“This is what I get for making a spectacle of myself, I take it,” he grumbled. “What do you want to know? Why I did it?”
“No. That’s plain enough. Who was the boy in the balcony?”
“Boy?” repeated Mr. Laurens in surprise.
“Yes. The kid that stood up when they began ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ Do you know him?”
“Let me refer that question to Miss Marcia Ames. She was right at the spot, in the balcony. Miss Ames, Mr. Robson.”
Jeremy bowed and found himself looking into two large, young, and extremely self-possessed grayish eyes, frank and happy eyes on the surface, but with inscrutable lights and depths beneath. For the rest, his hasty impression recorded an alert, intelligent, and delicately slanted face, and an almost disconcertingly direct regard. The skin was of that translucent brown-over-pink which the sun god bestows only upon his tried and true acolytes.
“Do you know the boy, Miss Ames?”
“What boy?” Her voice was cool and liquid and endearing, and just a bit lazily indifferent, with a strange hint—never anything more—of accent.
“The boy who stood in the first row of the balcony.”
“That was not a boy.”