"I'm so sorry," she said, panting a little as she dropped into a corner of the carriage opposite him and the train slipped away from the station, "but I couldn't get here any sooner." "Why couldn't you?" he asked, still severely, for he had spent a distressing and turbulent half hour. "You only had to get up in time." "But I couldn't get up because I was asleep." "Nonsense, Ingeborg. You could tell them to call you." "Well, but I didn't tell them." "And why don't you button your gloves? Here--I'll button them." "You can't. There aren't any buttons." "What? No buttons?" "They came off." "But why in heaven's name didn't you sew them on again?" "Do buttons matter? I was in such a tremendous hurry to start." And she smiled at him a smile of perfect happiness. "To come to me. To come to me," he said, his eyes on hers. "Yes. And Italy." "Italy! Well, you very nearly missed me. What would you have done then?" "Oh, gone to Italy." "What, just the same?" "Well, Italy _is_ Italy, isn't it? Look at this sky. Isn't it wonderful to-day, isn't it perfectly glorious? Can the sky in Italy possibly be bluer than this?" He made an impatient movement. "Choir-boy," he said; and added, catching sight of her finger-tips, "Why is your glove all over ink?" "Because I wrote to Robert in it." "What? You came away without saying anything at all?" "Oh, no. I said all the things about Berlin and shopping, and he didn't mind a bit." "There, now--didn't I tell you? But what did you write?" "Oh, just the truth. That I'm going with you to Italy." "What? You did?" "I couldn't bear after all to start like that, in that--that lying sort of way." "And you wrote that you were going with me?" "Yes. And I said--" "And he'll find the letter when he comes in?" "Yes. He can't help seeing it. I put it on his laboratory table, right in the middle." Ingram leaned forward, his face flushed, laughter and triumph in his eyes, and caught hold of her right hand in its inky glove. "Adorable inkstains," he said, looking at them and then looking up at her. "You little burner of ships." And as she opened her mouth in what was evidently going to be a question he hurried her away from it with a string of his phrases. "You are all the happiness," he said, with an energy of conviction astonishing at half-past nine in the morning, "and all the music, and all the colour, and all the fragrance there is in the world." "Then you haven't noticed the cabbage?" she asked, immensely relieved. He let go her hand. "What cabbage?" he asked shortly, for it nettled him to be interrupted when he was spinning images, and it more than nettled him to be interrupted in the middle of an emotion. But when she began--vividly--to describe the inner condition of the _Christliche Hospiz_ he stopped her.