He was doing his best to smooth things over, he told himself, although between his whole exit from the evergreen and the lingering manner in which he'd acted last time he'd met her, Tyb wasn't sure smooth was a particularly accurate descriptor.

She certainly didn't seem convinced. He choked back a laugh at the coolness of her answer. Perhaps she didn't have a sense of humour. Perhaps she just suffered no fools, and had so many lovesick men falling about her that she simply had no patience for that, either. She was attractive, he supposed, and probably well-bred, and had an interesting accent... (She was no Elsie, but -)

"Well, I hope you might forgive me for all that, anyway," he said cheerfully, with a new briskness now that he was out of the tree. He grinned at her, despite all her aloofness. "Either you didn't get one," - of the letters; as he'd heard, most had come in pairs, and he ought to be grateful this hadn't, else who knew what worse kind of trouble he could have gotten himself into - "or you have a great deal more self-control than I do." It wasn't hard to, admittedly. But if she had read one of those letters, she had an exceptional knack against fighting off ridiculous infatuations, more than most people did.

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