"At the ball?" he repeated, and the words were spoken with his lips
merely in that objective world of routine and habit. "Yes, I was there.
It was a dull business."

She laughed again with the lack of merriment he had noticed before.
Though her face was made for laughter, there was an oddly conflicting
note of tragedy in her voice. "Was it dull? I didn't notice."

"Then you must have enjoyed it?"

"But you were there. You saw what happened. Every one must have seen."
Her savage candour brushed away the flimsy amenities. He knew now that
she would say whatever she pleased, and, with the pigeon clasped tightly
in his arms, he waited for anything that might come.

"You pretend that you don't know, that you didn't see!" she asked
indignantly.

As she looked at him he thought--or it may have been the effect of the
shifting light--that her eyes diffused soft green rays beneath her black
eyelashes. Was there really the mist of tears in her sparkling glance?

"I am sorry," he said simply, being a young man of few words when the
need of speech was obvious. The last thing he wanted, he told himself,
was to receive the confidences of the Governor's daughter.

At this declaration, so characteristic of his amiable temperament, her
anger flashed over him. "You were not sorry. You know you were not, or
you would have made them kinder!"