“Informal! Where is the need of formality between you and me?” she asked quickly.
“In Sofia the tongues of gossip run glibly.”
“You have soon developed into an authority on the manners of the people here. Spare me your cant, I beg of you. What do you suppose I should care if all the old gossips in the city talked me over till their tongues ached? You ask why I am here. I wish to see you, that is all.”
“I am at your service,” I answered, with a bow.
“Are you? That’s just what I wish to know,” she replied, putting a significant meaning to my conventional phrase. “You have not given much evidence of it as yet. I should rather think you have even forgotten your promise to serve me.”
“I am, at any rate, ready to listen to you.”
She looked at me piercingly during a rather long pause.
“If I thought——” she began, but checked herself abruptly.
“Your thoughts are always shrewd,” I returned.
At the reply she looked up and laughed, with such an expression of malignity that it made her face hateful, for all the beauty of her eyes.