Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-70.djvu/94

84 Hilliard leaned back and clasped his dexterous brown fingers about his knee.

"That sounds very nice," he said. "I'm not in the habit of having people take fancies to me, so I particularly like the idea. I suppose it happens to you all the time, doesn't it? Do you get tired after a while?"

She looked at him with the same weary indifference. "You are quite wrong," she responded. "I am not that kind at all. People like the house sometimes and papa sometimes, but me—I am not by the way of inspiring liking."

"Don't you want people to like you?" returned the young man. "I thought all women wanted that, even when they weren't prepared to give anything in return. Now, with you and me, for instance, I should have ignorantly believed that it would have entertained and amused you for me to fall head over heels in love with your blue eyes, or are they gray?" He smiled a curious, quizzical smile that softened the hawk-look in his face. She stared gravely at him without a drop of added color on her cheek.

"That is the most shamelessly flirtatious remark I've heard tonight," she said. "But it's only a sham. You aren't that kind, really. Confess it. I have some instinct, and I'm not nineteen."

Hilliard broke into his unexpectedly merry laugh. "Dear me," he answered, "it's hard to be called down so early in the evening, but if you will have the truth, I am not that way inclined as a rule, and I don't go in for talking to women about their eyes, but yours are—well, they took my fancy."

If I keep at it, he thought, I shall get there.

"You are just the right kind of man to show the garden to, aren't you?" She rose. "You will make the lanterns and music seem not quite wasted, and yet to look at you" She stuck her small chin up a little with a cool impertinence, and gave a faint smile, the first he had seen.

"To look at me," retorted Hilliard, standing beside her and looking down—a long way down—from his height to the slender, graceful figure, "to look at me you would not say I was the man for a stroll in the moonlight. Quite true, and yet haven't you learned, my dear young lady, that ugly men with sharp eyes and hook noses have ten times the capacity for passion that your handsome, blue-eyed lad can boast?"

Miss Bagehot looked at him with a spark of animation in her eyes. "Learned," she answered. "I haven't had a chance to learn anything in life but how to write notes and fix flowers! Come, we will go outside," and turning abruptly, she led the way into the garden.

Hilliard felt himself sliding off into fairyland. The light streamed