He elicited from her that nectarines and grapes were her favourite fruits. But in the midst of their talk she became suddenly grave again.
"I do not believe that you had a single word with her after I came!"
His face betrayed his bewilderment.
"Tante," she enlightened him. "But before then? You did speak with her? She had sent you to look for me?" The depths of her misconception as to his presence were apparent.
"No; it was by chance I saw you," he said. "And I didn't have any talk with Madame von Marwitz." He had no time to undeceive her further if it had been worth while to undeceive her, for Mrs. Forrester, detaching herself from the larger group of bereaved ones, joined them.
"I can't give you a lift, Gregory?" she asked. "You are going citywards? We are all feeling very bleak and despoiled, aren't we? What an awful place a station is when someone has gone away from it."
"Mrs. Forrester," said Karen Woodruff, with wide eyes, "he did not have one single word with her; Mr. Jardine did not get any talk at all with Tante. Oh, that should have been managed."
But Mrs. Forrester, though granting to his supposed plight a glance of sympathetic concern, was in a hurry to get home and he was, again, spared the necessity of a graceless confession. He piloted them through the crowd, saw them—Miss Woodruff, Mrs. Forrester and Victor,—fitted into Mrs. Forrester's brougham, and then himself got into a hansom. It was still the atmosphere of the dream that hovered about him as he decided at what big fruit-shop he should stop to order a box of nectarines. He wanted her to find them waiting for her in Cornwall. And the very box of nectarines, the globes of sombre red fruit nested in cotton-wool, seemed part of the dream. He knew that he was behaving curiously; but she was, after all, the little Hans Andersen heroine and one needn't think of ordinary customs where she was concerned.