of documents still in sound condition. They are over on the right there. You will see a smaller number on your left—also spared. Some of those will be destroyed but both lots are to be glanced through again.”
“What are they all about?”
“Well, the last one I destroyed,” he told her, “was a bill for Her Ladyship’s lingerie from Madame Sturt. I destroyed the bill but I kept the receipt.”
“How much did the lingerie cost?”
He tweaked her ear—a soft pink and white shell-like little affair which he abandoned with reluctance.
“Do you realize that I was once a member of that household? You must not expect me to reveal the secrets of Her Ladyship’s toilet. Most unbecoming.”
“What are those serious-looking documents that you’ve kept?”
“Look here,” he demanded, “are you a spy?”
“Why no,” she assured him. “I should think it must be rather fun, though. If by any chance you didn’t change your mind and I did marry you, do you think you could find me a little espionage work?”
“Nothing in it nowadays,” he told her gloomily. “Typewriters and wireless have done away with all that. Diplomacy as a fine art is finished.”
“Then why are you taking all that trouble with those papers?”
“So that Her Ladyship shouldn’t pay her lingerie bills twice.”
“And to save her that,” she said, “you can sit there for nearly three hours with the fever of war in the air, troops marching by all the time and a long perilous journey before us within a few hours?”
“It does seem a little off the map, doesn’t it? But listen, I know what we might do.”
“What?”
“Slip down to the Herrenhof and have a cocktail. It’s half-past seven.”
“And supposing Mr. Blute comes back while we’re there? You know perfectly well that you have promised not to be seen anywhere on the other side of that door with me.”
“Quite right,” he agreed. “Same thing. We’ll have it up here. Telephone down, there’s a dear—ask especially for Frederick. Say we want White Lady cocktails in a shaker—four of them.”
She telephoned down the order, then she came back to his side.
“My temporary work is spoiling me for real work,” she sighed. “I’ve been with Mr. Benjamin for two years and he has never offered me a cocktail.”
“Quite right. You couldn’t have been out of your teens two years ago and cocktail drinking is not a child’s habit.”
“My teens, as you call them,” she confided, “were finished long before I went to Mr. Benjamin’s bank. It is time you began to treat me with a little more respect.”
“We don’t have time to play games,” he told her. “Every time I’ve met you we’ve been facing a crisis.”
“It is quite true,” she admitted. “I wish we could get you to take this one a little more seriously.”
“It is difficult to take anything seriously in Vienna,” he said. “To tell you the truth, the ways of even our diplomats here are strange. In this medley which I have been requested to clean up and leave nothing behind me are some quite important notes concerning a conversation between two important people. The same rubber band enclosed the account for Her Ladyship’s lingerie.”
“Very slack,” she criticized.
“Don’t be too severe,” he begged. “These are just the scraps left over from about a ton of rubbish which bothered our very respectable Consul, Mr. Porter. Kindly collect for me, dear secretary-in-chief and wife-that-is-to-be, every wastepaper basket you can find in the apartment. I can count three from here.”
“Aren’t you rather harping on that matrimonial business?” she asked as she started on her tour round the room.
“It drives everything else out of my mind,” he confided. “Especially when you look as sweet as you do this evening.”
She paused in the centre of the apartment with a basket in either hand.
“Come and kiss me,” he insisted.
She moved slowly towards him without any marked reluctance.
“Tell me,” she enquired, “have you ever had a secretary before?”
“Heaps of them.”
“Did you expect them to come and kiss you whenever you felt amorous?”
“I never felt that way.”
“Why not?”
“They were all men.”
“Do you mean that you never had a girl secretary?”
“Never in my life,” he assured her. “When I’ve been staying down at home I’ve sometimes dictated a few letters to my mother’s amanuensis but as she is well over fifty, wears most unbecoming glasses and has taken a degree at Oxford I refrained from taking liberties.”
She brought the baskets and succeeded in slipping from his knee just as the waiter arrived with the cocktails.
“Never,” Patricia confessed, opening her vanity-bag, “have I been driven to my mirror so often as I have been during the last few hours.”
“Well, there’s a slight difference between the atmosphere of New York and Vienna, isn’t there?” he remarked. “Waiter,” he added, “you can leave the shaker and come back again in half-an-hour.”
Two more wastepaper baskets were discovered and filled. Charles leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette.
“Is it my fancy,” he asked, “or has my charming helper and bride-to-be been afflicted with a sudden seriousness?”
“I have been wondering,” she confided, “where we shall find Mr. Benjamin.”
“I can’t think how you ever completely lost him,” Charles reflected. “I should have thought Blute would have had a special emergency address which would have reached him.”
“He had several—and pseudonyms, too. He had tried them all before we got into the state in which you found us. The censorship here is simply devastating. Practically everything in any sort of code was destroyed.”
“It’s a mistake,” he told her, “to attempt to get a code letter through a censor anywhere. But let’s abandon this discussion now and talk about something really interesting.”
“Suggest something, then.”
“Getting married.”
“Lovely! Go on, please.”
“You
