"You have a short memory," commented the voice on the phone.
"You have chanced," said Ware, pleasantly, "upon a melancholy fact, madam. But may I not ask the identity of—Jove! wait a bit, though! My creaking wheels of recollection are beginning to revolve.... I have it! I have it! Miss Nixon?"
"Yes," said Daisy's voice, in a matter-of-fact way, "it is. I want to see you."
Sir William, at the speaker's naive directness, covered the transmitter with his palm and rocked in enjoyment.
"Bravo!" he said, then, uncovering the instrument; "the city hasn't spoiled you yet, my dear—has it?"
"I'm waiting near that cafe we were at before," said Daisy, "how long will you be?"
Something in the bare blunt words made Sir William hug himself in an almost boyish ecstasy. "I shall come," he answered, "on the wings of Hermes. They should bring me into your presence in from three to five minutes, young lady."
Daisy Nixon, after hanging up the telephone in the little candy store across from the Cumberland Cafe, had waited barely four minutes in the shadowed street just beyond the circle of light from the Cumberland's windows, when she saw a tall figure, cane in hand, walk briskly into that area of illumination. She crossed the street.
Ware, dangling his cane and glancing about enquiringly, saw her when she was half-way across the circle of light and facing the full blaze of it. Her bright frank eyes; her clear girlish fresh cheeks, on which a certain nervousness kept the tide of color changing its shape and margin; her round maidenly lines of bust and hip and ankle: all wrought curiously and strongly and with a united effect upon Ware, as they had on that night in the Harrison dining-room when his attention, drawn to her casually by the accident to the soup-tureen, had changed at once to the heartiest interest.