“Which way are you going?” he asked, with a pretence of suddenly remembering something. He had halted, and they stood at the corner, looking up Whitehall. He smothered a yawn with a little explanatory laugh. “I made rather a night of it--it’s my birthday to-day--and I’m half asleep. I hadn’t noticed where we’d walked to. I hope I haven’t taken you out of your way.”
The girl hesitated, looked up the broad, stately street, and bit her lip in strenuous thought of some sort.
“Good morning, then!” she blurted out, confusedly, and turned to move away.
The impulse to be quit of her had been very sharply defined in his mind, and had dictated not only his words, but his awkward, half-shamefaced, half-familiar, manner in suggesting a parting. Now it vanished again with miraculous swiftness.
“No, no! You mustn’t go off like that!” he urged, and sprang forward to her side. “I only asked you which was your way.”
She was blinking her eyes in a struggle to regain facial composure. He could see that she had been on the point of tears, and the sight moved him to recklessness. It was not surprising to hear her confess: “Me? I have no way.”
He took charge of her with a fine paternal tone. “Oh yes, you have! Your way is my way. You are going with me. It’s my birthday, you know, and you have come to help me celebrate it. What do you say to beginning with a special breakfast?--or perhaps you’ve spoiled your appetite already. But you can pretend to eat a little.”
The girl laughed aloud, with pathetic irony at some conceit which curled her lip in scornful amusement. “Words rose to her tongue, but she forbore to utter them, and stared up the street.
“You’ll come along, won’t you?” He had held up his hand, and a four-wheeler, with a driver and horse of advanced years and dejected aspect, was crawling diagonally across the roadway toward them.
She took courage to look him frankly in the face. “I shall be very much obliged to you, indeed,” she said, keeping her voice up till the avowal should be finished. “I’ve had no breakfast.”
The ancient cab, with a prodigious rattling of framework and windows for its snail’s progress, bore them along past Trafalgar Square, and westward through narrow streets, already teeming with a busy, foreign-looking life, till it halted before a restaurant in one of the broader thoroughfares of Soho.