"He's telling me what a nice chap you are, Freddie," said she sweetly. Brock glared out of the window. Freddie sniffed scornfully.
"I'm getting sick of this job," growled Brock under his breath. "I didn't calculate on—"
"Now, Roxbury dear, don't be a bear," she pleaded so gently, her eyes so full of appeal, that he flushed with sudden shame and contrition.
"Forgive me," he said, the old light coming back into his eyes so strongly that she quivered for an instant before lowering her own. "I hate that confounded puppy," he explained lamely, guarding his voice with a new care. "If you felt as I do, you would too."
She laughed in the old way, but she was not soon to forget that moment when panic was so imminent.
"I—I don't see how anyone can help liking Freddie," she said, without actually knowing why. He stared hard at the Danube below. After a long silence he said,—
"It's all tommy-rot about it being blue, isn't it?"
She was also looking at the dark brown, swollen river that has been immortalised in song.
"It's never blue. It's always a yellow-ochre, it seems to me."
He waited a long time before venturing to express the thought that of late had been troubling him seriously.