"Who was there?"

She looked up at him. "_You_ were not there," she said, smiling.

"No; I cut it. But I did not know you were going; you said nothing about
it."

"Of course, you would have stayed if you had known, Captain Selwyn?" She
was still smiling.

"Of course," he replied.

"Would you really?"

"Why, yes."

There was something not perfectly familiar to him in the girl's bright
brevity, in her direct personal inquiry; for between them, hitherto, the
gaily impersonal had ruled except in moments of lightest badinage.

"Was it an amusing dinner?" she asked, in her turn.

"Rather." Then he looked up at her, but she had stretched her slim
silk-shod feet to the fender, and her head was bent aside, so that he
could see only the curve of the cheek and the little close-set ear
under its ruddy mass of gold.

"Who was there?" she asked, too, carelessly.

For a moment he did not speak; under his bronzed cheek the flat muscles