"I wonder how soon my maid will come," she mused, dropping the loose roses on her knees. "If she is going to be very long about it perhaps-- perhaps you might care to find a chair--if you have decided to wait."
He drew one from a corner and seated himself, pulses hammering his throat.
Through the stillness of the house sounded at intervals the clink of glass from the pantry. Other sounds from above indicated the plumber's progress from floor to floor.
"Do you realize," she said impulsively, "how very nice you have been to me? What a perfectly horrid position I might have been in, with poor Clarence on the back fence! And suppose I had dared follow him alone to the cellar? I--I might have been there yet--up to my neck in coal?"
She gazed into space with considerable emotion.
"And now," she said, "I am safe here in my own home. I have lunched divinely, a maid is on the way to me, Clarence remains somewhere safe indoors, Mr. Quinn is flitting from faucet to faucet, the electric light and the telephone will be in working order before very long--and it is all due to you!"
"I--I did a few things I almost w-wish I hadn't," stammered Brown, "b-because I can't, somehow, decently t-tell you how tremendously I--I--" He stuck fast.
"What?"
"It would look as though I were presuming on a t-trifling service rendered, and--oh, I can't say it; I want to, but I can't."
"Say what? Please, I don't mind what you are--are going to say."