Partially relieved by her
unconcern, and yet mortified that he had only provoked her sense of the
ludicrous, he tried to laugh also.
"Then, to be quite plain," said Louise, wiping her now humid eyes, "you
want me to understand that you really didn't pay sufficient attention
to hear correctly! Thank you; that's a pretty English compliment, I
suppose."
"I dare say you wouldn't call it 'philandering'?"
"I certainly shouldn't, for I don't know what 'philandering' means."
Mainwaring could not reply, with Richelieu, "You ought to know"; nor did
he dare explain what he thought it meant, and how he knew it. Louise,
however, innocently solved the difficulty.
"There's a country song I've heard Minty sing," she said. "It runs--
Come, Philander, let us be a-marchin',
Every one for his true love a-sarchin'
Choose your true love now or never. . . .
Have you been listening to her also?"
"No," said Mainwaring, with a sudden incomprehensible, but utterly
irrepressible, resolution; "but I'M 'a-marchin',' you know, and perhaps
I must 'choose my true love now or never.' Will you help me, Miss Macy?"
He drew gently near her. He had become quite white, but also very manly,
and it struck her, more deeply, thoroughly, and conscientiously sincere
than any man who had before addressed her.
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