“I _was_ thinking about you,” she admitted. “I mean myself; I thought--I thought you weren’t at all like an Englishman!” Léon laughed gently. “What a discovery,” he said. “I am not like an Englishman--I! And did you want me to be? You are disappointed, perhaps?” The wonderful pink color deepened in her face. “No,” she said, “I am not a bit disappointed--I like people to be different.” “Thank you, Mademoiselle,” he said with sudden gravity. “You relieve me very much, for that is one thing I could not change for you--I could not be less a Frenchman.” Still she did not begin her sketch. “You are tired?” he asked her. “Rest then, and don’t trouble to make a picture on that little strip of canvas. Nothing you can do there will, I assure you, be half as successful as what you are doing, by just sitting where you are.” She was sure he was flirting now, but what she wasn’t sure was how to stop it. She wondered if Edith or Agatha knew, but it flashed across her in a terrible moment of disloyalty that perhaps neither of them had ever been put to the proof. “I don’t think you ought to say that kind of thing--” she said a little uncomfortably. “But why not?” Léon urged. “Why do you not wish me to take pleasure in your beauty? And if I take it, would it not be rude and ungracious not to express it? For my part I believe only in the truth. If it is agreeable--good! Let us enjoy it. If it is disagreeable, let us bear it. But why should we try to avoid it? Besides we can never avoid it. If we choose to shut our eyes to the truth it will take us by surprise. Is that the way you like to be taken, Mademoiselle?” Rose was not a stupid girl; she gave Léon a fleeting glance; there was just the delicate hint of laughter in it, her lips trembled at the upturned corners. “I don’t like being taken at all,” said Rose sedately, returning to her sketch. It occurred to her afterwards this was not, perhaps, the best way to stop flirting. They came back rather late for tea, but Mr. and Mrs. Pinsent were not at all uneasy about them. They didn’t look feverish and they hadn’t seen any savage Abruzzi dogs. CHAPTER III For a Frenchman of the type of Léon Legier there are a great many ways of being in love; there are also several goals. You needn’t, as he himself expressed it, finish the game in order to have received your entertainment. In the case of Rose Pinsent, Léon wasn’t at first very serious, he was out for the fine shades. He had never had an intimacy with an Englishwoman before. It was simply a nationality he didn’t know, and he found it touching. For her sake he led the Pinsents in compact and cheerful batches into unknown churches and gave them on unfrequented hillsides splendid Roman views. He never made a visible point of the few moments alone he managed to snatch with Rose. She took these moments with a certain unexacting grace which pleased him.