Page:Watch and Ward (Boston, Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1878).djvu/75

72 Round here you 're all stuck fast in ten feet of varnish. For yourself, Nora, at bottom you 're all right; but superficially you 're just a trifle overstarched. But we'll take it out of you! It comes of living with a stiff-necked—"

Nora bent for a moment her lustrous eyes on the young man, as if to recall him to order. "I beg you to understand, once for all," she said, "that I refuse to listen to disrespectful allusions to Roger."

"I 'll say it again, just to make you look at me so. If I ever fall in love with you, it will be when you are scolding me. All I have got to do is to attack your papa—"

"He is not my papa. I have had one papa; that 's enough. I say it in all respect."

"If he is not your papa, what is he? He is a dog in the manger. He must be either one thing or the other. When you are very little older, you will understand that."

"He may be whatever thing you please. I shall be but one,—his best friend."

Fenton laughed with a kind of fierce hilarity. "You are so innocent, my dear, that one does n't know where to take you. Do you expect to marry him?"

Nora stopped in the path, with her eyes on her cousin. For a moment he was half confounded by their startled severity and the flush of pain in her cheek. "Marry Roger!" she said, with great gravity.

"Why, he 's a man, after all!"

Nora was silent a moment; and then with a certain forced levity, walking on: "I had better wait till I am asked."