Page:Herbert Jenkins - The Rain Girl.djvu/39

 She nodded brightly. "In some countries the rain is looked upon almost as a god."

"I suppose it's a matter of whether it gives you vegetables or rheumatism," he said as he lighted a second cigarette.

She looked up quickly; then, with a little gurgling laugh, she nodded.

"In any case I like to sit and listen to it," she said, "and I love tramping in the rain."

Beresford regarded her curiously. What a queer sort of girl and what eyes, they were wonderful. Behind their limpid and serious greyness there lurked a something that puzzled him. They held wonderful possibilities.

"Personally I think less of the rain than of my own comfort," he confessed.

"Auntie always says that I'm a little mad," she said with the air of one desiring to be just. "Sometimes she omits the 'little.'"

"That's rather like my Aunt Caroline," he said, "she holds the same view about me. She calls me a fool. It amounts to the same thing. Directness is her strong point."

"I suppose we all appear a little mad to our friends," said the Rain-Girl with a smile.

"Aunt Caroline's not a friend, she's a relative," he hastened to explain.

The girl smiled as she gazed at the spiral of smoke rising from her cigarette.

"I'm always a little sorry for outraged relatives," she said.