"Do you think a girl could spend several years knocking about down town
in New York without getting experience?"

He smiled--a forced smile of raillery, hiding sudden fierce suspicion
and jealousy. "I should say not. But you always pretend innocence."

"I can't be held responsible for what you read into my looks and into
what I say," observed she with her air of a wise old infant. "But I was
so glad to find out that you were seriously in love with a nice girl up
town."

He burst out laughing. She gazed at him in childlike surprise. "Why are
you laughing at me?" she asked.

"Nothing--nothing," he assured her. He would have found it difficult to
explain why he was so intensely amused at hearing the grand Josephine
Burroughs called "a nice girl up town."

"You are in love with her? You are engaged to her?" she inquired, her
grave eyes upon him with an irresistible appeal for truth in them.

"Tetlow didn't lie to you," evaded he. "You don't know it, but Tetlow is
going to ask you to marry him."

"Yes, I knew," replied she indifferently.

"How? Did he tell you?"

"No. Just as I knew you were not going to ask me to marry you."