She leaned her elbows on the table and looked at June admiringly. “How long is it since you saw the great and only?” she asked.
June did some rapid counting on her white fingers.
“Nineteen hours exactly,” she said. “But it seems like ninety! I nearly died with joy when his note came at breakfast time–––” She looked at Esther wistfully. “You don’t know how lovely it is to have some one of your very own,” she said with unwonted sentimentality.
Esther averted her eyes.
“I envy you,” she said quietly. “But you’ll be late if you stand rhapsodising here––be off!”
June bent and kissed her.
“I shan’t be long––he’s only asked me for lunch....”
Esther smiled.
“I have known lunches that lasted till tea-time,” she said. “When there has been a great deal to talk about.”
June went downstairs singing. During the last few days she had, as she would have expressed it, begun to discover herself all over again. Certainly the world had utterly changed, and was more like a fairy city than a 291 place where it rained a great deal and where buses and taxicabs splashed pedestrians with mud.