“You’re too silly—really too silly,” said Miss Verinder. She had withdrawn to the bevelled looking-glass in the front of the Queen Anne bureau and was arranging her hair.
They sat down to breakfast, and she made the tea for him exactly as she would have made it for Mrs. Bell or the vicar of the parish, had either been visiting her; but her eyes were bright, and the colour still glowed in her cheeks. Dyke watched each precise little movement with a sort of swooning ecstasy. First she warmed the tea-pot, then she began to load her tiny shovel from the silver tea-caddy, and as she transferred each shovelfull she demurely recited the habitual incantation. “One for me; one for you, Tony; one for the pot—and one for luck. Shall we have one more? Yes, I think one more for luck. Now the kettle, please.”
“Go on,” cried Dyke, with a roar of delighted laughter. “Say it.” He wanted the rhymed couplet to finish the unchanging rite, that foolish rhyme that he himself had taught her. “Say it, Emmie.”
And she said it, quietly and gravely, as if there was nothing ridiculous about it. “‘For if the water not boiling be, filling the tea-pot spoils the tea.’ Push back that little bolt under the kettle. Thank you, dear.”
They spent four or five heavenly days together in the flat, never issuing from it till after dark, and not then without a preliminary reconnaissance by Louisa and her report that the coast was clear. All day long they were perfectly blissful, making up to each other in endless talk for the vast tracts of time during which neither could hear the other’s voice. It was during one of these secret visits that Dyke taught the parrot to say “Look sharp, Louisa.” Emmie could never have done it without aid.
Under the friendly cloak of darkness they used to take long walks about the huge town. They had jolly little treats too. Dyke loved the “moving pictures” from their very first introduction, and Emmie was devoted to this form of entertainment for the reason that it afforded her an opportunity of holding Dyke’s hand and squeezing it while the lights were down. They also attended representations of the legitimate drama, going to the cheaper seats of unfashionable theatres on or beyond the four-mile circle; and they found and cherished the strangest sort of restaurants or cafés far from the more frequented haunts of well-to-do mankind, where they dined and supped with the utmost enjoyment. Some of these eating-places were almost too humble and doubtful, scarcely better than cabmen’s shelters; for Dyke, fresh from New Guinea or an uninhabited island, was almost incapable of differentiation. To him, at any rate for a while, the Ritz Hotel and a refreshment room at an Underground railway station seemed equally magnificent and luxurious.
Emmie’s favourite restaurant was at least clean and respectable, a little place kept by Italians in a side street near Hammersmith Broadway; and thither she guided her illustrious traveller when he wished to invite a guest to join them at dinner. These guests were always of the same class, rough simple fellows, generally colonials, with whom Dyke had sailed the seas or plodded the earth at some time or other in the past. He had promised to have an evening with them when the chance came and was anxious not to break his word. So, Emmie consenting, he sent off a slap-dash line inviting them to meet him at Spinetti’s.
One night dear old Captain Cairns of the Mercedaria dined with them there.
“Well, upon my life, Tony, it’s a sight for sore eyes to see you again,” said Cairns. “And you too, miss.”
He was just as he had been when she first saw him at that Johnsonian chop-house in the City; wearing a pea-jacket with a blue shirt collar, and, although so short, seeming excessively broad and powerful. His stubby beard was perhaps a little greyer, his big round head balder, and the network of wrinkles on his sun-burnt cheeks had become more intricate. His weight and solidity inspired confidence in her just as they had done at their very first meeting; but Emmie had a premonition that he would certainly break the fragile cane chair on which he had seated himself, and gracefully vacating her own place, she manœuvered him to the more substantial foundations of the velvet-covered bench against the wall. He sat there, beside Dyke, and beamed at her across the table.