"I'm dying to talk to you about the game-preserve----" "I can't; I'm not attired for a tete-a-tete with anything except my pillow." "Then put on one of those fetching affairs you wear sometimes----" "Oh, Scott, you are a nuisance!" When, a few moments later, she came into the library in a delicate shimmering thing and little slippers of the same elusive tint, Scott jumped up and dragged a big chair forward.
"You certainly are stunning, Kathleen," he said frankly; "you look twenty with all the charm of thirty.

Sit here; I've a map of the Roya-Neh forest to show you." He drew up a chair for himself, lifted a big map from the table, and, unrolling it, laid it across her knees.

Then he began to talk enthusiastically about lake and stream and mountain, and about wild boar and deer and keepers and lodges; and she bent her pretty head over the map, following his moving pencil with her eyes, sometimes asking a question, sometimes tracing a road with her own delicate finger.
Once or twice it happened that their hands touched en passant; and at the light contact, she was vaguely aware that somewhere, deep within her, the same faint dismay awoke; that in her, buried in depths unsuspected, something incredible existed, stirred, threatened.
"Scott, dear," she said quietly, "I am glad you are happy over Roya-Neh forest, but it _was_ too expensive, and it troubles me; so I'm going to sleep to dream over it." "You sweet little goose!" laughed the boy impulsively, passing his arm around her.

He had done it so often to this nurse and mother.
They both rose abruptly; the map dropped; his arm fell away from her warm, yielding body.
He gazed at her flushed face rather stupidly, not realising yet that the mother and nurse and elder sister had vanished like a tinted bubble in that strange instant--that Kathleen was gone--that, in her calm, sweet, familiar guise stood a woman--a stranger, exquisite, youthful, with troubled violet eyes and vivid lips, looking at him as though for the first time she had met his gaze across the world.
She recovered her composure instantly.
"I'm sorry, Scott, but I'm too sleepy to talk any more.

Besides, Geraldine isn't very well, and I'm going to doze with one eye open.
Good-night, dear." "Good-night," said the boy vacantly, not offering the dutiful embrace to which he and she had so long and so lightly been accustomed..