He was too keenly alive to the change in his feelings not to know that he showed it. He endeavored to hide his perturbation under an appearance of simple politeness, but he was sure that she watched him and that she was puzzled.
"Well," she said, as she arranged a cushion in the big easy-chair beside the crackling wood fire, "you have the genuine scarred veteran air."
"Please don't bother to wait on me, Miss Morison," he answered, trying to speak naturally, and painfully aware that he did not succeed. "I'm all right, except for the scratch on my arm."
"Scratch, indeed," she returned with a smile which almost disarmed him. "How many stitches did the doctor have to put in?"
"'Bout enough for a week's mending," interpolated Mehitabel, putting him into the chair with an air of authority, and preparing to retire. "There, now stay there till you want to go upstairs again, and then send for me."
"Indeed," he protested, laughing, "I am not helpless. You can't make a baby of me just for a disabled arm."
"I suppose," Berenice said, "that I ought to be willing to say that I had rather the wound were in my back, where it would have been but for you; only as a matter of fact I shouldn't be telling the truth. I am sorry for you, Mr. Wynne; but I can't help being glad for myself."
She seemed to be setting herself to win him from his ill-humor, and he had to look into the fire away from her lips and eyes to prevent himself from yielding. He fortified his resistance, which he felt to be weakening, by the reflection that it was his duty not to be carried away by her charm. He called upon his religious scruples to aid him in holding to his passion-born jealousy.
"There," Miss Morison said, when he had been properly ensconced and Mehitabel had departed, "now it is my duty to entertain you. What shall I do? My accomplishments are at your service. I can read, without stopping to spell out any except the very longest words. I can play two tunes on the mandolin, only that I've forgotten the middle of one and the other has a run in it that I always have to skip. The piano is too far off across the hall to be available; so that the little I can do in that way doesn't count. I can--let me see, I can teach you three solitaires, or play cribbage, or--I beg your pardon, I forgot."
