“I’m not one least bit annoyed with you,” she repeated.

The faint flush that had now appeared in her cheeks, and the complicated wistfulness of her expression, disarmed and enchanted him. He stooped down to her and stroked with the tips of his fingers the white blue-veined skin under her lace wristbands; but as he looked at her now, there was a certain virginal detachment about her thin ankles and about those lace-ruffled hands which irritated and provoked him by its inhuman remoteness.

“You puzzle me completely,” he remarked, returning rather awkwardly to his former seat and surveying her with a humorous frown.

She lifted up her head from her work. “Well? Why not? We haven’t known each other very long.”

Her words released his pent-up irritation.

“You make me feel funny, Christie,” he said. “As if we’d lost each other in a wood.”