“Certainly I do, but perhaps not more so than most girls of her kind and age,” was the quiet answer with its pretence of fairness.

“Including yourself?”

She smiled with unruffled amiability.  “I am an exception,” she said.  “I am neither of her kind nor, thank Goodness! of Tier country; and I have never seen the man I cared to flirt with.  I am more particular than most people, and more exclusive.  Besides,” with the most matter-of-fact air in the world, “I am an old maid by nature and destiny.  I am preparing for my metier too steadily to interrupt it by the vulgar amusement of flirting.”

“You an old maid!—­you! nonsense!” cried Edgar with an odd expression in his eyes.  “You will not be an old maid, Adelaide, I would marry you myself rather.”

She chose to take his impertinence simply.  “Would you?” she asked.  “That would be generous!”

“And unpleasant?” he returned in a lower voice.

“To you? chi sa? I should say yes.”  She spoke quite quietly, as if nothing deeper than the question and answer of the moment lay under this crossing of swords.

“No, not to me,” he returned.

“To me, then?  I will tell you that when the time comes,” she said.  “Things are not always what they seem.”

“You speak in riddles to-night, fair lady,” said Edgar, who honestly did not know what she meant him to infer—­whether her present seeming indifference was real, or the deeper feeling which she had so often and for so long allowed him to believe.

“Do I?” She looked into his face serenely, but a little irritatingly.  “Then my spoken riddles match your acted ones,” she said.

“This is the first time that I have been accused of enigmatic action.  Of all men I am the most straightforward, the least dubious.”

Edgar said this rather angrily.  By that curious law of self-deception which makes cowards boast of their courage and hypocrites of their sincerity, he did really believe himself to be as he said, notably clear in his will and distinct in his action.

“Indeed!  I should scarcely endorse that,” answered Adelaide.  “I have so often known you enigmatic—­a riddle of which, it seems to me, the key is lost, or to which indeed there is no key at all—­that I have come to look on you as a puzzle never to be made out.”

“You mean a puzzle not known to my fair friend Adelaide, which is not quite the same thing as not known to any one,” he said satirically, his ill-humor with himself and everything about him overflowing beyond his power to restrain.  His knowledge that Miss Birkett was his proper choice, his mad love for Leam—­love only on the right hand, fitness, society, family, every other claim on the left—­his jealousy of Alick, all irritated him beyond bearing, and made him forget even his good-breeding in his irritation.

“Not known to my friend Edgar himself,” was Adelaide’s reply, her color rising, ill-humor being contagious.