“And to philander? Do you deny it?”
“Deny it. Odzooks, yes! ’Tis the last thing I have in my mind,” I rapped out mighty short. “I have done with women and their follies. I begin to see why men of sense prefer to keep their freedom.”
“Do you, Kenn? And was the other lady so hard on you? Did she make you pay for our follies? Poor Kenn!” laughed my mocking tormentor with so sudden a change of front that I was quite nonplussed. “And did you think I did not know my rakehelly lover Sir Robert better than to blame you for his quarrels?”
I breathed freer. She had taken the wind out of my sails, for I had come purposing to give her a large piece of my mind. Divining my intention, womanlike she had created a diversion by carrying the war into the country of the enemy.
She looked winsome in the extreme. Little dimples ran in and out her peach-bloom cheeks. In her eyes danced a kind of innocent devilry, and the alluring mouth was the sweetest Cupid’s bow imaginable. Laughter rippled over her face like the wind in golden grain. Mayhap my eyes told what I was thinking, for she asked in a pretty, audacious imitation of the Scotch dialect Aileen was supposed to speak,
“Am I no’ bonny, Kenneth?”
“You are that, ’Toinette.”
“But you love her better?” she said softly.
I told her yes.
“And yet——” She turned and began to pull a honeysuckle to pieces, pouting in the prettiest fashion conceivable.