"I could have set them quarreling just as well, but the role of cupid suits me to-night." His shoulders drooped wearily; the feverish brightness of his eyes and the pallor of his thin face indicated that he had indeed spent all his nervous force.
"Cupid in a sweater!" Adoree exclaimed. "Well, I believe it, for your playing made me positively mushy. I've been hugging a sofa-cushion and dreaming of heroes for ever so long. Why, at this moment I'd marry the janitor."
With the eager shyness of a boy he inquired: "Do you really like to hear me play? Can I come and play for you again?"
"Not without a chaperon," she told him, positively; "wool tickles my cheek."
Pope rose hastily and in some embarrassment. He could write about love with a cynic's pen, but he could not bear to talk about it even in a joking way. He eyed the speaker with the frightened fascination of a charmed rabbit, until she laughed in mischievous enjoyment of his perturbation.
"Oh, never fear! It will take more than music to make me forget what you are. Say!" She yawned, doubled up her little fists, and stretched. "Won't you play something to make those lovers go home, so I can go to bed?"
He shook his head. "Not until we go to the nearest cafe and have a bite to eat."
"There are no cafes open at this hour."
In spite of her protestations that she was not hungry he bore her away with him, bareheaded as she was, and in the next block they found an unsuspected little place called the "Chauffeurs' Lunch," where a man was busy making sandwiches of the whitest bread and the most delicious-smelling Hamburger for a hungry cabby with a battered hat. And there they each ate a bowl of crackers and milk with a baked apple, using the arms of their chairs for tables. Pope's bill was forty cents, and, strangely enough, not even when he paid it did he remember that this was the woman for whose company at supper other men paid five hundred dollars.