Nellie chose to return as she had come. She was glad that he did not wait to be thanked, and slipped off without any notion of being missed.
They walked in silence through alternate patches of woods and moonlight. Occasionally he would offer a friendly hand to help her over a fence, but Nellie did not accept it. She had climbed fences unaided all her life. A strange impression of loneliness crept over her. She listened with a certain breathlessness to the quiet of the woods. Even the moonlight looked different; and then she realized that she had not often seen the full moon so high.
Her companion, too, was unusually silent, and it was she who spoke first. “Bob,” she said suddenly, “why did you risk your life for a dog?”
“Oh, Lord!” cried Vickers, “if any one else asks me that—! Every one seems to think I had a plan. I didn’t. The kid asked me to, and it seemed to be up to me. I quite forgot I was risking your precious salary. It would have been a good joke to send you home my corpse to pay the funeral expenses—the funeral expenses of a total stranger.”
“Perhaps it would not have been a very expensive funeral, Bob,” she answered dryly.
He was irrepressible, however.
“That would have been a shame, for we gave your cousin a splendid blow-out—a camellia wreath! You ought to have seen it,—equal to the best artificial. Oh, Nellie,” he went on, “you don’t know how the idea of your following my remains to the grave touches me. Would you wear mourning for me, Nellie?”
She would not smile. “Yes,” she said gravely. “But only because I should not wish to hurt my uncle’s feelings.”
“And would it be for me, or my two hundred dollars a month, that you mourned?”
“Entirely for the two hundred.”