"Exc -" he stopped himself before he could get any further. Despite the fact that he could think of very few reasons for Zahavi to be insulting him, the man was still of a higher class than him and he didn't want to seem impertinent. There were people he knew here.
A look of confusion ran across his features for a moment. It hadn't been two seconds earlier that Zahavi had seemed like a perfectly reasonably fellow. Oh, now he'd gone and done it, he'd probably tilted his head the wrong way or gotten some kind of inflection wrong.
He straightened up when the man poked him in the chest, and tried not to sound too scared or rude or mad or whatever he was clearly being and replied, "I escorted a friend here, sir."