Touch and tone were enough to disperse his anxieties, and he answered that he was in luck to find her already in when he had supposed her engaged, over a Nouveau Luxe tea-table, in repairing the afternoon's ravages.
"Oh, I didn't shop much—I didn't stay out long." She raised a kindling face to him. "And what do you think I've been doing? While you were sitting in your stuffy old theatre, worrying about the money I was spending (oh, you needn't fib—I know you were!) I was saving you hundreds and thousands. I've saved you the price of our passage!"
Ralph laughed in pure enjoyment of her beauty. When she shone on him like that what did it matter what nonsense she talked?
"You wonderful woman—how did you do it? By countermanding a tiara?"
"You know I'm not such a fool as you pretend!" She held him at arm's length with a nod of joyous mystery. "You'll simply never guess! I've made Peter Van Degen ask us to go home on the Sorceress. What. do you say to that?"
She flashed it out on a laugh of triumph, without appearing to have a doubt of the effect the announcement would produce.
Ralph stared at her. "The Sorceress? You MADE him?"
"Well, I managed it, I worked him round to it! He's crazy about the idea now—but I don't think he'd thought of it before he came."
"I should say not!" Ralph ejaculated. "He never would have had the cheek to think of it."
"Well, I've made him, anyhow! Did you ever know such luck?"