He did not speak at once. Looking into her troubled eyes, he said, after a soulful moment: "I am glad that I came in time. You were made to love and be loved. The man you love,—if there ever be one so fortunate,—will be my debtor to the end of his days. I glorify myself for having been instrumental in saving you for him."
"If there ever be one so fortunate," she mused. Suddenly her mood changed. A new kind of despair came into her lovely eyes, a plaintive note into her voice. (I may be pardoned for declaring that she became, in the twinkling of an eye, a real flesh and blood woman.) "I don't know what I shall do unless I can get something to wear, Mr. Barnes. I haven't a thing, you see. This suit is—well, you can see what it is. I—"
"I've never seen a more attractive suit," he pronounced. "I said as much to myself the first time I saw it, the other evening at the cross-roads. It fits—"
"But I cannot LIVE in it, you know. My boxes are up at Green Fancy,—two small ones for steamer use. Everything I have in the world is in them. Pray do not look so forlorn. You really couldn't have carried them, Mr. Barnes, and I shudder when I think of what would have happened to you if I had tumbled them out of the window upon your head. You would have been squashed, and it isn't unlikely that you would have aroused every one in the house with your groans and curses."
"I dropped a trunk on my toes one time," he said, grinning with a delight that had nothing to do with the reminiscence. She was quaintly humorous once more, and he was happy. "I think one swears more prodigiously when a trunk falls on his toes than he does when it drops on his head. There is something wonderfully quieting and soothing about a trunk lighting on one's head from a great height. Don't worry about your boxes. I have a feeling it will be perfectly safe to call for them with a wagon to-morrow."
"I don't know what I should do without you," she said.
That evening at supper, Barnes and Mr. Rushcroft, to say nothing of three or four "transients," had great cause for complaint about the service. Miss Tilly was wholly pre-occupied. She was memorising her "part." Instead of asking Mr. Rushcroft whether he would have bean soup or noodles, she wanted to know whether she should speak the line this way or that. She had a faraway, strained look in her eyes, and she mumbled so incessantly that one of the guests got up and went out to see Mr. Jones about it. Being assured that she was just a plain damn' fool and not crazy, he returned and said a great many unpleasant things in the presence of Miss Tilly, who fortunately did not hear them.
"You've spoiled a very good waitress, Rushcroft," said Barnes.
"And a very good appetite as well," growled the Star.
Late in the night, Barnes, sitting at his window dreaming dreams, saw two big touring cars whiz past the tavern. The next morning Peter Ames, the chauffeur, called him up on the telephone to inquire whether he had heard anything more about the job on his sister's place. He was anxious to know, he said, because everybody had cleared out of Green Fancy during the night and he had received instructions to lock up the house and look for another situation.