“Not so absurd as your guardian’s, however,” says he, feeling the necessity for saying something without the power to manufacture it.

“Mr. Curzon’s?  What is his name?” asks she, rising out of her lounging position and looking, for the first time, interested.

“Thaddeus.”

Perpetua, after a prolonged stare, laughs a little.

“What a name!” says she.  “Worse than mine.  And yet,” still laughing, “it suits him, I think.”

Hardinge laughs with her.  Not at his friend, but with her.  It seems clear to him that Perpetua is making gentle fun of her guardian, and though his conscience smites him for encouraging her in her naughtiness, still he cannot refrain.

“He is an awfully good old fellow,” says he, throwing a sop to his Cerberus.

“Is he?” says Perpetua, as if even more amused.  She looks up at him, and then down again, and trifles with the fan she has taken back from him, and finally laughs again; something in her laugh this time, however, puzzles him.

“You don’t like him?” hazards he.  “After all, I suppose it is hardly natural that a ward should like her guardian.”

“Yes?  And why?" asks Perpetua, still smiling, still apparently amused.

“For one thing, the sense of restraint that belongs to the relations between them.  A guardian, you know, would be able to control one in a measure.”

“Would he?”

“Well, I imagine so.  It is traditionary.  And you?”

“I don’t know about other people,” says Miss Wynter, calmly, “I know only this, that nobody ever yet controlled me, and I don’t suppose now that anybody ever will.”

As she says this she looks at him with the prettiest smile; it is a mixture of amusement and defiance.  Hardinge, gazing at her, draws conclusions. ("Perfectly hates him,” decides he.)

It seems to him a shame, and a pity too, but after all, old Curzon was hardly meant by Nature to do the paternal to a strange and distinctly spoiled child, and a beauty into the bargain.

“I don’t think your guardian will have a good time,” says he, bending over her confidentially, on the strength of this decision of his.

“Don’t you?” She draws back from him and looks up.  “You think I shall lead him a very bad life?”

“Well, as he would regard it.  Not as I should,” with a sudden, impassioned glance.

Miss Wynter puts that glance behind her, and perhaps there is something—­something a little dangerous in the soft, soft look she now turns upon him.

“He thinks so, too, of course?” says she, ever so gently.  Her tone is half a question, half an assertion.  It is manifestly unfair, the whole thing.  Hardinge, believing in her tone, her smile, falls into the trap.  Mindful of that night when the professor in despair at her untimely descent upon him, had said many things unmeant, he answers her.