“How most absurd I have been made,” Von Ibn continued wrathfully, “in a cab from hotel to hotel hunting for you! Do you think I have ever done so before? Do you think I have found it very amusing to-day? Naturally I go from the Gare to the Victoria, where I have told you to go. I take there a room, and tell the garçon to bring my card to madame; and in ten minutes, as I am getting me out of the dust of that most abominable middle-day train, he returns to say that no such as madame is within the house. Figurez-vous? Why are you acted so? Why are you always so oddly singular?”
Rosina appeared struck dumb by the torrent of his words; she stood pink and silent before his towering blackness. Molly, at the window, judged it prudent to interfere, and, turning, began:
“It’s all my fault, monsieur. Rosina wanted to go to the Victoria; she wept when she found that she couldn’t, but I was here already and we wanted to be together, and so she consented to come with me and live by the lake.”
Von Ibn turned his eyes upon the new speaker, and their first expression was one of deep displeasure. But Molly’s eyes were of that brown which is almost bronze, and fringed by eyelashes that were irresistibly long and curly, and she furthermore possessed a smile that could have found its way anywhere alone, and yet was rendered twice wise in the business of hearts by two attendant dimples, to the end that the combination was powerful enough to slowly smooth out some of the deepest lines of anger in the face before her, and to vastly ameliorate its generally offended air.
From the evidently pardoned Irish girl the caller turned his somewhat softened gaze towards the young American, and then, and then only, it appeared that a fresh storm-centre had gathered force unto itself in that one small salon, and that it was now Rosina who had decided to exhibit her temper, beginning by saying, with a very haughty coolness:
“It’s nice of mademoiselle to try and make a joke out of all this, but she knows that I never thought for a minute of going anywhere except where she might chance to be. And as to you, monsieur, I cannot see how you could have expected or demanded that I should pay any attention whatever to your wishes. You told me last night that we might never meet again—”
“And that could have truthed itself by chance,” he interrupted eagerly.
“—And I believed you, and you know it,” she finished, not noticing his interpolation.
He stood still, looking straight at her, and when she was altogether silent he stepped forward and raised her hand within his own.
“Does one meet a real friendship on Saturday to let it go from him for always after Monday?” he asked her, speaking with a simple dignity that suddenly swept the atmosphere free from clouds and storms.