As she was pouring herself a second cup of coffee, the vacant chair at her table was drawn out and an amiable, amused voice asked: "Do you mind my sitting here, Mrs. Druce?"
Lucinda jumped in consternation. The speaker bowed with an ingratiating smile: her unsought champion of the night before!...
She recollected herself and gave a jerky inclination of her head; but all she could find to say was "Oh!" Whereupon the young man laughed quietly and, construing her consent, sat down.
"I'm surprised, too," he confessed—"pleasantly, if you don't mind my saying so. And yet the dear public continually kicks about coincidences!"
Lucinda found her tongue but found it incompetent to frame any but formal phrases: "I have a great deal to thank you for——"
"Please don't think of it that way. To the contrary, I owe you all sorts of apologies——"
"Apologies!"
"For butting in where any rational angel would have been scared to death to tread, and particularly for being here—though that was my fault and this isn't. But I'm glad you're not angry with me—" The waiter thrust an order blank with the bill of fare under the young man's nose, and he concluded to give them attention with an easy: "If you'll excuse me...."
The head he bowed over the cards was well-modelled and thatched with a good quantity of hair, light brown in colour and amazingly lustrous. A skin whose patina of faint tan resembled that of old ivory, with never a blemish, covered boldly fashioned features. The mobile face had a trick of lighting up when its owner was talking as if aglow with the light of his thought, so that his look was in fact more eloquent than his speech. Lucinda thought she had never seen hands more strong and graceful, or any better cared for, not even Bel's. Nor had Bel ever dressed in better taste.
The object of her interest waved the waiter away and met her openly interested regard without loss of countenance.