Both
the nurse and her companion gazed fixedly, and it seemed to Ransom even
sternly, at the striking couple on the bench; and meanwhile Verena,
looking with a quickened eye at the children (she adored children), went
on--
"It sounds too flat for you to talk about your remaining unheard of. Of
course you are ambitious; any one can see that, to look at you. And once
your ambition is excited in any particular direction, people had better
look out. With your will!" she added, with a curious mocking candour.
"What do you know about my will?" he asked, laughing a little awkwardly,
as if he had really attempted to kiss her--in the course of the second
independent interview he had ever had with her--and been rebuffed.
"I know it's stronger than mine. It made me come out, when I thought I
had much better not, and it keeps me sitting here long after I should
have started for home."
"Give me the day, dear Miss Tarrant, give me the day," Basil Ransom
murmured; and as she turned her face upon him, moved by the expression
of his voice, he added--"Come and dine with me, since you wouldn't
lunch. Are you really not faint and weak?"
"I am faint and weak at all the horrible things you have said; I have
lunched on abominations. And now you want me to dine with you? Thank
you; I think you're cool!" Verena cried, with a laugh which her
chronicler knows to have been expressive of some embarrassment, though
Basil Ransom did not.
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