All of it I engage to analyze
and consider dispassionately at my leisure. Meantime, I thank you for
your interest in the matter. Good-evening."
"Mr. Queed."
Sharlee rose hurriedly, since hurry was so evidently necessary. She felt
profoundly stirred, she hardly knew why; all her airs of a haughty
princess were fled; and she intercepted him with no remnant of her
pretense that she was putting a shabby inferior in his place.
"I want to tell you," she said, somewhat nervously, "that I--I--admire
very much the way you've taken this. No ordinary man would have listened
with such--"
"I never pretended to be an ordinary man."
He moved, but she stood unmoving in front of him, the pretty portrait of
a lady in blue, and the eyes that she fastened upon him reminded him
vaguely of Fifi's.
"Perhaps I--should tell you," said Sharlee, "just why I--"
"Now don't," he said, smiling faintly at her with his old air of a
grandfather--"don't spoil it all by saying that you didn't mean it."
Under his smile she colored a little, and, despite herself, looked
confused. He took advantage of her embarrassment to pass her with
another bow and go out, leaving her struggling desperately with the
feeling that he had got the best of her after all.
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