"I don't know why you should be." If she had not stared hard at Miss Carroll's trunk, and tried anxiously to make out the name on a very small label, she would have done what she had boasted of never doing, whatever the world did to her: she would have cried. As it was, she wore the expression of a budding basilisk.
"Don't you know? Well, then, you didn't realize what it meant to me to have you for a friend."
"
I really didn't think much about it, Mr. Rolls!"
"Evidently not. But I did. Look here, Miss Child. Did my sister put you against me—or our friendship—in any way?"
"What an extraordinary idea!" sneered Winifred. "She spoke very nicely of you, as far as I can remember, and said you were a dear brother."
"Then why are you so unkind to me now after being nice on the ship?"
"Oh, that! It was for a cinema, a motion picture. Didn't you understand?"
This slapped Peter in the face: that she should retort with flippant slang, when he was earnestly begging for an explanation. At last she had succeeded in freezing him.
"I'm afraid I didn't quite understand," he said in a new tone which she had not heard before. Mr. Balm of Gilead, alias Peter Pan, had suddenly grown up, and as Peter Rolls, Jr., was all politeness and conventionality.