He looked the admiration he felt—and there was not a little of the enthusiasm of the champagne both in the look and in the admiration—"I see you've already learned to play the game without losing your nerve."
"I begin to hope so," said she.
"Yes—you've got the signs of success in your face. Curious about those signs. Once you learn to know them, you never miss in sizing up people."
The dinner had come. Both were hungry, and it was as good a dinner as the discussion about it between Spenser and the waiter had forecast. As they ate the well-cooked, well-served food and drank the delicately flavored champagne, mellow as the gorgeous autumn its color suggested, there diffused through them an extraordinary feeling of quiet intense happiness—happiness of mind and body. Her face took on a new and finer beauty; into his face came a tenderness that was most becoming to its rather rugged features. And he had not talked with her long before he discovered that he was facing not a child, not a child-woman, but a woman grown, one who could understand and appreciate the things men and women of experience say and do.
"I've always been expecting to hear from you every day since we separated," he said—and he was honestly believing it now. "I've had a feeling that you hadn't forgotten me. It didn't seem possible I could feel so strongly unless there was real sympathy between us."
"I came as soon as I could."
He reflected in silence a moment, then in a tone that made her heart leap and her blood tingle, he said: "You say you're free?"
"Free as air. Only—I couldn't fly far."
He hesitated on an instinct of prudence, then ventured. "Far as
New York?"
"What is the railroad fare?"