She had backed away a little distance from him, looking at him
under brows bent slightly inward, and thinking that she had made no
mistake in her memory of this man. Certainly his features were
altogether too regular, his head and body too perfectly moulded
into that dark and graceful symmetry which she had hitherto vaguely
associated with things purely and mythologically Olympian.
Upright against the doorway, she suddenly recollected with a blush
that she was staring like a schoolgirl, and sat down. And he drew
up a chair before her and seated himself; and then under the
billowy rose crinoline she set her pretty feet close together,
folded her hands, and looked at him with a smiling composure which
she no longer really felt.
"The weather," she repeated, "is unusually warm. Do you think that
Major Anderson will hold out at Sumter? Do you think the fleet is
going to relieve him? Dear me," she sighed, "where will it all
end, Mr. Berkley?"
"In war," he said, also smiling; but neither of them believed it,
or, at the moment, cared. There were other matters
impending--since their first encounter.
"I have thought about you a good deal since Camilla's theatre
party," he said pleasantly.
"Have you?" She scarcely knew what else to say--and regretted
saying anything.
"Indeed I have. I dare not believe you have wasted as much as one
thought on the man you danced with once--and refused ever after."
She felt, suddenly, a sense of uneasiness in being near him.
"Of course I have remembered you, Mr. Berkley," she said with
composure. "Few men dance as well. It has been an agreeable
memory to me."
"But you would not dance with me again."
"I--there were--you seemed perfectly contented to sit out--the
rest--with me."
He considered the carpet attentively. Then looking up with quick,
engaging smile:
"I want to ask you something. May I?"
She did not answer. As it had been from the first time she had
ever seen him, so it was now with her; a confused sense of the
necessity for caution in dealing with a man who had inspired in her
such an unaccountable inclination to listen to what he chose to say.
"What is it you wish to ask?" she inquired pleasantly.
"It is this: are you really surprised that I came? Are you, in
your heart?"
"Did I appear to be very much agitated? Or my heart, either, Mr.
Berkley?" she asked with a careless laugh, conscious now of her
quickening pulses. Outwardly calm, inwardly Irresolute, she faced
him with a quiet smile of confidence.