I smiled. She did not say it rudely, or I should have been uppish at once. She has a wonderful charm.

"You don't speak much, either," she continued. "I feel you are dangerous. That is why I am being so civil to you; I think it wisest. I can't stand girls as a rule." And she went into one of her ripples of laughter. "Now say you will not hurt me."

"I should not hurt any one," I said. "Unless they hurt me first, and I like you, you are so pretty."

"That is all right," she said. "Then we are comrades. I was frightened about Robert last evening, because I am so attached to him; but you were a darling after dinner, and it will be all right now. I told him you would probably marry Malcolm Montgomerie, and he was not to interfere."

"I shall do nothing of the kind!" I exclaimed, moving off the bed. "I would as soon die as spend the rest of my life here at Tryland."

"He will be fabulously rich one day, you know, and you could get round père Montgomerie in a trice, and revolutionize the whole place. You had better think of it."

"I won't," I said, and I felt my eyes sparkle. She put up her hands as if to ward off an evil spirit, and she laughed again. "Well, you sha'n't then. Only don't flash those emeralds at me; they give me quivers all over."

"Would you like to marry Malcolm?" I asked and I sat down again. "Fancy being owned by that! Fancy seeing it every day! Fancy living with a person who never sees a joke from week's end to week's end! Oh!"

"As for that--" and she puffed smoke. "Husbands are a race apart--there are men, women, and husbands; and if they pay bills, and shoot big game in Africa, it is all one ought to ask of them; to be able to see jokes is superfluous. Mine is most inconvenient, because he generally adores me, and at best only leaves me for a three weeks' cure at Homburg, and now and then a week at Paris; but Malcolm could be sent to the Rocky Mountains, and places like that, continuously; he is quite a sportsman."

"That is not my idea of a husband," I said.

"Well, what is your idea, snake-girl?"

"Why do you call me 'snake-girl'?" I asked. "I hate snakes."




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