Robert have the right to come along and say HIS say?
That point had not been settled. Points so extremely delicate cannot be
settled on a slate, and he had not dared to broach it viva voce to his
younger brother. He had been too afraid of a rebuff.

He then hoped that Annie's servant would tell him that Annie was out.

Annie, however, took him at a disadvantage by opening the door herself.

'Well, MR HESSIAN!' she exclaimed, her face bursting into a swift and
welcoming smile.

'I was just passing,' the donkey in him blundered forth. 'And I
thought--'

However, in fifteen seconds he was on the domestic side of the
sitting-room window, and seated in the antimacassared armchair between
the fire-place and the piano, and Annie had taken his hat and told him
that her servant was out for the evening.

'But I'm disturbing your supper, Miss Emery,' he said. Flurried though
he was, he could not fail to notice the white embroidered cloth spread
diagonally on the table, and the cold meat and the pastry and the
glittering cutlery and crystal thereon.

'Not at all,' she replied. 'You haven't had supper yet, I expect?'

'No,' he said, not thinking.

'It will be nice of you to help me to eat mine,' said she.

'Oh! But really--'

But she got plates and things out of the cupboard below the
bookcase--and there he was! She would take no refusal. It was wondrous.

'I'm awfully glad I came now,' his thought ran; I'm managing it rather
well.'

And--

'Poor Bob!'

His sole discomfort was that he could not invent a sufficiently
ingenious explanation of his call. You can't tell a woman you've called
to make love to her, and when your previous call happens to have been
ten years ago, some kind of an explanation does seem to be demanded.
Ultimately, as Annie was so very pleased to see him, so friendly, so
feminine, so equal to the occasion, he decided to let his presence in
her abode that night stand as one of those central facts in existence
that need no explanation. And they went on talking and eating till the
dusk deepened and Annie lit the gas and drew the blind.

He watched her on the sly as she moved about the room. He decided that
she did not appear a day older. There was the same plump, erect figure,
the same neatness, the same fair skin and fair hair, the same little
nose, the same twinkle in the eye--only perhaps the twinkle in the eye
was a trifle less cruel than it used to be. She was not a day older.
(In this he w