"Do you think so? You had taken me to the golden silence with you."
"Where can everybody be?" She spoke anxiously. "Is it late? Maybe they've gone to get ready for dinner."
From a small bag she wore at her belt, American tourist-fashion, she pulled out an old-fashioned gold watch of the kind that winds up with a key—her mother's, perhaps, on which she had borrowed money to reach New York. "Something must be wrong with my watch," she said. "It can't be twenty minutes past eight."
The same thing was wrong with Stephen's expensive repeater, whose splendour he was ashamed to flaunt beside the modesty of the girl's poor little timepiece. There remained now no reasonable doubt that it was indeed twenty minutes past eight, since by the mouths of two witnesses a truth can be established.
"How dreadful!" exclaimed Victoria, mortified. "I've kept you here all this time, listening to me."
"Didn't I tell you I'd rather listen to you than anything else? Eating was certainly not excepted. I don't remember hearing the bugle."
"And I didn't hear it."
"I'd forgotten dinner. You had carried me so far away with you."
"And Saidee," added the girl. "Thank you for going with us."