Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/291

Rh smile. "To tell the truth, I really had to buy these. I've just been down to the village for 'em!" He held out the bunch of violets to me. They were not the kind that grow in country glades. They were the kind you get at Thorley's, and they cost more than prints of creamery butter.

"I love flowers!" I told him, as I buried my nose in them. Then I looked up at him and smiled. I was puzzling him, apparently, quite as much as he had been puzzling me. His cut on the lip from the night before, I noticed, was quite swollen and discolored. And he looked rather meek and domestic, loaded down with those parcels like a commuter. Yet he seemed determined to accept the situation quite as casually as I had been doing.

"Sleep well?" he inquired, as I followed him across the breakfast-room to the snowy little table.

"Like a top!" I told him, though just why a top should stand as an emblem of sound slumber was quite beyond my comprehension.

"Hungry?" he inquired, as he tumbled the rolls out on the table-top. I arranged them neatly on an empty plate as I answered him.

"Starving!" I replied, and I remembered that much the same words had been used at the last meal which I had eaten with him.