Page:The Tsar's Window.djvu/168

 there are two hours before we need to start. I want you to tell me something."

There was a strange excitement in her tone, and her eyes were unusually large and bright. I looked at her in silence. My cousin laughed softly.

"Don't look so alarmed," taking my lamp from me, and setting it down ruthlessly on a bunch of artificial sunflowers which I had spent one hour in arranging.

"There! You have ruined them!" I exclaimed, indignantly rescuing my flowers. "And I have no others to wear."

She took them gently away from me.

"I am so sorry, dear. But see,—I will make them all right. Don't be cross with me!"

"You are so impulsive!" I sighed. "If you had only stopped to look, you would have seen the flowers."

"Of course I should; but I did not look. They are as good as new now; so don't fix your black eyes on me any longer with that reproachful look."

She put a hand on each of my shoulders, and looked down on me fondly from her superior height.

"Listen. Suppose, if you can—suppose you were in love!"

"Well?" I said, after a brief pause, during which she never removed her eyes from mine. "I am willing to suppose it. What then?"

"What then?" she repeated in rather a puzzled tone, turning away and seating herself on an ottoman. "Well, what then? Sure enough," looking at me again, and laughing.