Then Ann Woltor with unprecedented presence of mind jumped up from the table and ran to the mirror over the fireplace. Only the twittering throat-muscle reflected in that mirror belied for an instant the sincerity of either her haste or her astonishment.
"Broken tooth!" she protested incredulously. "Why! Have I got a—broken tooth?"
People acknowledge their mental panics so divergently. My Husband acknowledged his by ramming his elbow into his coffee cup. Claude Kennilworth lit one cigarette after another. The May Girl started to butter a picture post card that someone had just passed her. Quite starkly before my very eyes I saw the Sober Stranger, erstwhile drunken, reach out and slip a silver salt-shaker into his pocket. Meeting his glance my own nerves exploded in a single hoot of mirth.
Into the unhappy havoc of the Stranger's face a rather sick but very determinate little smile shot suddenly.
"Well, I certainly am rattled?" he acknowledged.
His embarrassment was absolutely perfect. Not a whit too much, not a whit too little, at a moment when the slightest under-emphasis or over-emphasis of his awkwardness would have stamped him ineradicably as either boor—or bounder. More indeed by his chair's volition than by his own he seemed to jerk aside then and there from any further responsibility for the incident. Turbid as the storm at the window his eyes racked back to the eyes of his companions.
"Surely," he besought us, "there must be some place—some hotel—somewhere in this town where I can crawl into for a day or two till I can yank myself together again? . . . Taking me in this way from the streets—or worse the way you- people have—" Along the stricken pallor of his forehead a glisten of sweat showed faintly. From my eyes to my Husband's eyes, and back to mine again he turned with a sharply impulsive gesture of appeal. "How do you-people know but what I am a burglar?" he demanded.
"Even so," I suggested blithely, "can't you see that we'd infinitely rather have you visiting here as our friend than boarding at the hotel as our foe!"
The mirthless smile on the Stranger's face twitched ever so faintly at one corner.
"You really believe then—" he quickened, "that there is 'honor among thieves'?"