"I'll tell you when the time comes. It's not the sort of thing to be sprung on the street."
"Oh, how interesting!" But though Peggy stopped asking questions, her curiosity grew prodigiously. Silent as Graham was as to the occasion of this unwonted festivity, she realized that there was about him an atmosphere of suppressed excitement. Sometimes, when his eyes were on her, he seemed to be looking through her at something big in the distance. Peggy was at the age when thrills and mysteries are always welcome. She climbed aboard the street-car all a-tingle with pleasurable excitement.
The dining-room at the McLaughlin impressed Peggy with its grandeur. The hour was still early for fashionable diners, and less than half of the tables were occupied. But the rows of waiters in black clothes and gleaming shirt fronts, and the scrape of violins in the background, gave Peggy an uneasy sense of being out of place. But Graham, convinced that he was escorting the queen rose of the rose-bud garden of girls, walked to his place as sure of himself as a young prince. And what he saw in Peggy's eyes was not of a sort to lessen his self-confidence.
Peggy soon perceived that her customary little hints regarding economy were to have no weight on this particular occasion. Graham began with oysters and then appealed to Peggy as to her choice in soups. And perceiving that he was determined to be extravagant, for all she could say or do, Peggy gave herself up to enjoying the fruits of his extravagance. This was clearly Graham's night. Peggy decided not to ask again about his secret till he told her of his own accord.
"PEGGY LOOKED AT HIM WITHOUT REPLYING"
As a matter of fact, Graham seemed in no hurry to take her into his confidence. The meal went on through its leisurely courses, the tables about them gradually filling, till the attentive waiter set their dessert before them—French pastries with small cups of deliciously fragrant coffee. Peggy tasted and sipped and smiled, and looked across the table with such an air of radiant happiness that if Graham had kept the smallest fragment of a heart in his possession, he would have been forced to surrender it on the spot.
He laid down his fork and leaned toward her. "Peggy, I've got my promotion."
"Oh, Graham!"
"They want me to go to South America for two years," Graham continued, speaking with curious breathlessness. "They're not asking me to stay permanently, you understand. But they want a man here who's thoroughly familiar with conditions down there."