George followed her out of the car and Dibley beckoned me over to him.
“Get her talking again,” he told me. “Leave him to me.”
When I found her seated alone at a table for two in the dining car, I interpreted Dib’s orders liberally. She smiled at me and, when I asked, “How about my sitting here?” she said, “Oh, I’d like it!” So there I was across the table from her, ordering her supper and mine together.
There’s something about that—the breaking of bread together, you know—which rather does more than you’d ever suspect unless you’ve tried it under conditions like mine. We not only broke bread; we broke a full portion of broiled white fish between us, another of cauliflower au gratin. I served those while she poured our two cups of orange pekoe from the same little pot and, for both of us, she mixed salad dressing of her own in a bowl. The best dressing, by the way, I’d ever tasted.
She’d the prettiest hands I’d ever seen; and to have them doing things for me!
Occasionally, but with rapidly lessening frequency, I wondered about George,—why he didn’t show up for supper and to what I’d left him with Dib. I ventured to ask Doris about him.
“Oh, he’s not hungry,” she assured me.
As I remembered him, he hadn’t looked it; he’d only looked worried, whereas she didn’t at all. She had true nerve, you see.
That dinner was so delightful that I longed to forget that she was playing for her liberty for the next ten years. I didn’t want any other element in this but just her and me.
It ended with the check which she let me pay without silly argument; then we had to get up, and never more reluctant feet than mine moved from a dining car.