"My silly conceit, I presume. I couldn't bear the thought of having that roughneck return and muss up one of my neatest jobs."
"I don't understand you at all," she murmured, utterly confounded.
"Nor I you, if it matters. Still, I'm sure you won't keep me much longer in suspense, considering how open-faced I've been. But here's that animal of a waiter again."
She was willingly silent, though she exerted herself to seem at ease with indifferent success. The voice of her companion was like a distant, hollow echo in her hearing; her wits were all awhirl, her nerves as taut and vibrant as banjo-strings; before her vision the face of Blue Serge swam, a flesh-tinted moon now and again traversed by a flash of white when he smiled.
"Come!" the man rallied her sharply, if in an undertone, "this will never do. You're as white as a sheet, trembling and staring as if I were a leper--or a relation by marriage or--something repulsive!"
She sat forward mechanically and mustered an uncertain smile. "Forgive me. I'm a little overwrought--the heat and--everything."
"Not another word, then, till you've finished. I'll do the talking, if it's all the same to you. But you needn't answer--needn't listen, for that matter. I've no pride in my conversational powers, and you mustn't risk losing your appetite."
He seemed to find it easy enough to make talk; but Sally spared him little attention, being at first exclusively preoccupied with the demands of her hunger, and later--as the meal progressed, renewing her physical strength and turning the ebbing tide of her spirits--thoroughly engaged with the problem of how to extricate herself from this embarrassing association or, if extrication proved impossible, how to turn it to her own advantage. For if the affair went on this way--his way--she were a sorry adventuress indeed.
Small cups of black coffee stood before them, steaming, when a question roused her, and she shook herself together and faced her burglar across the cloth, once more full mistress of her faculties.
"You're feeling better'?"