"That's true, Penny," Ralph was saying dully. "You have a right to know, because I'm asking you to marry me now.... I did propose to Nita again Thursday night, and she did accept me. I confess now I was wild with happiness—"
"Why did she refuse you before?" Penny cut in, and Dundee silently thanked her for asking the question he would have liked to ask himself. "Was it because she wasn't sure she was in love with you?"
"You're making it awfully hard for me, honey," the boy protested, then admitted humbly, "Of course you want to know, and you should know.... No, she said all along, almost from the first that she loved me more than I could love her, but that there were—reasons.... Two reasons, she always said, and once I asked her jealously if they were both men, but she looked so startled and then laughed so queerly that I didn't ask again.... Then I thought it might be because I was younger than she was, though I can't believe she is more than twenty-three or so, and I'm twenty-five, you know. And once I got cold-sick because I thought she might still be married, but she said her husband was married again, and I wasn't to ask questions or worry about him—"
"But she did accept you Thursday night?" Penny persisted.
"Yes," the boy admitted, his face darkly flushed again. "This is awfully hard, honey, but I'll tell you once for all and get it over with.... I took her to dinner. We drove to Burnsville because she said she was sick of Hamilton. When we were driving back she suddenly became very queer—reckless, defiant.... And she asked me if I still wanted to marry her, and I said I did. I asked her right then to say when, and she said she'd marry me June first, but she added—" and the boy, to Dundee's watching eyes, seemed to be genuinely puzzled again by what must have sounded so odd at the time—"that she'd marry me June first if she lived to see the day."
"Oh!" Penny gasped, then, controlling her horror, she asked with what sounded like real curiosity, "Then what—happened, Ralph? Why do you propose to her on Thursday and to me on—on Sunday?"
"A gorgeous actress sacrificed to the typewriter," Dundee told himself, as he waited for Ralph Hammond's reluctant reply.
"Can't we forget it, honey?... You do love me a little, don't you? Can't you take my word for it that—I'm cured now—forever?"
Penny's hands went up to cover her face, and Dundee had the grace to feel very sorry indeed for her—sorry even if she intended to give her promise to Ralph Hammond, as a sick feeling in his stomach prophesied that she was about to do....
"How can I know you're really—cured, if I don't know what cured you?"