A Woman's Will Part 9

"How most American!"

She laughed a little.

"I amuse you?" he asked, with a look of pleased non-understanding.

"Oh, so very much!"

He came a little forward and smiled down at her.

"We are really friends, are we not?"

She looked into his big, earnest eyes.

"I think so," she answered simply, with a little nod.

He moved slowly across the room and, going to the window, turned his back upon her.

"It is cooler out now, let us go out and walk. I like to walk, and you do too, do you not? yes?"

"Oh, _please_ stop saying 'yes' like that, it makes me so horribly nervous."

He continued to look out of the window.

"Are you nervous?" he said. "I am sorry, because it is very bad to be nervous."

"I shall not be so if you will only cease tacking that 'yes' on to the end of every question that you find occasion to ask me."

"What is 'tacking'?" he asked, whirling around.

"Attaching."

"Why did you not p.r.o.nounce it plainly the first time?"

She rose slowly from her seat and retouched the violets where he had disturbed their carefully arranged disorder. He quitted the window and approached her side.

"I asked you to go out with me," he reminded her; "will you go? Yes?--I mean 'No'?" he added in hasty correction.

She bent above the flowers, just to see what he _would_ say next.

"Can you go to walk so," he inquired, "or shall I go down and wait while you undress?"

She straightened up.

"I can go out this way," she told him; "I have only to get my hat."

"And you will go now?"

"Yes, with pleasure."

"Is it long to get a hat? I will go down to wait for you, you know."

"It is five minutes."

"Is it really five minutes?" he asked anxiously; "or shall I be there very much longer?"

"If I say five minutes it will be five minutes."

He took his hat and cane in his left hand and extended the other to her with a smile.

"I will go and wait," he said.

She gave him her hand; he held it a minute, looking down into her eyes, which wavered and fell before his.

"_Comme vous etes charmante!_" he exclaimed in a low voice, and, bending, pressed a kiss (a most fervent one this time) upon the fingers which he raised within his own.

After which he left the room at once.

Rosina caught a quick breath as she went in to where her maid sat mending some lace.

"Get my things, Ottillie, I am going out."

"What a beautiful color madame has," Ottillie remarked, as she rose hastily and went towards the wardrobe.

Rosina looked at herself in the mirror. She was forced to smile at what she saw there, for the best cosmetic in the wide world is the knowledge that the right person is waiting downstairs.

"Do hurry, Ottillie," she said impatiently, "and get me out a pretty, a _very_ pretty, hat; do you hear?"

And then she felt with a glorious rush of joy how more than good life is when June is fair, and one is young, and--

"Where shall we walk?" he asked, when she came down to him.

"On the Quai, of course. No one ever walks anywhere else."

"I do often, and we did this morning," he replied, as they pa.s.sed out through the maze of tables and orange-trees that covered the terrace before the hotel.

"I should have said 'no one who is anybody.'"

He looked at her, a sadly puzzled trouble in his eyes.

"Is it a joke you make there," he asked, "or but your _argot_?"

"I don't know," she said, unfurling her parasol; "the question that I am putting to myself just now is, why did not you raise this for me instead of allowing me to do it for myself?"

He looked at her fixedly.

"Why should I do so? or is _that_ a joke?"

"No, I asked that in dead earnest."