“No,” she said.
“And if there was?”
“Can you ask?”
“Then come to breakfast, heart of my heart!—the moments are flying very swiftly, and there is only this day left—until to-morrow. Listen! I hear the steward moving like a gray rat in the pantry. Can we endure a steward in Eden?”
“Only during breakfast,” she said, laughing. “I smell the wheaten flapjacks, and, oh, I am famished!”
There have been other breakfasts—Barmecide breakfasts compared with their first crust broken in love.
But they ate—oh, indeed, they ate everything before them, from flapjacks to the piles of little, crisp trout. And they might have called for more, but there came, on tiptoe, the steward, bowing, presenting a telegram on a tray of silver; and Crawford’s heart stopped, and he stared at the bit of paper as though it concealed a coiled snake.
She, too, suddenly apprehensive, sat rigid, the smile dying out in her eyes; and when he finally took the envelope and tore it open, she shivered.
“Crawford, Sagamore Club:
“Ophir has consolidated with Steel Plank. You take charge of London office. Make arrangements to catch steamer leaving a week from to-morrow. Garcide and I will be at Sagamore to-night. James J. Crawford.”