He wondered how Edith had kept herself hidden in such a place. It was amazing that no one had discovered her. That some hint of her presence had not been given to the newspapers.
He found her in a quaint sitting-room up-stairs. “I think,” she said to him, as he came in, “that you are very good-natured to take all this trouble for me——”
“It isn’t any trouble.” His assurance was gone. With her hat off she was doubly wonderful. He felt his youth and inexperience, yet words came to him, “And I didn’t do it for you, I did it for myself.”
She laughed. “Do you always say such nice things?”
“I shall always say them to you. And you mustn’t mind. Really,” Jane would have recognized returning confidence in that cock of the head, “I’m just a page—twanging a lyre.”
They laughed together. He was great fun, she decided, different.
“You are wondering, I fancy, how I happened to come here,” she said, leaning back in her chair, her burnished hair against its faded cushions. “Well, an old cook of Mother’s, Martha Burns, is the wife of the landlord. She will do anything for me. I have had all my meals up-stairs. I might be a thousand miles away for all my world knows of me.”
“I was worried to death when I thought of you out in the storm.”
“And all the while I was sitting with my feet on the fender, reading about myself in the evening papers.”
“And what you read was a-plenty,” said Baldy, slangily. “Some of those reporters deserve to be shot.”