"I wouldn't mention it if I were you," she retorted. "Seeing that you just made a fool of yourself that time."
She openly sniffed the air as he stepped by her reaching out for butcher-knife and roast. "So you are dad's kind, are you? Hitting the booze every show you get. The Lord deliver me from his chief blunder. Meaning a man."
"He probably will," grinned Packard genially. "And as for turning up your nose at a fellow for taking a drop o' kindness with a hospitable host, why, that's all nonsense, you know."
Terry kicked her high heels impudently and vouchsafed him no further answer beyond that easy gesture. Packard made his own sandwich, found the salt, poured a tin cup of coffee.
"The sugar's over there." She jerked her head toward a shelf on which, after some searching among a lot of empty and nearly empty cans, Packard found it. "That's all there is and precious little left; help yourself but don't forget breakfast comes in the morning."
"This is the old Slade place, isn't it?" Packard asked.
"It was, about the time the big wall was building in China. Where've you been the last couple of hundred years? It's the Temple place now."
"Then you're Miss Temple?"
"Teresa Arriega for my mother, Temple for my dad," she told him in the quick, bright way which already he found characteristic of her. "Terry for myself, if you say it quick."
He had suspected from the beginning that there was Southern blood of some strain in her. Now he studied her frankly, and, just to try her out, said carelessly: