He rose from his chair and gazed pensively at his black socked feet.
Miss Bibby fluttered up at once, handed back his pen, and hurriedly tore off from the block her last written sheet.
“I can never, never thank you enough,” she said, and held out to him a hand that somehow pleased him, and made him compunctious at the same time—such a white, slender, gentlewoman’s hand it was.
But then he remembered his hero had not yet proposed, and assuredly would not to-day after such an interruption. He told himself that she had deserved all she got, and that she would, at all events, earn the six guineas she was so eager about.
“Oh, don’t mention it,” he said gallantly, and turned her over to Kate, who was just coming along to satisfy herself that actual murder had not been committed.
She fluttered back one moment, however, just as he was closing the door.
[p111]
“I believe interviews have to be signed as authentic by their subject, have they not?” she said; “forgive me for troubling you again.”
“Oh, have they?” he said. His fountain-pen was in his hand. “Where shall I put the signature? I suppose you will copy all this out again; suppose I write on this blank slip?”
“That will do nicely,” she said.
“I guarantee this to be an authentic interview, Hugh Kinross, his mark,” he scrawled lazily across the page.