Frances hardened her voice on the instant. “But that doesn’t help me to understand why—what this is all about.”
He responded slowly, searching for his words as he went along. The rattle of machines in the next room for the first time came into the conversation, and forced him to lift his voice. “You were my last friend in France—my first friend in England,” he began. “I said I would not forget you, and you have been always in my mind—always somewhere secure and fresh and sweet in my mind. It was only last night that I learned where I might find you. You will remember that when I begged you to tell me, you laughed and would not. I must not make you believe that I did not very soon find out your name or that I could not have learned your whereabouts much earlier. All I say is that I did not forget—and that last night, when the chance came naturally to me, I asked and learned what I desired to know. And then—why, then—this knowledge spread upward to be of more importance than all the other things I knew. I went home—but never to think of sleeping, but only to change my clothes and hasten out again, to get some new morning flowers for you, and to come to you at the earliest moment. I did not know that London rose so late—I arrived before the time, and, so it seems, waiting for your coming, I fell asleep. That is the entire story. You see it is not very complicated—it is by no means extraordinary.”
Frances had listened with a dreamy gentleness in her gray eyes. She started slightly when he stopped, and gave him a keen, cool glance. “The entire story?” she queried. “I think you have forgotten to mention that it was my sister who told you about me, and gave you my address.”
Her prescience in no wise astonished Christian. Imagination had thrown round the Minerva-like figure which personified her in his thoughts, such a glamour of intellectual radiancy, that it seemed quite a natural thing for her to divine the obscure, and comprehend the mysterious. He smiled at her as he shrugged his shoulders. “It did not occur to me as important,” he exclaimed. “It is true, however, that she told me. She did not know the address when I asked her, but later she procured it for me from her brother. It was at a supper at the Hanover Theater. Afterward there was dancing on the stage. I fear it would have been rather tiresome for me if I had not met your sister. She is a very friendly lady, and she talked a great deal to me.”
“About me?” demanded Frances, sharply.
“Oh, no—about you only a few pleasant words; not more. It seems you do not meet very often.”
He spoke with such evident frankness that she hesitated over the further inquiry her mind had framed. At last she put it in altered form. “Then you would not say that she sent you here—-that she told you to come—and to come by way of Covent Garden, and buy these flowers?” The question, as she uttered it, was full of significant suggestion about the nature of the reply desired. Its tone, too, carried the welcome hint of a softened mood, under the influence of which Christian’s face brightened with joy.
“Why, not at all!” he cried, lifting his voice gaily above the typewriters’ clatter. “She did speak of Covent Garden, and the show of flowers there in the early morning, but it was not in the least with reference to you. It was my own idea long after she had gone. Oh, no one would be more surprised than that good sister of yours to know that I am here!”
Frances, with a puzzling smile which ended in a long breath of relief, took up some of the roses and held them to her face.
“Sit down again,” she bade him, with a pleasant glow in the eyes regarding him over the blossoms; “sit down, and let us talk. Or does that noise bore you?”