Flaming Youth

CHAPTER IX

"Then I'd put up my innocent, childish lips and ask him to say nighty-nighty nicey-nicey."

"Yes; you're pretty good at that innocent, childish lips stuff," remarked Dee placidly. "About time you were outgrowing it, I'd say."

Pat glowered. "Oh, you go to hell," she snapped. "No man would ever want to kiss you. You—you dead fish."

Dee laughed. "Wouldn't they? I wish they didn't. It's a rotten nuisance."

Pat's ill humour vanished in interest. "You are a queer one," she said. "How does Jimmieson James like your views?"

Dee shrugged her slim, clean-muscled shoulders. "He dangles along."

"Better haul him in before he wriggles off the hook," advised the worldly Pat. "Come on down and show me the new suitor."

"Do your own butting-in," yawned Dee. "I won't."

"Oh, verra-well! Here's trying."

Finesse did not mark Pat's irruption upon the solitude à deux in the library.

[Pg 91]
"'Lo, Con," was her opening. "Seen T. T. around here?"

Constance's companion arose and viewed the new arrival with surprise, amusement and expectation. The latter was not immediately fulfilled.

"No," said Constance with significant brevity. "It's in the conservatory." Which was a guess.

"I've looked," said Pat. Which was a lie. She directed a guileless gaze at Cary Scott. "I think you must have been sitting on it," she said; "my copy of Town Topics."

"No; I assure you," he returned. There was a moment's pause which he relieved by turning to Constance. "This is Miss Patricia?" he asked.

"Yes; that's the infant," returned Constance so disparagingly that Pat at once decided to see it through.

"Only half an introduction," she said, greatly fancying herself for her aplomb. "What's the other half?"

"Cary Scott, at your service, mademoiselle." He made her an elaborate bow, twinkling.

She held out a hand, large, firm, and nervously modelled. "Oh, yes. Dee's been telling me about you. Such a lot."

"A charming historian. I hope the history borrowed some of the quality."

"It wasn't so dull. Con, are you driving down for Dad to-day?"

"No. You are."

"Oh, very well. I can take the car, then. Good-bye, Mr. Scott. It was really an awfully interesting history. I'd like to hear more of it some day."

"That's a precocious child, Stancia," said Cary Scott, giving to the special name which he had devised for Constance a caressing quality.

[Pg 92]
"She's a terrible brat," replied the other.

"She is your sister and therefore has for me a shadow of your delight about her."

"How foreign you sound when you say those things! I love it in you."

"Do you? But you use the word 'love' so lightly."

"I don't think of it lightly. No," she whispered, reading the swift fire in his eyes and holding him back with a light hand upon his shoulder. "Not again. Not now. That other time—it frightened me."

"Don't be afraid of me," he murmured. "I can wait."

"Ah, but I'm more afraid of you when you wait than when you seek," she smiled, and he reflected, with warm recognisance, that for once she had shown a gleam of subtlety, that subtlety which had so enthralled him in the mother, for which he was ever eagerly looking in the daughter. "You'll be at the club dance Saturday?" she added.