“Oh, thank you!” she cried, radiantly. “If you had not believed me I don’t think I could have borne to stay at Verelands. How good you are! But I remember that you were just as kind to me when I was a little child. You saved my life. I feel so grateful to you for that!” He did not understand why he should feel that odd pique because she was talking to him so freely, so gratefully, so unrestrainedly, as if he were a hundred years old. Something made him say, daringly: “Do you remember how you crept into my arms and kissed me the first day we met? You said you loved me, and fed me peppermint drops. Mr. Hinton said then that you were a little flirt.” Her cheeks were pink as roses, and she removed the little hand from his arm in a furtive way. “I remember that I was very fond of you,” she said, with a smile; but she did not meet his questioning glance. “How forward I must have seemed to you!” she added, constrainedly. “No, indeed,” he began; but Thea was glad not to hear any more of his reminiscences, for Mrs. de Vere entered very opportunely at that moment, and the girl went to a seat where she sat in silence, furtively studying that darkly handsome face, and wishing he had not remembered she had made love to him when she was a mere baby. CHAPTER XXXV. After that first night, Norman de Vere found no occasion for unconscious pique at Thea’s sisterly frankness toward him. By the next morning her manner had changed indefinably. It had developed into a pretty dignity that just escaped shyness, and was almost reserve. She tacitly avoided her handsome guardian and clung to his mother with all the tenderness of a daughter. But he knew that for the first week or two she was engaged about half her time in reading his own works, for his mother had come herself to the library for them. “Sweetheart is so anxious to read them, but she would not come herself lest she should disturb you,” she said. “Good little girl!” her son muttered, dryly, and went on with his scribbling; but more than once that day he wondered if Thea was reading his books, and how she liked them. “But I shall not ask her, since she is so silly as to pretend to be afraid of me,” he thought, severely; and tried to dismiss her from his mind, chafing to himself at the persistency with which her image came between him and his work. Why should the blue eyes haunt him so when they scarcely saw each other save at the table, for he spent half of his time in his library, the other half walking or riding unsociably by himself, with now and then an evening at the Author’s Club or theater. Thea and his mother rode a great deal, too, but it was always in the elder lady’s two-seated pony-phaeton, which she drove herself. There was only room for two, and in any case Mrs. de Vere would not have asked him to make one of the party. She vaguely felt that Norman was not to be annoyed for the sake of a simple school-girl who seemed to him a mere child.