Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/427

 "Not if I could run faster than the person who was trying to teach me!" he confessed helplessly.

The girl broke into another laugh. There never was anybody who laughed like that, with her lips, and her gleaming, dancing eyes, and her eyebrows—even her hands had a droll little gesture of delightedly giving him up. What in the world had ever made him imagine that her expression was pensive or her eyes wistful?

"Do you mind?" he asked, rather uncertain what she was laughing at, and hoping it was not at him.

"Oh, I like it!" she told him, heartily. "But it's the very first time I ever ran into it. It makes me laugh, it's so unexpected."

"Well, it has its disadvantages," he broke in, seeing an opening to say something that had been on his conscience for two days. "It makes you do all sorts of unusual and unconventional things without meaning to at all. Like my talking to you yesterday morning, for instance, in the corridor of the pension, when I hadn't been introduced to you."

She stopped laughing, her face all blank with surprise. "Why, that was not unconventional! People at the same pension never wait for introductions. And anyhow I'm not a jeune fille du monde. I'm just a music-student. If you only knew how some people try to take advantage of that! Why, what in the world made you think it was not all right?"

"Well, when you didn't say anything about it at the breakfast table, when Miss Oldham introduced us, the way you looked as though you'd never seen me before. I thought you—I thought I—well, why didn't you mention we'd just been talking?"

"Oh—" She remembered the incident. "Why didn't I? Why should I? You always hide what you don't have to tell, don't you?"

Neale pondered this negligent axiom for a time, and then said hesitatingly, "But if the servants happened to mention it?"

"Oh," she explained quickly, as if mentioning something that went without saying, "oh, of course I told the servants not to speak of it."