"She surely deserves it all," Graham murmured, although vaguely hurt in that the addle-pated, alphabet-obsessed, epicurean anarchist of an Irishman who gloried in being a loafer and a pensioner should even mildly be in love with the Little Lady. "She is most deserving of all men's admiration," he continued smoothly. "From the little I've seen of her she's quite remarkable and most charming."
"She's my half-sister," Ernestine vouchsafed, "although you wouldn't dream a drop of the same blood ran in our veins. She's so different. She's different from all the Destens, from any girl I ever knew-- though she isn't exactly a girl. She's thirty-eight, you know--"
"Pussy, pussy," Graham whispered.
The pretty young blonde looked at him in surprise and bewilderment, taken aback by the apparent irrelevance of his interruption.
"Cat," he censured in mock reproof.
"Oh!" she cried. "I never meant it that way. You will find we are very frank here. Everybody knows Paula's age. She tells it herself. I'm eighteen--so, there. And now, just for your meanness, how old are you?"
"As old as Dick," he replied promptly.
"And he's forty," she laughed triumphantly. "Are you coming swimming? --the water will be dreadfully cold."
Graham shook his head. "I'm going riding with Dick."
Her face fell with all the ingenuousness of eighteen.
"Oh," she protested, "some of his eternal green manures, or hillside terracing, or water-pocketing."
"But he said something about swimming at five."
Her face brightened joyously.
"Then we'll meet at the tank. It must be the same party. Paula said swimming at five."
As they parted under a long arcade, where his way led to the tower room for a change into riding clothes, she stopped suddenly and called: "Oh, Mr. Graham."
He turned obediently.
"You really are not compelled to fall in love with Paula, you know. It was just my way of putting it."
"I shall be very, very careful," he said solemnly, although there was a twinkle in his eye as he concluded.
Nevertheless, as he went on to his room, he could not but admit to himself that the Paula Forrest charm, or the far fairy tentacles of it, had already reached him and were wrapping around him. He knew, right there, that he would prefer the engagement to ride to have been with her than with his old-time friend, Dick.
As he emerged from the house to the long hitching-rails under the ancient oaks, he looked eagerly for his hostess. Only Dick was there, and the stable-man, although the many saddled horses that stamped in the shade promised possibilities. But Dick and he rode away alone. Dick pointed out her horse, an alert bay thoroughbred, stallion at that, under a small Australian saddle with steel stirrups, and double- reined and single-bitted.