After such a gathering men and women insisted on meeting him personally. He often left the halls with groups violently discussing his words. And so little resulted from this enthusiasm. An inclination strengthened here and there, a few teetering on the edge of belief converted. Sometimes a successful meeting such as this had been exhausted Roger more than any antagonistic opposition could have done.
To-night he was very tired. The ideal for which a few strove seemed so far away, so beyond those for whom he searched for it. He had left the hall instantly, escaping, as he rarely permitted himself to do, the urgent wish of strangers to meet him. Safe in his hotel room at last he had given the order not to be disturbed by any visitor or telephone call, and had begun indifferently looking over the forwarded mail, when he came unexpectedly on Anne's letter.
He looked at it for a moment curiously, as if it were something not intended for him. He turned it over and over, until a sudden eagerness to know of Anne and Rogie seized him and he tore the envelope open with quivering fingers. The note was brief, and, although Anne had intended it to be friendly, it seemed to Roger stiff and formal. He read it only once and then tore it across and dropped the pieces in the waste-basket with a touch of disappointment he refused to recognize. There was no reason Anne should write to him in another tone, and, after all, the important thing was that he could see Rogie. He had longed for this and resented Anne's monopoly of the boy, but now he knew that seeing Rogie rested alone with him he forgave Anne the bitterness he had felt. He sat down to answer instantly, but he, as Anne, found it difficult to write. Three drafts of a simple note he destroyed, and then suddenly pushed the pad from him. He would go. There was a train in an hour. He would be in the city in the morning, Sunday morning. He had another meeting on the following Monday to complete the itinerary, but when Roger visioned the empty Sunday between, he could not face it.
Half an hour later he had paid his bill and left the hotel. As the train pulled out of the station it began to rain sharp, slanting rain that lashed at the windows of his berth. But Roger, exhausted from the meeting and his own reaction to Anne's letter, slept almost instantly. Nor did he wake until the train clanged into the station. It was still raining, but less violently now. The sharp lashing had quieted to a steady fall. Roger had breakfast, went to the loft to see if there was an urgent matter for him, telephoned to Tom to send another speaker to Los Angeles in time for the Monday night meeting, and then went to the cottage.
It was still and clean and empty as he had left it. He made a fire, and, to persuade himself that he was in no haste, sat before it.
By night he would have seen Anne and Rogie. Whatever was to be the future relation between them would have been fixed. What did he want this relation to be? He felt no anger with Anne. She had been true to herself as he had been to himself. He felt no emotional eagerness to meet Anne, nor reluctance. His sharpest feeling was toward Rogie.
In the past Rogie had been a baby, the child of himself and Anne, not in any way distinct from them. But now that the convention of a home had been taken from Rogie—now that the accepted standard of father, mother, child under one roof had been taken from him, somehow Rogie had become a distinct personality. It was as if, in some strange way, the responsibility of being an individual, a separate social unit, had somehow descended upon the baby; so that now he was almost an adult in the separateness of his personality. Roger could not shake off a ridiculous feeling that he would almost meet Rogie as man to man.
It was after six before Roger climbed the hill, and, closing the old-fashioned garden gate quietly behind him, rang the bell.
At the sound of the bell pealing through the still house, Anne started, and then certainty gripped her beyond motion. Again the bell rang, this time less fiercely, as if eagerness in the ringer were passing. Anne hurried from the room, but at the foot of the stairs she paused, staring at the door, her heart thumping until she could scarcely breathe. It sounded again, this time a sad little clang of disappointment. Anne went slowly to the door and opened it. The cold wind and rain rushed in and then Roger was close to her in the hall; the door shut, and the smell of his damp clothes sharp in the air.
"I thought you must have left town," she said calmly.