CHAPTER X
ABOUT eight that evening Annan knocked and entered, and found Eris intent on beef tea.
“How are you?” he asked in his winning, easy way, leaning down to look at her, and to inspect the broth.
Her awe of him and his golden tongue made her diffident. She tried now to respond to his light, informal kindness,—meet it part way.
She said, shyly, that she was quite recovered,—sat embarrassed under his amiable scrutiny, too bashful to continue eating.
“I’m having two or three people to dinner,” he remarked, adjusting the camelia in his button-hole. “I hope we won’t be noisy. If we keep you awake, pound on the floor.”
She thought that humorous. They both smiled. She looked at the camelia in the lapel of his dinner jacket. He leaned over and let her smell it.
“Tell me,” he said with that caressing accent of personal interest which in such men is merely normal affability, “do you really begin to feel better?”
She flushed, thanked him in a troubled voice. Mustering courage:
“I know I must be in the way here,” she ventured; “I could get up and dress, if you’d let me, Mr. Annan——”