“You don't say! Ain't any better off'n that? Humph! Well, Henry Champney's petered out, but then he's pretty old now. He could talk tall in his time, near as good as Aidee, but more windy. Aidee had a better outfit of brains, but Champney was a fine figure of a man, and burnt coal all right. Why, I met my wife on a lake steamer, and married her when I got to Port Argent with twenty-one dollars and fifty cents in my pocket, and she never understood how it happened—claimed she didn't, anyhow—and that afternoon I heard Henry Champney make a speech from the Court House steps that sounded like he was President of the Board of Prophets, and I bet a man twenty dollars Champney was prophesying all right, and lost it, I did. I began housekeeping on a dollar and a half. Yes, sir. 'Will if you can!' Ho! Well, why can't you?”
The big talkative man wandered off into mellow reminiscence, and Hennion presently took his leave.
He came to the Champney house and was about to ring the bell, but Camilla spoke from the corner of the porch, where she sat hidden in the black shadows of the vines.
“Do you want me, Dick?”
“Yes.”
From the outside, where the nervous electric light and the placid moonlight mingled, little gimlets of light bored through, insisted and arrived, through the matting of vine leaves that hid the porch, and made little specks of light within, impertinent and curious, little specks on the wall, little specks on the floor.
“Want you!” Hennion said. “I always want you.”
He bent over till her breath was warm on his face.
“How can you be so near me, and so far away? Did you think I loved you as a habit? You're God's crown of glory that he sent me, but it won't stay still on my head. Do you remember when you used to sit on the floor upstairs in a white dress, with a red ribbon on it somewhere? Don't remember the red ribbon? You used to cut faces on shingles, with dismal expressions and hard-luck features, and you thought they were the beautifullest things, and got very hot because I didn't. But I thought that you were the beautifullest girl with the red ribbon. I did so.”
“I didn't know that.”