Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/20

 She never replied to this, either in agreement or denial.

"I'm crazy over you," he often declared hotly and he re-announced it now.

"About me too, Ket?" she asked him, looking up with her blue eyes serious at first and then twinkling with an amusement which made her lips doubly provoking.

Why did he waste so much time and thought on a twenty-five-a-week stenographer, he wondered, when she would offer him nothing and when other girls, as good looking and twice as swell, were waiting to give him all? He looked her over and tried to tell himself that she was just one more little blue-eyed, black-haired girl with a slender, pretty figure and a lively way; and that she was just "playing" him; nothing more; but he cried out, in spite of himself:

"There's not one in the bunch like you!" And after he had again admitted it, her unlikeness to the others stirred him the more.

It lay in the look of her steady, thoughtful eyes; it was in the shaping of her head, which was not merely pretty, but was very lovely in the line of her brow and in the modeling behind it. She had an exquisiteness which he encountered in no one else.

No other had hands like hers, so smooth and small-boned. Strong little hands, hers were, with a definite clasp in them, very pleasant to feel.

"Play it, Ket," she reminded him.

"What?" he asked; and he recollected and turned to his piano.

It was an instrument of the type denoted as baby grand and, like all the other furnishings of the room, it was new and of the best. Also, as the girl was thinking, although it had cost more than a thousand dollars, it undoubtedly had been paid for, as everything else in the flat had been paid for, in full and by cash.