"May one ask what the unfortunate lady was given to eat?"
"She was given cold ham, Miss Weare, tinned apricots, and black Indian tea at three o'clock in the afternoon——"
"How extraordinarily nasty," sniffed Elizabeth, obviously wrung with jealousy of the woman who had thus lunched.
Deprecatingly, Colonel Fielding smiled. "This woman told me," he said, "that she knew now what was meant by the expression 'A Priceless Binge.' It was that lunch. She would not have exchanged a crumb of it for two years of living at the Ritz."
How well I understood that woman's point of view! I opened my mouth to say so; then I saw that Captain Holiday, leaning up on his elbow on the grass, was watching me hard behind a cloud of smoke.
Why? Curiosity again? I said nothing.
"I suppose that woman meant that the person she was lunching with made all the difference in the world to her?" said Elizabeth, whose small, brown paw had been pulling quite viciously at the grass during these last remarks, in the voice of bravado.
"Well," he replied, "I believe that she did happen to be lunching at the time with 'the person' she cared rather a lot about. He was—er—an old love or something she hadn't seen for ages. At least—I think it must have been that."
"You 'think'!" I said exasperated. "You don't know?"
"No," returned the young Colonel, "I couldn't ask her, could I?"