He had had breakfast in Berlin, but he sat watching her with an alert
interest that missed not the smallest of her movements, very reminiscent
in his attitude and pleasure of a cat watching its own dear mouse,
observing it with a whiskered relish, its own dear particular mouse that
it has ached for for years before it ever met it, filling itself
dismally meanwhile with the wrong mice who disagreed with it--its mouse
that, annexed and safely incorporated, was going to do it so much good
and make it twice the eat it was before; and he buttered her roll for
her, and poured out her tea, and did all the things a cat would do in
such a situation if it were a man, pleased that its mouse should fatten,
aware that anything it ate and drank would ultimately, so to speak,
remain in the family.
The splendid June morning, the last morning of June, shone golden
through the long, continuous windows of the car. The fields of the Mark
lay bathed in light. It was early still, but it had already begun to be
hot, and haymakers straightening themselves to watch the train go by
wiped their faces, and the prudent cows were gathered in the shade of
trees, and in the ear the ventilator twirled and hummed, and the waiter
in his white linen jacket who brought her strawberries, each one of
which had been examined and passed as fit and sound by the proper
authorities suitably housed in Berlin in buildings erected for the
purpose, was a credit to the Prussian State Railway by-law which
decrees, briefly and implacably, that waiters shall be cool.
She pulled out one of the blue German hundred mark notes from her blouse
when he brought the bill, and more of them came out with it.
"What on earth is all that for?" Ingram asked.
"To pay with. And you must tell me how much my ticket was to--wasn't it
Locarno you said we got out at?"
"You can't go about with money loose like that. Give it to me. I'll take
care of it for you."
She gave it to him, nine blue notes out of her blouse and the change of
the tenth out of a little bag she had brought and was finding great
difficulty, so much unused was she to little bags, in remembering.
"I hope it's enough," she said. "Don't forget I've got to get back
again."
He laughed, tucking the notes away into his pocket-book. "Enough? It's a
fortune. You can go to the end of the world with this," he said.
"Isn't it all glorious, isn't it all too wonderful to be true?" she
said, her face radiant.
"Yes. And the most glorious part of it is that you can't go anywhere
now," he said, putting the pocket-book in his breast pocket and patting
it and looking at her and laughing, "without me."
"But I don't want to. I'd much _rather_ go with you. It's so
extraordinarily sweet that you want me to. You know, I never can quite
believe it."
He bent across the table. "Little glory of my heart," he murmured.
The waiter came back with the change.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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