"At Basel—"
"Oh, go to hell!" said Ingram, suddenly, violently, and in his own tongue.
The conductor immediately put his heels together and saluted. From the extreme want of control of the gentleman's manner he knew him at once for an officer of high rank disguised for travelling purposes in civilian garments, and silently and deferentially withdrew.
"If there's a restaurant car can I have some breakfast?" asked Ingeborg.
"Haven't you had any? You poor little thing. Come along."
She followed him out into the corridor, he going first to clear people out of the way and turning to give her his hand at the crossings from one coach to the next. The restaurant was in the front of the train, and it required perseverance and the opening of many difficult doors to get to it. Each time he turned to help her and gripped hold of her hand as they swayed against the sides and were bumped they looked at each other and laughed. What fun it all was, she thought, and how entirely new and delicious being taken care of as though she were a thing that mattered, a precious thing!
He had had breakfast in Berlin, but he sat watching her with an alert interest that missed not the smallest of her movements, very reminiscent in his attitude and pleasure of a cat watching its own dear mouse, observing it with a whiskered relish, its own dear particular mouse that it has ached for for years before it ever met it, filling itself dismally meanwhile with the wrong mice who disagreed with it—its mouse that, annexed and safely incorporated, was going to do it so much good and make it twice the eat it was before; and he buttered her roll for her, and poured out her tea, and did all the things a cat would do in such a situation if it were a man, pleased that its mouse should fatten, aware that anything it ate and drank would ultimately, so to speak, remain in the family.
The splendid June morning, the last morning of June, shone golden through the long, continuous windows of the car. The fields of the Mark lay bathed in light. It was early still, but it had already begun to be hot, and haymakers straightening themselves to watch the train go by wiped their faces, and the prudent cows were gathered in the shade of trees, and in the ear the ventilator twirled and hummed, and the waiter in his white linen jacket who brought her strawberries, each one of which had been examined and passed as fit and sound by the proper authorities suitably housed in Berlin in buildings erected for the purpose, was a credit to the Prussian State Railway by-law which decrees, briefly and implacably, that waiters shall be cool.
She pulled out one of the blue German hundred mark notes from her blouse when he brought the bill, and more of them came out with it.
"What on earth is all that for?" Ingram asked.