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package.
    â€œMay I carry it for you?” he asked.
    Her eyebrows went up slightly, and she looked at him with candid eyes. “Are we going the same way?” she asked, with a droll smile that he found very attractive.
    He rubbed his chin in a characteristic manner, and smiled a little ruefully at the rebuff.
    â€œThe fact is,” he answered frankly, “I thought perhaps we might foregather in some tea-shop if there is such a thing in this metropolis. After all, it’s war time, we are fellow dumplings in a foreign land and all that.”
    â€œI suppose that does make some difference,” she answered with a smile.
    â€œAll the difference in the world,” he asserted.
    â€œBut how did you know. . . . Oh, you saw the address on that package!” she said severely.
    He nodded and grinned. “Yes, it was a lucky guess,” he acknowledged cheerfully.
    â€œAnd how am I to know that you, too . . .”
    â€œI dunno, Barney bor, these bunks do cut sumfen haard!” he drawled in broad Norfolk.
    â€œThat’s proof positive!” she laughed.
    â€œAnd my name is Peter Rawley,” he added.
    â€œI am Berney Travers,” said she.
    â€œAnd now that we are properly introduced, how about that teashop!”
    III
    â€œI rather like this French game of ‘Come choose you east, come choose you west, come choose the one that youlove best,’ ” said he, as they stood plate in hand before the tempting piles of confectionery on the pâtisserie counter. “Much simpler than our English system of six standard articles on a plate—you know: bun, cream, one; meringue, one; éclair, chocolate, one; conserve, one; cake, fruit, slice of, one; ditto, seed, slice of, one—and the waitress counts up on her fingers what’s left and does mental arithmetic with furrowed brow.”
    The girl laughed and speared to her plate a puffy confection, oozing cream. Rawley knit his brows and eyed it with mock aversion. “I’m afraid you have depraved tastes,” he said with a sigh.
    â€œThere are plenty more, if you want one,” she retorted.
    â€œThat’s the beauty of the system,” he answered, as he calmly transfixed one of the same fearsome confections. “In England you all sit like kids at a party with one eye on the cakes, gobbling up your bread and butter as fast as you can lest someone should finish first and bag the one you’ve had your eye on.”
    They sat down at their table. “I’m afraid you were a greedy child,” she said reprovingly.
    â€œI was,” he avowed unashamedly. “All healthy kids are. And I bet you were, too.”
    She handed him his cup. “Bulls’-eyes were my vice,” she confessed.
    He nodded. He liked her clear, low-pitched voice. “I was catholic in my tastes,” he admitted. “I don’t think I ever ran to a grande passion , though I did have an affair with doughnuts.”
    Her fork was poised half way to her mouth. “Stoge!” she said, with crinkled nose.
    It was a graceful hand that held the fork, small and white, but neither incapable nor delicate. And the finger nails suited it. They were not blunt and black, like those of the pretty farm girl at the mess, nor long and pointed, like those of the little girl in black who had laid her hand on his sleeve in the corridor of the Quatre Fils; they had little cream half moons on them, and were nice and honest looking.
    â€œIt’s good to be drinking out of a cup again,” he remarked. “But I miss the eternal chloride of lime.”
    â€œIt’s very good for one,” she mocked.
    â€œWhich? Cups or lime?”
    â€œBoth—one for the tummy and the other for the soul!”
    She had a slow, charming smile, that was free from malice, and gave promise of a great sense of harmless fun. He noticed how her lashes curved upwards when her head was bent. She had steady, candid eyes, and