To Dennis, in his absorption, it seemed impossible that the question could refer to anything else than the habitual disability at the end of each chapter, and he answered promptly:
“’Tis the way the dickey ends—to be concluded in Series C—an’ it’s me here an’ Series C in Baxter Street, so I can’t read the rest; it’s too bad, so it is.”
“So it is,” repeated the lady softly, with a dexterous parody of his concluding words, but with a subtle intimation in her manner that she did not consider the inconvenient termination such a misfortune, after all, and that it somehow suggested an alternative that was not displeasing.
“Do you want to hear the rest?” asked Dennis frankly.
“I do, indeed,” replied his companion with an adroitly conveyed insinuation of disappointed expectation that seemed to place the responsibility of measuring to this agreeable emergency entirely upon Dennis.
The same degree of sensitiveness which leaves an Irishman so open to offense, enables him, with equal celerity, to comprehend a hint, and Dennis, when he realized that the lady understood that the continuation of the tale involved a subsequent reading, exclaimed, with a delicious paraphrase of Sancho Panza: “God bless the man who first invented ‘Continued in our next!’”
Presently the one certain that her telepathy had not miscarried, and the other equally convinced that his reception of the message was accredited to him, the conversation was given an abrupt direction by an apparently alien question:
“Do you know anything about flowers?” asked his companion.
“Only the difference between a rose and a cauliflower,” replied Dennis with a twinkle in his eye, to which the lady responded with a shade of disappointment.
“An’ why flowers?” asked Dennis.