She was frantic enough to accept a luncheon engagement with Jim and his mother for the next day. She telephoned him in the morning: “Your angel of a mother will forgive me when you tell her I'm lunching down-town with my husband. The poor boy was detained at his office last night and didn't get my telegram till he got home. When he learned that I had come in and gone out again he was furious with himself and me. I hadn't left word where I was, so he couldn't come running after me. He waited at home and gave me a love of a call-down for my dissipation. It was a treat. I really think he was jealous.” Jim Dyckman did not laugh with her. He was thinking hard. He had seen Cheever at the Biltmore, and a little later Cheever vanished. Cheever must have seen Charity Coe then. And if he saw her, he saw him. Then why had he kept silent? Dyckman had a chilling intuition that Cheever was lying in ambush for him. Again he was wrung with the impulse to tell Charity Coe the truth about her husband. Again some dubious decency withheld him. CHAPTER VII The word “breakfast” was magic stimulant to the Thropps. Kedzie put on her clothes, and the family went down to the elevator together. They found their way to the Tudor Room, where a small number of men, mostly barricaded behind newspapers, ate briskly. A captain showed the Thropps to a table; three waiters pulled out their chairs and pushed them in under them. Another laid large pasteboards before them. Another planted ice-water and butter and salt and pepper here and there. Adna had traveled enough to know that the way to order a meal in a hotel is to give the waiter a wise look and say, “Bring me the best you got.” This waiter looked a little surprised, but he said, “Yes, sir. Do you like fruit and eggs and rolls, maybe?” “Nah,” said Adna. “Breakfast's my best meal. Bring us suthin' hearty and plenty of it. I like a nice piece of steak and fried potatoes and some griddle-cakes and maple-surrup, and if you got any nice sawsitch--and the wife usually likes some oatmeal, and she takes tea and toast, but bring me some hot bread. And the girl--What you want, Kedzie? The same's I'm takin'? All right. Oh, some grape-fruit, eh? She wants grape-fruit. Got any good? All right. I guess I'll take some grape-fruit, too; and let me see--I guess that'll do to start on--Wait! What's that those folks are eatin' over there? Looks good--spring chicken--humm! I guess you'd like that better'n steak, ma? Yes. She'd rather have the chicken. All right, George, you hustle us in a nice meal and I'll make it all right with you. You understand.” Adna called all waiters “George.” It saved their feelings, he had heard. The waiter bowed and retired. Adna spoke to his family: “Since we pay the same, anyway, might's well have the best they got.” The waiter gave the three a meal fitter for the ancient days when kings had dinner at nine in the morning than for these degenerate times when breakfast hardly lives up to its name.