"This must be yours," she said. "You must have spilled it coming over the wall, Mr. Townsend."
It was Peter's cigarette-case.
"Why, dear me, yes!" I assented, affably. "Do you know, now, I would have been tremendously sorry to lose that? It is a sort of present—an unbirthday present from a quite old friend."
She turned it over in her hand.
"It's very handsome," she marvelled. "Such a pretty monogram! Does it stand for Poor Idiot Boy?"
"Eh?" said I. "P.I.B., you mean? No, that stands for Perfectly Immaculate Behaviour. My friend gave it to me because, he said, I was so good. And—oh, well, he added a few things to that,—partial sort of a friend, you know,—and, really—Why, really, Miss Beechinor, it would embarrass me to tell you what he added," I protested, and modestly waved the subject aside.
"Now that," my meditations ran, "is the absolute truth. Peter did tell me I was good. And it really would embarrass me to tell her he added 'for-nothing.' So, this far, I have been a model of veracity."
Then I took the case,—gaining thereby the bliss of momentary contact with a velvet-soft trifle that seemed, somehow, to set my own grosser hand a-tingle—and I cried: "Now, Miss Beechinor, you must show me the pergola. I am excessively partial to pergolas."
And in my soul, I wondered what a pergola looked like, and why on earth I had been fool enough to waste the last three days in bedeviling Peter, and how under the broad canopy of heaven I could ever have suffered from the delusion that I had seen a really adorable woman before to-day.
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