"I should have thought you must be in a happier place than most mortals." Napier sat down on a half-concealed wooden seat.
Julian joined him with an eager, "What makes you say that?"
"Well, it must be plain to the blindest she is very fond of you."
"You think she is?" He sat wondering. Then he presented the grievance closest to hand. "She wouldn't let me kiss her just now, and I've been away three whole days."
"She _must_ be, or else she wouldn't, would she, now? A girl like that?"
Napier tried to ask if these scenes were of frequent occurrence, whether they were courted or evaded. The question stuck in his throat. And then, exactly as if he had spoken, Julian answered.
"She's a little capricious about that kind of thing. But,"--he turned trustfully to his friend--"girls often _are_, aren't they?"
Napier sat there without speaking. "I wondered," Julian went on, "if it could possibly mean the sort of disapproval that's putting me into other people's black books--about this devil's mess of a war. But you saw she took quite a rational view about that."
"I saw she took _your_ view. As to its being rational--"
"Oh, well, we won't say any more about that _now_. I've talked war till I'm sick. I thought I was coming back here to--something I don't find."
Into Napier's silence Julian dropped the suggestion. "It may only be that I don't understand women." In his quandary Napier wondered aloud whether you ever did understand a person brought up in a different country.
"Or in your own," Julian said moodily. "People I've known since I was a baby I begin to realize I've never known at all!"
"Oh, come, it isn't as bad as that, though we're all of us having our eyes opened these days. Those Pforzheims now; I'm persuaded they got hold of the Kirklamont newspapers and kept them back with the express idea of giving Greta an excuse for getting the official news they wanted."
Julian stared, and then he turned his head wearily away. "What rot!"
The tone nettled Napier. "You seem to have forgotten your own suspicions of that woman."
"They were never of _that_ sort, thank God!" Julian flung out. "I didn't like the idea of Nan's friend carrying on a doubtful love affair--But that's all pettiness. The awful actualities of war have brought fine things to the surface in Greta von Schwarzenberg's character."