Page:Herbert Jenkins - The Rain Girl.djvu/188

 "How do you know I shall look across?" she challenged, darting him a look from beneath her lashes.

"You are merely interrupting the story," he said severely. "One morning you will look across at my table and find it empty," he repeated. "Later in the day there will be a great disturbance when my body is found weltering in its own blood. Heroes of romance always welter in their own blood," he added.

"Heroes of romance!" she repeated with uplifted brows. "Are you one?"

"I am the hero of my own romance," he retorted; "but you interrupt me. I had just got to where I was weltering in my own blood—the victim of the Thirty-Nine Articles."

She laughed.

"And ever afterwards," he proceeded, "I shall share with the Roman sentry, Casabianca and Jack Cornwell their laurels for devotion to duty."

"I should have preferred to be regarded as a pleasure," she said demurely.

"It's my duty to protect my pleasure," he retorted quietly.

"But you were saying you felt like a boy scout"

"Like several boy scouts," he corrected. "I felt as Ulysses must have felt when he saw them dragging the wooden horse into Troy, or Leonidas at Thermopylae, or Mr. Lloyd George when he heard that Mr. Asquith had been defeated at East Fife;