“Must I?” Collier Pratt smiled his rare smile. “Well, at any rate, it is good to hear you say so.”
She finished her ice-cream, and Collier Pratt drank his mineral water slowly, and smoked innumerable cigarettes of Virginia tobacco. The conversation which had proceeded so expeditiously to this point seemed for no apparent reason, suddenly to become gratuitous. Nancy had never before begun on the subject of the balanced ration without being respectfully allowed to go through to the end. She had not been allowed to feel snubbed, but she was a little bewildered that any conversation in which she was participating, could be so gracefully stopped before it was ended by her expressed desire.
Collier Pratt took his watch out of his pocket, and looked at it hastily.
“By jove,” he said, “I had entirely forgotten. I have a child in my charge. I must be about looking after her.”
“A child?” Nancy cried, astonished.
“Yes, a little girl. She’s probably sitting up for me, poor baby. Can you get home alone, if I put you on a bus or a street-car?”
“If you’ll call a taxi for me—” Nancy said.
She noticed that the check was paid with change instead of a bill. In fact, her host seemed not to have a bill of any denomination in his pocket, but to be undisturbed by the fact. He parted from her casually.
“Good-by, child,” he said with his head in the door after he had given the chauffeur her street number; “with the permission of le bon Dieu, we shall see each other again. I feel that He is going to give it to us.”