“Sure, you’re excused,” returned the athlete, so placidly that Carroll, somewhat at a loss, altered his speech to a more gracious tone.
“At any rate, you stood your ground when you were needed, which is more than Mr. Perkins did. I should like to have a talk with him.”
“That’s easy. He was rambling around here not a quarter of an hour ago with young Raimonda. That’s them sitting on the bench over by the fountain.”
“Will you take me over and present me? I think it is due Mr. Perkins that some one should give him a frank opinion of his actions.”
“I’d like to hear that,” observed Cluff, who was not without humanistic curiosity. “Come along.”
Heaving up his six-feet-one from the seat, he led the way to the two conversing men. Raimonda looked around and greeted the newcomers pleasantly. Cluff waved an explanatory hand between his charge and the bench.
“Make you acquainted with Mr. Perkins,” he said, neglecting to mention the name of the first party of the introduction.
Perkins, goggling upward to meet a coldly hostile glance, rose, nodded in some wonder, and said: “How do you do?” Raimonda sent Cluff a glance of interrogation, to which that experimentalist in human antagonisms responded with a borrowed Spanish gesture of pleasurable uncertainty.
“I will not say that I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Perkins,” began Carroll weightily, and paused.
If he expected a query, he was doomed to a disappointment. Such of the Perkins features as were not concealed by his extraordinary glasses expressed an immovable calm.