“Why--why!” he gasped out, chokingly. “I--I have always thought of them as gray eyes.”
“If that isn't just like a man!” she exclaimed, shrugging away from him. Her quarter profile revealed those thinly curved lips pursed into a most delicious pout. “You acknowledge, don't you, that they're _not_ gray?” she flung at him over her shoulder--an adorable shoulder, Decatur thought.
“Then--then why don't you go away?” It was just that trembling little quaver on the low notes which spurred him on to cast the die.
“Jane,” he whispered, “I don't want to go away, and I don't want you to send me. It isn't gray eyes that I care for, or ever have cared for. It's been just you, your own dear, charming self.”
“No, it hasn't been. I haven't even a piquant chin.”
“That doesn't matter. What is a piquant chin, anyway?”
“So I did, but I didn't know what it meant. I just knew that it ought to mean something charming, which you are.”
“I'm not. And I am not accomplished. I don't sing, I don't play, I don't draw.”
“Thanks be for that! I don't, either. But I think you are the dearest girl in the world.”
At that she turned to him and smiled a little as only Jane could smile.
“You told me that once before, a long time ago, you know.”
“No. I--you see--I didn't want to forget.”
Had it been August, or even July, doubtless a great number of vacationists would have been somewhat shocked at what Decatur did then. But it was early June, you remember, and on the far end of the Ocean Park fishing-pier were only these two, with just the dancing blue ocean in front.
“But,” she said at length, after many other and more important things had been said between them, “what will Aunt Judith say?”
“I suppose she'll think me a lucky dog--and slightly color-blind,” chuckled Decatur, joyously. “But come,” he went on, helping her to rise and retaining both her hands, swaying them back and forth clasped in his, as children do in the game of London Bridge,--“come,” he repeated, impulsively, “while my courage is high let us go and break the news to your aunt Judith.”
There was, however, no need. Looming ponderously in the middle distance of the pier's vista, a lorgnette held to her eyes, and a frozen look of horror on her ample features, was Aunt Judith herself.