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 The first time he had been aware of this queer twist in her was one day last April, when he had interrupted her, to admire a group of birch trees on the marshy edge of a river. The birch trees were just coming into leaf. Their branches shone white and bare through a haze of faint green.

'Aren't they exquisite?' he had exclaimed—'Like young girls in thin green gauze, wading.'

He thought it rather a pretty idea. But her reply had left him in no doubt as to her difference of opinion.

'You don't talk a bit like a lawyer. More like a lady-novelist,' she had retorted.

It had chilled him for a moment, but later he concluded that a little healthy intolerance of his nonsense would prove a good thing for him in the long run, and Cicely wasn't always intolerant of it, he observed. For instance, when later that same April day he had playfully likened her to a pansy—a big rich black pansy, with her soft, sooty-black eyes, and soft, sooty-black hair, and voice smooth as a velvet petal, she had flushed with pleasure, and hadn't said he talked like a lady-novelist.

That flush of pleasure had surprised Roger Dallinger. It had pleased him, too. He had supposed Cicely Morgan was as indifferent to his absurdities as the very flowers he likened her to. It had em-