"Then," I said by and by, "why aren't you bicycling--or walking--this
afternoon?" I wanted to have the position quite clear. If she could
spend three days with him in succession, why not a fourth, and a fifth,
and a sixth?
"I had to give that note to you," she said.
"Ah, the note! I forgot that.... Have you any idea what's in it?"
She blushed crimson, flamed with reproach. All the same, I contrasted
her shameless deception of her parents with this point of honour about
peeping into an unsealed note to myself. These heaven-born young
beauties draw the line in such odd places.
"I never thought----", she said, biting her lip; and I hastened to set
her right.
"Good heavens, Jennie, you can't think that I meant _that_! I meant in a
general way, what the subject of it is."
"I know what he thinks," she said, the fierce colour slowly retiring
again.
"Well, what does he think?"
"He thinks you were perfectly ripping to him the other night, about not
doing anything till you saw him again, and when I told him you were ill
he was awfully upset, and tore a page out of his sketch-book and wrote
the note that very moment."
The devil!... But I went on.
"So he was sketching, and you went with him?"
"Yes. He did a sweet sketch, with me in it," she breathed, her eyes
softly shining.
Only to see her and to go for bicycle-rides with her--only to speak to
her and to paint her among the glowing sarrasin, the green translucence
of the woods, the golden seaweed of the rocks or wherever it was----
"Oh, he did! And where was this?"
It was neither among the sarrasin, nor in the green woods, nor on the
shore.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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