“Oh, there are sprains and sprains,” she answered, with the quiver of her lip he remembered so disturbingly.  “Didn’t you learn that in the trenches?” Was she really pretty, or was it only the provocative appeal to his imagination, the dangerous sense that you never knew what she would dare to say next?

“I didn’t go there to learn about sprains,” he responded gravely.

“Nor about maneuvers apparently?” She hesitated over the word as if it were unfamiliar.

At her charge the light of battle leaped to his eyes.  “Then it was a maneuver?  I suspected as much.”

The audacity of her!  The unparalleled audacity!  “But I am not so much interested in maneuvers,” he added merrily, “as I am in the strategy behind them.”

She looked puzzled, though her manner was still mocking.  “Is there always strategy,” she pronounced the word with care, “behind them?”

“Always in the art of warfare.”

“But can’t there be a maneuver without warfare?” He could see that she was venturing beyond her depths; but he realized that a confession of ignorance was the last thing he must ever expect from her.  Whatever the challenge she would meet it with her natural wit and her bright derision.

“Never,” he rejoined emphatically.  “A campaign goes either before or afterward.”

A thoughtful frown knit her forehead.  “Well, one didn’t go before, did it?” she inquired with an innocent air.  “So I suppose—­”

He ended her sentence on a note of merriment.  “Then I must be prepared for the one that will follow!”

She threw out her hand with a gesture of mock despair.  “Oh, you may have been mistaken, you know!”

“Mistaken?  About the campaign?”

“No, about the maneuver.  Perhaps there wasn’t any such thing, after all.”

“Perhaps.”  Though his voice was stern, his eyes were laughing.  “I am not so easily fooled as that.”

“I doubt if you could be fooled at all.”  It was the first bit of flattery she had tossed him, and he found it strangely agreeable.

“I am not sure of that,” he answered, “but the thing that perplexes me—­the only thing—­is why you should have thought it worth while.”

Her eyes grew luminous with laughter, and the little red wings quivered as if they were about to take flight over her arching brows.  “How do you know that I thought about it at all?  Sometimes things just happen.”

“But not in this case.  You had arranged the whole incident for the stage.”

“Do you mean that I fell down on purpose?”

“I mean that you were laughing up your sleeve all the time.  You weren’t hurt and you knew it.”

Her expression was enigmatical.  “You think then that I arranged to fall down and risk breaking my bones for the sake of having you pick me up?” she asked demurely.

Put so plainly the fact sounded embarrassing, if not incredible.  “I think you fell for the fun of it.  I think also that you didn’t for a second risk breaking your bones.  You are too nimble for that.”