“You don’t ask enough for your tea,” he told Betty, after having carefully ascertained from Nora that one always paid one’s bill at the desk. “I ought to be charged three prices for such a very big pot. Did you say I have been charged an extra big price?” He shook his head dubiously. “I don’t believe you make enough then. And I say, is it permissible for customers to make suggestions—not complaints, you understand, but hints for improvements? Well, in my father’s English stables the name of each horse and a picture of it is nailed up at the head of the stall. Don’t you think that would take well here?” He waved his hand toward the stalls. “Winona, Prince, Down-and-Out, Vixen, King o’ Spades—you get the idea? And little colored prints fastened just below the names.”
“I think that would be splendid,” Betty told him cordially. “It would be a real feature, to be able to order your lunch served in Vixen’s stall or Prince’s, instead of just in the third or first. I’ll tell Madeline—I mean Miss Ayres—and I’m sure she’ll see to it.”
“Is she the decorating committee?” inquired the young man. “Because if so, she’s certainly to be congratulated. And does she also make the pretty things on that table? I’m coming over here for lunch some day, and then I shall have time to select Christmas gifts. Marmalade again to-morrow, please. Good-bye.”
The next afternoon he came carrying a handful of scarlet pepper berries. “I had a lot sent on from California,” he explained, “to brighten up our barracks over there. They’ll fit in beautifully here, won’t they?”
“He’s heard about the Perfect Patrons’ Society,” Mary declared, “and he’s trying to qualify for membership. Let him in on condition that he explains himself. I’m simply bursting with curiosity.”
But Young-Man-Over-the-Fence came for his tea, calmly oblivious of the interest he had aroused. He generally arrived tired and listless, and he always hurried out smiling.
“You will save my life yet,” he told Betty gaily one day. “I generally forget to go to lunch, but I never pass up my tea. If ever I should, Nora must run up the hill and remind me—no, that would be a lot of trouble for her, because she couldn’t climb the fence, and it’s further round by the street.”
“Then you mustn’t forget,” Betty insisted. “And I’m sure you oughtn’t to miss your lunch either,” she added gravely. “It must be very bad for your health. Is the stocking business so absorbing?”
The young man laughed good-humoredly. “It’s not the stocking business exactly that’s absorbing; it’s the people who make the stockings. There’s a little Italian boy whose hand was caught in a machine yesterday morning. He was responsible for my passing up yesterday’s lunch. And there are two old men—Russians—who know hardly a word of English. They’re terribly forlorn and lonely. And then the girls, and the miserable little children——Oh, it’s a paradise compared to our mills in the South, of course, but—I’m afraid I’m boring you. Perhaps you aren’t interested in such things.”
“Oh, yes, I am,” Betty told him earnestly, “only I don’t know very much about them. Are you—do you——”