“There is none. And if there had been Aunt Lucy would have been much hurt to have you go there. Where did you leave your bag?”
“At the station. I can stay only for a night and a day, so it's a small one.”
“I'll send Young Sam for it. Now let Sam take you to your room, and in a few minutes I'll give you supper.”
“Don't bother about supper at this hour. I only want—”
“You want what you are to have,—some of Sue's delicious Southern cookery.” She smiled at him as he looked back at her, following the old servant. “She's been in the family for forty years and she loves to have company to appreciate her dishes. Sam, you are to help Doctor Burns. He has had a broken arm.”
When Burns came down, fresh from a bath and comfortable with clean linen, he smelled odours which made him realize that, eager as he was for other things, he was human enough to be intensely hungry with a healthy man's appetite. So he surrendered himself to the fortunes that now befell him.
Old Sam conducted him to the dining-room, a quaintly attractive apartment where candle-light illumined the bare mahogany of the round table laid with a large square of linen at his place and set with delicate ancient china and silver. Ellen Lessing was already there in a high-backed chair opposite the one set for him, a figure to which his eyes were again drawn irresistibly and upon which they continued to rest as he took his seat.
Sam disappeared toward the kitchen, and Burns spoke in a low voice across the table.
“I feel as if I were in a dream,” said he. “Forty-eight hours ago I was rushing about, hundreds of miles from here, trying to attend to the wants of a lot of people who seemed determined not to let me get away. Now I'm down here in the midst of all this quiet and peace, with you before me to look at, and nobody to demand anything of me for at least twenty-four hours. It's all too good to be true.”
“It seems rather odd to me, too,” she answered, letting her eyes stray from his and rest upon the bowl of japonicas of a glowing pink, which stood in the centre of the table. The candle-light made little starry points in her dark eyes as she looked at the rich-hued blooms. “The last person in the world I was expecting to see to-night was you.”