A fresh-cheeked Swedish girl appeared from a further room, bearing the soup. The professor ladled it out, still beaming.
"Now, this is very delightful!--isn't it, Daisy?" he said.
"Very," said Miss Holroyd, with the faintest tinge of irony.
"Very," I repeated heartily; but I looked at my soup when I said it.
"I suppose," said the professor, nodding mysteriously at his daughter, "that Dick knows nothing of what we're about down here?"
"I suppose," said Miss Holroyd, "that he thinks we are digging for fossils."
I looked at my plate. She might have spared me that.
"Well, well," said her father, smiling to himself, "he shall know everything by morning. You'll be astonished, Dick, my boy."
The professor said, "Isn't it?" in an absent-minded way, and relapsed into contemplation of my necktie.
I asked Miss Holroyd a few questions about Jack, and was informed that he had given up law and entered the diplomatic service--as what, I did not dare ask, for I know what our diplomatic service is.
"Choo Choo is the name of the city," added her father proudly; "it's the terminus of the new trans-Siberian railway."
"He's vice-consul," added the professor triumphantly.
"He'll make a good one," I observed. I knew Jack. I pitied his consul.
So we chatted on about my old playmate, until Freda, the red-cheeked maid, brought coffee, and the professor lighted a cigar, with a little bow to his daughter.
"Of course, you don't smoke," she said to me, with a glimmer of malice in her eyes.
"He mustn't," interposed the professor hastily; "it will make his hand tremble."
"No, it doesn't," said I, laughing; "but my hand will shake if I don't smoke. Are you going to employ me as a draughtsman?"
"You'll know to-morrow," he chuckled, with a mysterious smile at his daughter.--"Daisy, give him my best cigars; put the box here on the table. We can't afford to have his hand tremble."
Miss Holroyd rose, and crossed the hallway to her father's room, returning presently with a box of promising-looking cigars.
"I don't think he knows what is good for him," she said. "He should smoke only one every day."
It was hard to bear. I am not vindictive, but I decided to treasure up a few of Miss Holroyd's gentle taunts. My intimacy with her brother was certainly a disadvantage to me now. Jack had apparently been talking too much, and his sister appeared to be thoroughly acquainted with my past. It was a disadvantage. I remembered her vaguely as a girl with long braids, who used to come on Sundays with her father and take tea with us in our rooms. Then she went to Germany to school, and Jack and I employed our Sunday evenings otherwise. It is true that I regarded her weekly visits as a species of infliction, but I did not think I ever showed it.