Page:The Wheel of Time, Collaboration, Owen Wingrave (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1893).djvu/74

66 still find—" She paused a moment, and he really hung upon her lips; there was such a charm of tone in whatever she said. "You'd still find, underneath, the blowzy girl—" With this she again checked herself and, slightly to his surprise, gave a nervous laugh.

"The blowzy girl?" he repeated, with an artlessness of interrogation that made her laugh again.

"Whom you went with that hot day to see the princess give the prizes."

"Oh yes—that dreadful day!" he answered, gravely, musingly, with the whole scene pictured by her words, and without contesting the manner in which she qualified herself. It was the nearest allusion that had passed between them to that crudest conception of his boyhood, his flight from Ennismore Gardens. Almost every day for a month he had come to see her, and they had talked of a thousand things; never yet, however, had they made any explicit mention of this remote instance of premature wisdom. Moreover, if he now felt the need of going back, it was not to