Page:Keeping the Peace.pdf/234

 Alice? "Why," he thought, "she treated me as if we were meeting for the first time and she didn't care if it was the last."

But he comforted himself with the thought that the next day he would ask her what he had done to offend her and keep on asking until she gave him the answer.

They spent nearly the whole of the next day in the Louvre. Their intention to tackle the paintings first, then the statuary and then the odds and ends from Charlemagne's sword to the snuff-box of Napoleon fell by the wayside; for they ran plump into the Venus of Milo and had to sit down on a bench and look at her for a long time. Then the Victory of Samothrace held them spellbound and they went out to luncheon without having looked at any paintings at all. And it was not until then that Edward asked her why she was so changed toward him and what it was that he had done to offend her.

"Why, Eddie," she said, and there was a kind of pitying look in her eyes, "I haven't exactly changed. I love you better than almost anybody and always will, but—well, girls are funny animals. If you'd stayed around Westchester maybe we'd have run away or done something foolish like that; but you didn't stay around and after a while