he rather preferred this association with her helpless innocence and ignorance.
"I had no idea you were coming to-day. I rather like those surprise parties. Mrs. Ross never thought of going until last evening, she says. Oh, by the way, I saw you in the theatre last evening."
He almost started. He had quite forgotten that this self-possessed, clear-eyed, pale girl was the madcap coquette whose caprices and griefs had alternately fascinated and moved him on the previous evening.
"Oh indeed," he stammered. "It was a great pleasure to me—and a surprise. Lieutenant Ogilvie played a trick on me. He did not tell me before we went that—that you were to appear."
She looked amused.
"You did not know, then, when we met at Mrs. Ross's that I was engaged at the Piccadilly Theatre?"
"Not in the least," he said, earnestly, as if he wished her distinctly to understand that he could not have imagined such a thing to be possible.
"You should have let me send you a box. We have another piece in rehearsal. Perhaps you will come to see that."
Now if these few sentences, uttered by those two young people in the noisy railway station, be taken by themselves and regarded, they will be found to consist of the dullest commonplace. No two strangers in all that crowd could have addressed each other in a more indifferent fashion. But the trivial nothings which the mouth utters may become possessed of awful import when accompanied by the language of the eyes; and the poor commonplace sentences may be taken up and translated so that they shall stand written across the memory in letters of flashing sunlight and the colors of June. "Ought we to take tickets?" There was not much poetry in the phrase but she lifted her eyes just then.