"You can't. There aren't any b.u.t.tons."

"What? No b.u.t.tons?"

"They came off."

"But why in heaven's name didn't you sew them on again?"

"Do b.u.t.tons matter? I was in such a tremendous hurry to start." And she smiled at him a smile of perfect happiness.

"To come to me. To come to me," he said, his eyes on hers.

"Yes. And Italy."

"Italy! Well, you very nearly missed me. What would you have done then?"

"Oh, gone to Italy."

"What, just the same?"

"Well, Italy _is_ Italy, isn't it? Look at this sky. Isn't it wonderful to-day, isn't it perfectly glorious? Can the sky in Italy possibly be bluer than this?"

He made an impatient movement. "Choir-boy," he said; and added, catching sight of her finger-tips, "Why is your glove all over ink?"

"Because I wrote to Robert in it."

"What? You came away without saying anything at all?"

"Oh, no. I said all the things about Berlin and shopping, and he didn't mind a bit."

"There, now--didn't I tell you? But what did you write?"

"Oh, just the truth. That I'm going with you to Italy."

"What? You did?"

"I couldn't bear after all to start like that, in that--that lying sort of way."

"And you wrote that you were going with me?"

"Yes. And I said--"

"And he'll find the letter when he comes in?"

"Yes. He can't help seeing it. I put it on his laboratory table, right in the middle."

Ingram leaned forward, his face flushed, laughter and triumph in his eyes, and caught hold of her right hand in its inky glove.

"Adorable inkstains," he said, looking at them and then looking up at her. "You little burner of ships."

And as she opened her mouth in what was evidently going to be a question he hurried her away from it with a string of his phrases.

"You are all the happiness," he said, with an energy of conviction astonishing at half-past nine in the morning, "and all the music, and all the colour, and all the fragrance there is in the world."

"Then you haven't noticed the cabbage?" she asked, immensely relieved.

He let go her hand. "What cabbage?" he asked shortly, for it nettled him to be interrupted when he was spinning images, and it more than nettled him to be interrupted in the middle of an emotion.

But when she began--vividly--to describe the inner condition of the _Christliche Hospiz_ he stopped her.

"I don't want to talk of anything ugly to-day," he said. "Not to-day of all days in my life." And he added, leaning forward again and looking into her eyes, "Ingeborg, do you know what to-day is?"

"Thursday," said Ingeborg.

The conductor--it was a corridor train, and though they had the compartment to themselves the pa.s.sage outside was busy with people squeezing past each other and begging each other's pardons--came in to look at their tickets.

"There is a restaurant car on the train," he said in German, giving information with Prussian care, a disciplinary care for the comfort of his pa.s.sengers, who were to be made comfortable, to be forced to use the means of grace provided, or the authorities would know the reason why.

"Yes," said Ingram.

"You do not change," said the conductor, with Prussian determination that his pa.s.sengers should not, even if they wanted to and liked it, go astray.

"No," said Ingram.

"Not until Basel," said the conductor menacingly, almost as if he wanted to pick a quarrel.

"No," said Ingram.

"At Basel you change," said the conductor eyeing him, ready to leap on opposition.

"Yes," said Ingram.

"You will arrive at Basel at 11.40 to-night," said the conductor, in tones behind which hung "Do you hear? You've just got to."

"Yes," said Ingram.

"At Basel--"

"Oh, go to _h.e.l.l_!" said Ingram, suddenly, violently, and in his own tongue.

The conductor immediately put his heels together and saluted. From the extreme want of control of the gentleman's manner he knew him at once for an officer of high rank disguised for travelling purposes in civilian garments, and silently and deferentially withdrew.

"If there's a restaurant car can I have some breakfast?" asked Ingeborg.

"Haven't you had any? You poor little thing. Come along."

She followed him out into the corridor, he going first to clear people out of the way and turning to give her his hand at the crossings from one coach to the next. The restaurant was in the front of the train, and it required perseverance and the opening of many difficult doors to get to it. Each time he turned to help her and gripped hold of her hand as they swayed against the sides and were b.u.mped they looked at each other and laughed. What fun it all was, she thought, and how entirely new and delicious being taken care of as though she were a thing that mattered, a precious thing!

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 att.i.tude 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 b.u.t.tered 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.