“Well, he should make verses to you and pretty speeches. He should sing serenades about undying love under your window. Bonbons should bombard you, roses make your rooms a bower. He should be ardent as Romeo, devoted as a knight of old. These be the signs of a true love,” she laughed.
Frances’ face fell. If these were the tokens of true love, her ranger was none. For not one of the symptoms could fairly be said to fit him. Perhaps, after all, she had given him what he did not want.
“Must he do all that? Must he make verses?” she asked blankly, not being able to associate Bucky with poetasting.
“He must,” teased her tormentor, running a saucy eye over her boyish garb. “And why not with so fair a Rosalind for a subject?” She broke off to quote in her pretty, uncertain English, acquired at a convent in the United States, where she had attended school:
“From the east to western Ind,
No jewel is like Rosalind.
Her worth being mounted on the wind,
Through all the world bears Rosalind.
All the pictures, fairest lin’d,
Are but black to Rosalind.
Let no face be kept in mind
But the fair of Rosalind.”
“So your Shakespeare has it, does he not?” she asked, reverting again to the Spanish language, in which they had been talking. But swift on the heels of her raillery came repentance. She caught the dispirited girl to her embrace laughingly. “No, no, child! Nonsense ripples from my tongue. These follies are but for a carpet lover. You shall tell me more of your Señor Bucky and I shall make no sport of it.”
When Bucky returned at the expiration of the time he had set himself, he found them with their arms twined about each other’s waists, whispering the confidences that every girl on the threshold of womanhood has to tell her dearest friend.
“I reckon you like my pardner better than you do me,” smiled Bucky to Miss Carmencita.
“A great deal better, sir, but then I know him better.”
Bucky’s eyes rested for a moment almost tenderly on Frances. “I reckon he is better worth knowing,” he said.