"Leave them behind you," said Mr. Polly with a catch of the breath, "where they are safe"; and marvelling at his own wit and daring, and indeed trembling within himself, he held out a hand for her.
She brought another brown leg from the unknown, and arranged her skirt with a dexterity altogether feminine. "I think I"ll stay on the wall,"
she decided. "So long as some of me"s in bounds--"
She continued to regard him with eyes that presently joined dancing in an irresistible smile of satisfaction. Mr. Polly smiled in return.
"You bicycle?" she said.
Mr. Polly admitted the fact, and she said she did too.
"All my people are in India," she explained. "It"s beastly rot--I mean it"s frightfully dull being left here alone."
"All _my_ people," said Mr. Polly, "are in Heaven!"
"I say!"
"Fact!" said Mr. Polly. "Got n.o.body."
"And that"s why--" she checked her artless comment on his mourning. "I say," she said in a sympathetic voice, "I _am_ sorry. I really am. Was it a fire or a ship--or something?"
Her sympathy was very delightful. He shook his head. "The ordinary table of mortality," he said. "First one and then another."
Behind his outward melancholy, delight was dancing wildly. "Are _you_ lonely?" asked the girl.
Mr. Polly nodded.
"I was just sitting there in melancholy rectrospectatiousness," he said, indicating the logs, and again a swift thoughtfulness swept across her face.
"There"s no harm in our talking," she reflected.
"It"s a kindness. Won"t you get down?"
She reflected, and surveyed the turf below and the scene around and him.
"I"ll stay on the wall," she said. "If only for bounds" sake."
She certainly looked quite adorable on the wall. She had a fine neck and pointed chin that was particularly admirable from below, and pretty eyes and fine eyebrows are never so pretty as when they look down upon one. But no calculation of that sort, thank Heaven, was going on beneath her ruddy shock of hair.
VI
"Let"s talk," she said, and for a time they were both tongue-tied.
Mr. Polly"s literary proclivities had taught him that under such circ.u.mstances a strain of gallantry was demanded. And something in his blood repeated that lesson.
"You make me feel like one of those old knights," he said, "who rode about the country looking for dragons and beautiful maidens and chivalresque adventures."
"Oh!" she said. "Why?"
"Beautiful maiden," he said.
She flushed under her freckles with the quick bright flush those pretty red-haired people have. "Nonsense!" she said.
"You are. I"m not the first to tell you that. A beautiful maiden imprisoned in an enchanted school."
"_You_ wouldn"t think it enchanted!"
"And here am I--clad in steel. Well, not exactly, but my fiery war horse is anyhow. Ready to absquatulate all the dragons and rescue you."
She laughed, a jolly laugh that showed delightfully gleaming teeth. "I wish you could _see_ the dragons," she said with great enjoyment. Mr.
Polly felt they were a sun"s distance from the world of everyday.
"Fly with me!" he dared.
She stared for a moment, and then went off into peals of laughter.
"You _are_ funny!" she said. "Why, I haven"t known you five minutes."
"One doesn"t--in this medevial world. My mind is made up, anyhow."
He was proud and pleased with his joke, and quick to change his key neatly. "I wish one could," he said.
"I wonder if people ever did!"
"If there were people like you."
"We don"t even know each other"s names," she remarked with a descent to matters of fact.
"Yours is the prettiest name in the world."
"How do you know?"
"It must be--anyhow."
"It _is_ rather pretty you know--it"s Christabel."
"What did I tell you?"
"And yours?"
"Poorer than I deserve. It"s Alfred."
"_I_ can"t call you Alfred."
"Well, Polly."
"It"s a girl"s name!"
For a moment he was out of tune. "I wish it was!" he said, and could have bitten out his tongue at the Larkins sound of it.