"Plaything?"
"Well, yes--or rather a very delicately tuned musical instrument. If you know the scales and the common chords, you can improvise nice little airs and charming variations. She's a sort of--well, a penny whistle, and the music you get depends not on her at all, but on your own technique."
"I've never been in love," said Temple; "not seriously, I mean," he hastened to add, for Vernon was smiling, "not a life or death matter, don't you know; but I do hate the way you talk, and one of these days you'll hate it too."
Miss Desmond's warning floated up through the dim waters of half a year.
"So a lady told me, only last Spring," he said. "Well, I'll take my chance. Going? Well, I'm glad we ran across each other. Don't forget to look me up."
Temple moved off, and Vernon was left alone. He sat idly smoking cigarette after cigarette, and watched the shifting crowd. It was a bright October day, and the crowd was a gay one.
Suddenly his fingers tightened on his cigarette,--but he kept the hand that held it before his face, and he bent his head forward.
Two ladies were passing, on foot. One was the elder Miss Desmond--she who had warned him that one of these days he would be caught--and the other, hanging lovingly on her aunt's arm, was, of course, Betty. But a smart, changed, awakened Betty! She was dressed almost as beautifully as the lady whose profile he had failed to recognise, but much more simply. Her eyes were alight, and she was babbling away to her aunt. She was even gesticulating a little, for all the world like a French girl. He noted the well-gloved hand with which she emphasized some point in her talk.
"That's the hand," he said, "that I held when we sat on the plough in the shed and I told her fortune."
He had risen, and his feet led him along the road they had taken. Ten yards ahead of him he saw the swing of the aunt's serviceable brown skirt and beside it Betty's green and gray.
"I am not breaking my word," he replied to the Inward Monitor. "Who's going out of his way to speak to the girl?"
He watched the brown gown and the green all the way down the Boulevard des Capucines, saw them cross the road and go up the steps of the Madeleine. He paused at the corner. It was hard, certainly, to keep his promise; yet so far it was easy, because he could not well recall himself to the Misses Desmond on the ground of his having six months ago involved the one in a row with her relations, and discussed the situation afterwards with the other.