She looked at him with a vague smile.
“What can you prove?” said she.
“Perfectly true, dear child. Nothing. I don’t want to prove anything, either.”
She smiled incredulously.
“It’s quite true, Scheherazade. Otherwise, I shouldn’t have ordered my steward to throw the remains of my dinner out of the corridor porthole. No, dear child. I should have had it analysed, had your stateroom searched for more of that elusive seasoning you used to flavour my dinner; had a further search made for a certain sort of handkerchief and perfume. Also, just imagine the delightful evidence which a thorough search of your papers might reveal!” He laughed. “No, Scheherazade; I did not care to prove you anything resembling a menace to society. Because, in the first place, I am absurdly grateful to you.”
Her face became expressionless under the slow flush mounting.
“I’m not teasing you,” he insisted. “What I say is true. I’m grateful to you for violently injecting romance into my perfectly commonplace existence. You have taken the book of my life and not only extra illustrated it with vivid and chromatic pictures, but you have unbound it, sewed into its prosaic pages several chapters ripped bodily from a penny-dreadful, and you have then rebound the whole thing and pasted your own pretty picture on the cover! Come, now! Ought 213 not a man to be grateful to any philanthropic girl who so gratuitously obliges him?”
Her face burned under his ridicule; her clasped hands in her lap were twisted tight as though to maintain her self-control.
“What do you want of me?” she asked between lips that scarcely moved.
He laughed, sat up, stretched out both arms with a sigh of satisfaction. The colour came back to his face; he dropped one leg over the bed’s edge; and she stood erect and stepped aside for him to rise.