She showed an unflattering surprise.  “Why, I didn’t know you ever thought about such things.”

He looked at her askance, dimly amused.  “High opinion you have of me!”

She looked annoyed at herself and said with a genuine good-will in her voice, “Why, Arnold, you know I’ve always liked you.”

“You like me, but you don’t think much of me,” he diagnosed her, “and you show your good sense.”  He looked up at the picturesque white house, spreading its well-proportioned bulk on the top of the terraced hillside before them.  “I hope Madrina is looking out of a window and sees us here, our heads together in the twilight.  You’ve guessed, I suppose, that she had you come on here for my benefit.  She thinks she’s tried everything else,—­now it’s her idea to get me safely married.  She’d have one surprise, wouldn’t she, if she could hear what we’re saying!”

“Well, it would be a good thing for you,” remarked Sylvia, as entirely without self-consciousness as though they were discussing the tennis game.

He was tickled by her coolness.  “Well, Madrina sure made a mistake when she figured on you!” he commented ironically.  And then, not having been subjected to the cool, hardy conditions which caused Sylvia’s present clear-headedness, he felt his blood stirred to feel her there, so close, so alive, so young, so beautiful in the twilight.  He leaned towards her and spoke in a husky voice, “See here, Sylvia, why don’t you try it!”

“Oh, nonsense!” said the girl, not raising her voice at all, not stirring.  “You don’t care a bit for me.”

“Yes, I do!  I’ve always liked you!” he said, not perceiving till after the words were out of his mouth that he had repeated her own phrase.

She laughed to hear it, and he drew back, his faint stirring of warmth dashed, extinguished.  “The fact is, Sylvia,” he said, “you’re too nice a girl to fall in love with.”

“What a horrid thing to say!” she exclaimed.

“About you?” he defended himself.  “I mean it as a compliment.”

“About falling in love,” she said.

“Oh!” he said blankly, evidently not at all following her meaning.

“What time is it?” she now inquired, and on hearing the hour, “Oh, we’ll be late to dress for dinner,” she said in concern, rising and ascending the marble steps to the terrace next above them.

He came after her, long, loose-jointed, ungraceful.  He was laughing.  “Do you realize that I’ve proposed marriage to you and you’ve turned me down?” he said.

“No such a thing!” she said, as lightly as he.

“It’s the nearest I ever came to it!” he averred.

She continued to flit up the terraces before him, her voice rippling with amusement dropping down on him through the dusk.  “Well, you’ll have to come nearer than that, if you ever want to make a go of it!” she called over her shoulder.  Upon which note this very modern conversation ended.