At breakfast he was again startled by a low voice very close to him. It was Mr. Fair.
"Mr. March, why not come over and sit with us?"
The ladies bowed from a table on the far side of the room. Mrs. Fair seemed as handsome as ever; while Miss Garnet!—well! If she was winsome and beautiful yesterday, with that silly, facing-both-ways traveling cap she had worn, what could a reverent young man do here and now but gasp his admiration under his breath as he followed his senior toward them?
Even in the lively conversation which followed he found time to think it strange that she had never seemed to him half so lovely in Suez; was it his over-sight? Maybe not, for in Suez she had never in life been half so happy. Mrs. Fair could see this with her eyes shut, and poor Barbara could see that she saw it by the way she shut her eyes. But John, of course, was blind enough, and presently concluded that the wonder of this crescent loveliness was the old, old wonder of the opening rose. Meanwhile the talk flowed on.
"And by that time," said John, "you'd missed your connection. I might have guessed it. Now you'll take—but you've hardly got time——"
No, Mrs. Fair was feeling rather travel weary; this was Saturday; they would pass Sunday here and start refreshed on Monday.
In the crowded elevator, when March was gone, Barbara heard Mrs. Fair say to her husband,
"You must know men here whom it would be good for him to see; why don't you offer to——" Mrs. Fair ceased and there was no response, except that Barbara said, behind her smiling lips,
"It's because he's in bad hands, and still I have not warned him!"
March did not see them again that day. In the evening, two men, friends, sitting in the hotel's rotunda, were conjecturing who yonder guest might be to whose inquiries the clerk was so promptly attentive.