"Why don't you come down to Cookham and get out of this heat?" Miss Cavendish asked. "You need it; you look ill."
"I'd like to, but I can't," said Carroll. "The fact is, I paid in advance for these rooms, and if I lived anywhere else I'd be losing five guineas a week on them."
Miss Cavendish regarded him severely. She had never quite mastered his American humor.
"But—five guineas—why, that's nothing to you," she said. Something in the lodger's face made her pause. "You don't mean—"
"Yes, I do," said the lodger, smiling. "You see, I started in to lay siege to London without sufficient ammunition. London is a large town, and it didn't fall as quickly as I thought it would. So I am economizing. Mr. Lockhart's Coffee Rooms and I are no longer strangers."
Miss Cavendish put down her cup of tea untasted and leaned toward him.
"Are you in earnest?" she asked. "For how long?"
"Oh, for the last month," replied the lodger; "they are not at all bad—clean and wholesome and all that."
"But the suppers you gave us, and this," she cried, suddenly, waving her hands over the pretty tea-things, "and the cake and muffins?"
"My friends, at least," said Carroll, "need not go to Lockhart's."