"If you'll trust me till afternoon for the price of a breakfast," Val answered, trying to speak lightly.
"O!" she exclaimed, "I didn't ask you to pay. Pity if I can't invite a friend to have a meal, without anyone making a fuss. I was just guying about Bill. Besides, he's different. Pa throws in his dinner and supper as part of his pay, and he's supposed to look out for his own breakfast. He gets good money here, I'm sure, and if he's so soft that every old applewoman or lame bootblack can wheedle his money off him, why that's his business, and Pa says we ought to learn him better instead of encouraging him to go on the way he does. That's why I have to sneak him a doughnut and a cup of coffee on the sly sometimes. But I want you to understand I've invited you to breakfast, as a gentleman friend of mine, and I shall be real hurt if you talk about paying."
"Very well, I'll accept your invitation with thanks, provided you'll breakfast with me," said Val, as gallantly as if he were addressing a Duchess—or a popular chorus girl.
"My! I couldn't do that," answered Isidora. "Pa'd be wild if he got to know I eat a meal in the restaurant. We've a parlour upstairs," she went on, with a pretty air of importance, "and the hired girl brings our meals, Pa's and mine, for he doesn't have his down, either, except when he's in a hurry, and just picks up a bite as he goes. But you'll be seeing me soon again," she reassured Loveland. "I shall be at the desk in Pa's place."
This was her exit speech, and she made it close to the red curtain, which in another moment had blotted her out of sight. From some region beyond the drapery, now came an appetizing smell of breakfast: coffee, frizzling ham and frying sausages. The sulky boy, his face shining with kitchen soap, came in with a tray full of dishes, and a red-faced, middle-aged German followed, who stared with goggling, gooseberry eyes at Loveland, the while he clawed clean cups and saucers from a hidden cupboard.
Not fifteen minutes had passed when Miss Alexander alias Solomon reappeared, this time in all her glory, panting with haste and the snugness of her stays (perhaps she had drawn them in extra tight), yet smiling in conscious beauty.
"My, but you are got up to kill, this morning!" exclaimed Bill Willing; and the fair Isidora darted a vexed glance at him, for she had wanted the "swell" to believe that this gorgeousness was her daily toilet.
She had put on a red cloth dress, which might have been made to suit the restaurant, as well as the wearer; her bust was magnificently full, and her waist impossibly small. She had powdered her olive face to a pearly whiteness, and her black pompadour, with its bright undulations, looked as if it would have scorned the plebian aid of metal hair-wavers.
"Now, the show's ready to begin," she announced, with a smile and a glance, all, all for Loveland. And she was so lusciously handsome in her richly developed young beauty that Val, despite the revolt of his fastidiousness, admired her reluctantly.
No customers had come in yet, and Isidora insisted that Mr. Gordon should have his breakfast. Bill, she said, could go into the kitchen and "sneak something" from the cook; but it was Loveland's whim not to eat unless his chum ate with him, and Isidora secretly liked him the better for his loyalty to one so humble, not knowing that it was a new development.