She disappeared from the window, and in a moment joined him behind the screen of honeysuckles on the porch. [p261] The hammock hung, inviting ease, but neither of them took it. She sat primly on the straight-backed, green settee, and he sat on the step at her feet with his hat pulled over his eyes.
“What an infernal nuisance I have been to you!” he said ruefully; “but no more than I have been to myself. The only difference was that I had to stand it, and you stood it out of the goodness of that kind little heart of yours. Well, it’s nearly over now; I’m expecting to go to the city any day. I guess you’ll not be sorry to get rid of me, will you, Miss Guinevere?”
Instead of answering, she drew a quick breath and turned her head away. When she did speak, it was after a long pause.
“I like the way you say my name. Nobody says it like that down here.”
“Guinevere?” he repeated.
She nodded. “When you say it like that, I feel like I was another person. It makes me think of flowers, and poetry, and the wind in the trees, and all those [p262] things I’ve been reading you out of your books. Guin-never and Guinevere don’t seem the same at all, do they?”
“They aren’t the same,” he said, “and you aren’t the same girl I met on the boat last March. I guess we’ve both grown a bit since then. You know I was rather keen on dying about that time,—‘in love with easeful death,’—well, now I am not keen about anything, but I am willing to play the game out.”
They sat in silence for a while, then he said slowly, without raising his eyes: “I am not much good at telling what I feel, but before I go away I want you to know how much you’ve helped me. You have been the one light that was left to show me the way down into the darkness.”
A soft touch on his shoulder made him lift his head. Guinevere was bending toward him, all restraint banished from her face by the compassion and love that suffused it.