At last Mr. Mayhew left them for a
while, and Van Berg turned and said gently:
"Miss Ida, you are not in good spirits this afternoon."
She did not answer for a moment, but averted her face still further
from him. At last she said, in a low tone: "Mr. Van Berg, did
you ever have a presentiment of evil?"
"I don't believe in such things," he replied promptly.
"Of course not; you are a man. But I have such a presentiment this
afternoon, and it will come true."
"What do you fear, Miss Ida?"
"What does a woman always fear? Earthquakes, political changes,
disturbances in the world at large, of course."
"I have heard that a woman's kingdom was her heart," Van Berg was
indiscreet enough to say.
"It is a pity," Ida replied with one of her reckless laughs, "for
it so often happens that she cannot keep it, and those who wrest
it from her do not care to keep it, and so it comes to be what the
geographies used to call one of the 'waste places of the earth.'
As the world goes, I think I had better retain my kingdom, small
as it is."
He turned very pale, and swift as light he thought: "Has she, by
the aid of her woman's intuition, read my thoughts? Has she seen
the beginnings of a regard for her far warmer than my professed
friendship, and, remembering my suit to Jennie Burton, is she learning
to despise me as fickle, or, worse, as a hypocritical specimen of
that meanest type of human vermin--a male flirt?" and his face grew
so white that Ida in her turn was not only perplexed, but alarmed.
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