The street was certainly a quaint, old-fashioned one, and the boarding house in question by no means lacking in a fine though dingy sort of dignity.
But the doorbell that the girl rang and rang brought no reassuring answer. Fumbling anxiously in her purse for a moment, she threw out her hands with a little gesture of dismay.
"It is that I must also have mislaid my key," she frowned. Then like a flash of pale sunshine her smile seemed to drive every possible shadow from her mind. "Oh, well," she cried. "It is after all only a scarce seven o'clock. Some one in not many minutes will surely come. And meanwhile," she glowed. "Of such a fine night! I will just sit down here very happy and take the air!"
"Take the air?" gasped the Young Doctor. Quite unconsciously as he spoke he reached up and drew his fur collar a little bit closer about his neck.
But already the girl had dropped casually 61down on the top step and opened the throat of her own dark-fur red coat as one who was fairly thirsting for air.
"Good night!" she said briskly.
"Good-by!" said the Young Doctor. Before he had even reached the lower step he was congratulating himself that the incident was now safely ended,—"comfortably ended," he meant, instead of awkwardly, as it might so easily have been. "Foreigners were often so irrational," he considered. Even as he considered, he turned in spite of himself to investigate the sudden unmistakable rustle of a paper bag. His suspicion was frankly confirmed.
"See!" brandished the girl triumphantly. "The little pink cake of the foolish woman!" With an unmistakable chuckle of joy her white teeth met through the treasure.
In the flash of a second, the perfectly idiotic impulse of a joke, the Young Doctor lifted a warning finger at her.
"You realize of course that you are eating a—a misapprehension?" he admonished her with really terrifying severity.