Amber stared at her. Her face was almost flushed with the vehemence of her words, and there was a strange sparkle in her eyes. Amber stared at this inexplicable display of feeling. She wondered what on earth had come over her friend Josephine, and had opened her mouth to say so, when Josephine prevented her speaking. “Now, don’t say--what you’re going to say,” she cried, lifting up both her hands in an exaggerated attitude of protest which, however, but imperfectly concealed the increased flush upon her face. “Don’t say that I’m an idiot, my beloved girl, because I happen to have--to have taken an unaccountable dislike to your Mr. Winwood. I haven’t--I give you my word I haven’t in reality--as a matter of fact I think that I could almost like him, if I did not--that is to say, _if_ I did not--do the other thing. There you are now.” “What’s the other thing?” asked Amber. “Good gracious! what’s the opposite to liking a man?” “Loving a man,” cried Amber. Josephine’s flush vanished. It was her turn to stare. She stared as a cold search-light stares. Then she said coldly: “I dislike your Mr. Winwood--I--I--I wonder if I don’t actually hate him. Yes, I feel that I must actually hate him or I shouldn’t be looking forward to meeting him so eagerly as I do. That’s the truth for you, my dear Amber--the truth--whatever that may mean.” “I wish you were not coming on Friday,” said Amber, after a long, thoughtful and embarrassing pause. “So do I. But I swear to you that nothing shall prevent my lunching with you on Friday,” cried Josephine. And then after a moment of gravity which Amber thought might be simulated in a kind of spirit of parody of her own gravity, Josephine burst out laughing and then hurried away. Amber felt completely puzzled by her attitude. She did not know what to make of her flushing--of her frowning--of her pouting--least of all of her outburst of laughter. She thought over what Josephine had said; but, of course, that was no assistance to her. If one cannot arrive at any satisfactory interpretation of a girl’s flushing and frowning and laughing one is not helped forward to any appreciable extent by recalling her words. Amber wished with all her heart that her father had not suggested to her the asking of Josephine to this confidential little lunch which he had projected. CHAPTER XIV If Josephine came with great reluctance to lunch with her dearest friend because of her precipitate dislike to Mr. Winwood, she was of course sufficiently a woman of the world to avoid betraying in any way that might cause her friend to feel uncomfortable, her antipathy to him--perhaps antipathy was too strong a word to _think_, Amber thought; but she felt that if she did Josephine an injustice in letting so strong a word come into her mind in this connection, the mystic manner--the absurd and inexplicable contradictoriness of Josephine was alone accountable for it.