"Yes, I'm the inventor," the tanned young man in the dusty overalls answered rather contemptuously: "What did you take me for? ... A French medical student having a joy-ride, or a commis voyageur?"
"Can't say. Never thought! ... Fact is—my wife had frightened me horribly. When your machine bore down on her—posted right in the middle of the gravel—I was scared stiff—give you my honour!—you might have sunk a brace of Dreadnoughts in the palms of my hands!"
Franky made this absurd statement with so sincere an air, and clinched it so effectually by displaying a lovely silk-cambric handkerchief in a state of soppy limpness, that the abrased inventor nearly laughed.
But his thick, silvery, fair eyebrows settled into a straight line across his tanned forehead. He said with a directness that seemed to belong to his lean, keen, hatchet-faced type:
"Once more, I am glad that no harm has happened to the lady. The delay caused by the—mishap can hardly have prejudiced my success. For all I know, the test of my hoverer may have favourably impressed the judges. If it has done otherwise I have no right to blame man, dog, or devil, for a failure that may be my own."
He lifted his goggled cap to Margot with a good air, pulled it down, and was in the act of lowering the visor, when Margot's voice arrested the big-boned hand. That voice Franky knew could be wonderfully coaxing. It pleaded now, soft as the sigh of a Mediterranean breeze:
"Whether the test is successful or isn't, will you promise that we shall hear from you? ..."
"Good egg!" joined in Franky. "Do let us know! ... We're stopping at the Spitz, Place Vendôme." He warmed and grew expansive in the light of Margot's smile of approval. "Drop in on us there," he urged, "as soon as you've found out. Come and dine with us in any case.... No!—we're engaged to-night, but come and lunch at two sharp to-morrow, and tell us all about your hoverer over a bottle of Bubbly. Suite 10, Second Floor. Name of Norwater. Stick this away to remind you," he ended, tendering his card.
"You're awfully good. But at the same time I hardly——"
The voice broke off. A glance at the proffered pasteboard had dyed the inventor flaming scarlet from the collar of his dusty gabardine to the edges of his goggled cap. He dropped the card quietly upon the gravel, and said, looking Franky straight between the eyes: