He wished to make her laugh again, and he succeeded—in spite of the sad pan-bread.
"Perhaps you have been muck-raking somebody in your stories," she remarked. "But that wouldn't include me. I am even more harmless than you are. My worst enemies are frivolous girls from well-to-do families who think it beneath them to learn to cook scientifically."
"It's a joke," Prime offered soberly; "it can't be anything else." Then: "If we only knew what is expected of us, so that we could play up to our part. What is the last thing you remember—in Quebec?"
"The most commonplace thing in the world. I am, or I was, a member of a vacation excursion party of school-teachers. Last evening at the hotel somebody proposed that we go to the Heights of Abraham and see the old battle-field by moonlight."
"And you did it?"
"Yes. After we had tramped all over the place, one of the young women asked me if I wouldn't like to go with her to the head of the cove where General Wolfe and his men climbed up from the river. We went together, and while we were there the young woman stumbled and fell and turned her ankle—or at least she said she did. I took her arm to help her back to the others, and in a little while I began to feel so tired and sleepy that I simply couldn't drag myself another step. That is the last that I remember."
"I can't tell quite such a straight story," said Prime, taking his turn, "but at any rate I shan't begin by telling you a lie. I'm afraid I was—er—drunk, you know."
"Tell me," she commanded, as one who would know the worst.
"I, too, was on my vacation," he went on. "I was to meet a friend of mine in Boston, and we were to motor together through New England. At the last moment I had a telegram from this friend changing the plan and asking me to meet him in Quebec. I arrived a day or so ahead of him, I suppose; at least, he wasn't at the hotel where he said he'd be."
"Go on," she encouraged.