There seemed to be something in that, and my tirade broke up in confusion.  “Oh, no,” I said lamely, “I hoped—­I hoped—­”

“Be careful!”

“No; I hoped to work down here,” I blurted.  “And I thought if I saw too much of you—­I might not.”

She looked at me with widening eyes.  “And I can take my choice,” she cried, “of all the different things you may mean by that!  It’s either the most outrageous speech I ever heard—­or the most flattering.”

“But I meant simply—­”

“No.”  She lifted her hand and stopped me.  “I’d rather believe that I have at least the choice—­and let it go at that.”  And as I began to laugh, she turned to me with a gravity apparently so genuine that for the moment I was fatuous enough to believe that she had said it seriously.  Ensued a pause of some duration, which, for my part, I found disturbing.  She broke it with a change of subject.

“You think Louise very lovely to look at, don’t you?”

“Exquisite,” I answered.

“Every one does.”

“I suppose she told you—­” and now I felt myself growing red—­“that I behaved like a drunken acrobat when she came upon me in the path.”

“No.  Did you?” cried Miss Elizabeth, with a ready credulity which I thought by no means pretty; indeed, she seemed amused and, to my surprise (for she is not an unkind woman), rather heartlessly pleased.  “Louise only said she knew it must be you, and that she wished she could have had a better look at what you were painting.”

“Heaven bless her!” I exclaimed.  “Her reticence was angelic.”

“Yes, she has reticence,” said my companion, with enough of the same quality to make me look at her quickly.  A thin line had been drawn across her forehead.

“You mean she’s still reticent with George?” I ventured.

“Yes,” she answered sadly.  “Poor George always hopes, of course, in the silent way of his kind when they suffer from such unfortunate passions—­ and he waits.”

“I suppose that former husband of hers recovered?”

“I believe he’s still alive somewhere.  Locked up, I hope!” she finished crisply.

“She retained his name,” I observed.

“Harman?  Yes, she retained it,” said my companion rather shortly.

“At all events, she’s rid of him, isn’t she?”

“Oh, she’s rid of him!” Her tone implied an enigmatic reservation of some kind.

“It’s hard,” I reflected aloud, “hard to understand her making that mistake, young as she was.  Even in the glimpses of her I’ve had, it was easy to see something of what she’s like:  a fine, rare, high type—­”

“But you didn’t know him, did you?” Miss Elizabeth asked with some dryness.

“No,” I answered.  “I saw him twice; once at the time of his accident—­ that was only a nightmare, his face covered with—­” I shivered.  “But I had caught a glimpse of him on the boulevard, and of all the dreadful—­”