The salesman returned with the package, and Beatrice gave him the five-dollar bill. She hastily left the store, and, still with averted eyes, bumped into the very person she was seeking to avoid.
"I beg your pardon," he said, raising his hat. "It was my awkwardness. I stopped to raise my umbrella. You see it rains a little." Then noticing that she carried no umbrella, and that she was looking very tired, he asked kindly, "Are you going home?"
"I think I am ready for home," answered Beatrice, trying to keep the tears out of her voice. "I've been down town since ten o'clock——" She stopped suddenly, the absurdity of the statement coupled with the single package of which he had relieved her, appealing to her with full force.
"But you've had luncheon?"
"I am not at all hungry," declared Beatrice perversely. She was very near to tears, and she felt that another question on his part might precipitate them.
"This is the very time to have you taste the German cake they call 'puffer,' and which can be had only in this shop," said Francis,—and almost before she knew it he had led the way into a caterer's, and a neat little maid was taking an order for iced chocolate and the German sweet-bread.
"What would father say?" she thought despairingly. "What will Miss Billy say? What shall I say to myself, to-morrow?" But for the present she was strangely content to sit in restful retirement opposite this grave dark-eyed young fellow, Mr. Schultzsky's grand-nephew, and satisfy her hunger with the iced chocolate and delicious German cake.
She was telling him the history of the day.
Strangely, too, in a few moments she was telling him the history of the day, and Francis was laughing heartily. "That accounts for the oddity of Miss Billy's actions," he declared. "I saw her riding on the top of an empty omnibus, clad in the sombre disguise of a raincoat. But she evidently didn't care if I knew her, for she waved her hand to me from her elevated perch."