“What time did you tell me our train went?” I asked Fifine, as I rejoined her.
“At three-twenty,” she repeated. “I copied it down, and can show you.”
She showed it me, in fact—a little note in pencil on a scrap of paper.
“Read it, please,” I said.
She obeyed—“Thirteen-twenty”—and stopped. “O—o!” she exclaimed—a prolonged interjection of dismay.
“Exactly,” I said. “Thirteen-twenty is one-twenty, goose. There is not another train for just two hours.”
She stood looking up at me. Her lower lip went down, positively like a dear pitiful baby’s in deprecation of the expected and well-merited scolding.
“O, Felix,” she said. “I’m so sorry!”
I could have shaken her; I could have laughed; I could have snatched her to my heart and kissed her—it was so moving, after all, to see this change in her from that one-time confident assurance to propitiation and entreaty. In these latter days all her precocious dictatorialness seemed to have deserted her; and yet she did not know that I knew what I knew; to all intents and purposes she still figured to herself for a free agent. It was Carabas, the eternal Carabas, who had wrought the sad confusion.
“Never mind,” I said. “It will make us rather late, and it will be a little dull waiting; but we must kill the time as we can, and be glad it is no worse.”