"Oh, Lord!" said Mudd, "another mixture. As if there wasn't enough of us in the business!"
"That's a good name for it, 'business.' I feel as if I was helping to run a sort of beastly factory, a mad sort of show where we're trying to condense folly and make it consume its own smoke—an illicit whisky-still, for we're trying to hide our business all the time, and it gives me the jim-jams to think that at any moment a client may turn up and see him like that. I feel sometimes, Mudd, as fellows must feel when they have the police after them."
"Don't talk of the police," said Mudd, "the very word gives me the shivers. When is she coming, Mr. Robert?"
"Miss Delyse? She's coming by the 3.15 train to-day to Farnborough station, and I've got to meet her. I've just booked her a room here. You see how I am tied. If I was here alone she couldn't come, because it wouldn't be proper, but having him here makes it proper."
"Have you told her the state he's in?"
"Yes. She doesn't mind; she said she wished everyone else was the same—she said it was beautiful."
They were talking in Bobby's room, which overlooked the garden of the hotel, and glancing out of the window now, he saw Cerise.
Then he detached himself from Mudd. He reached her as she was passing through the little rambler-roofed alley that leads from the garden to the bowling-green. There is an arbour in the garden tucked away in a corner, and there is an arbour close to the bowling-green; there are several other arbours, for the hotel-planner was an expert in his work, but these are the only two arbours that have to do with our story.
Bobby caught up with the girl before she had reached the green, and they walked together towards it, chatting as young people only can chat with life and gaiety about nothing. They were astonishingly well-matched in mind. Minds have colours just like eyes; there are black minds and brown minds and muddy-coloured minds and grey minds, and blue minds. Bobby's was a blue mind, though, indeed, it sometimes almost seemed green. Cerise's was blue, a happy blue like the blue of her eyes.