Page:The little blue devil (IA littlebluedevil00mackiala).pdf/150

“What do you want?” she asked, very abruptly for her.

“You know quite well what I want.”

She took his face in both her hands. “Little boy,” she said half tenderly, “you do not want it. Can’t I see?”

“Little girl, you are too young to understand how much I want it.”

She drew her hands away with a petulant gesture. “I am tired of this game. It does not suit me.”

“No—you aren’t a little girl. You are the Princess in the Ivory Tower, and no one can come near you. And I———”

“You, I suppose, are the Prince?”

“The third son, who was a fool. But won’t you throw me down a gold thread from your Tower, because you have pity for a fool who has only one strong vein of wisdom in him?”

“And that———?”

“It’s just that he loves you,” said Tony, and his voice dropped with the words.

Yolanda’s beautiful mouth twisted a little; she looked at him for a moment without speaking.

“Some day,” she said slowly, “a woman is going to be very much in love with you.”

“Whereas at present I am only very much in love with a woman,” he said, and kissed the long white hands that lay passive in his. Liane’s hands had not resisted either, but there had been a very different quality in their stillness. However, Tony was a million miles from Liane just then; she might never have existed.

“Yolanda!” he said softly, and his eyes glittered. She smiled, rather cynically, and sat quite still.

He kissed her lips. At first he felt no response, then they clung for an instant, and then she recoiled slightly. A moment later she had risen, and with perfect self-