“Was it—interesting?”
“Thrilling! But there! I’m not going to tell you. I shouldn’t have mentioned it if what you say hadn’t been so oddly like—”
But Coningsby came back into the room to ask if Miss Barry wouldn’t join his wife in the nursery to see little Rufus while he was awake. In the mean time he and I would retire to his own snuggery and talk business.
While I followed his account of the hotel he was building sufficiently to get his ideas and to know what he expected of me, I was saying to myself: “She doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know me at all. It never occurs to her as a possibility that the man who wrote those words is the one she is now asked to meet at dinner. How am I ever to get the nerve to let her know?”
When I found the opportunity I put the question, “Have your wife and Miss Barry any idea about me?”
“About you? You mean about—”
“The Down and Out.”
“Lord, no! What would be the good of that?”
“The only good would be that—that I shouldn’t be sailing under false colors.”