“I understand,” I told him, doing my best to sit steady under his inquisitorial eye. Then he looked down at the empty plate again.
“All right,” he said at last. He spoke in a quite flat and colorless tone. But it masked a decision which we both must have recognized as being momentous. And I knew, without saying anything further, that he would go.
Sunday the Third
Dinky-Dunk left Friday night and got back early this morning before I was up. This naturally surprised me. But what surprised me more was the way he looked. He was white and shaken and drawn about the eyes. He seemed so wretched that I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.
“She wouldn’t see me!” was all he said as I stopped him on the way to his room.
But he rather startled me, fifteen minutes later, by calling up the Greene and asking for Peter. And before half an hour had dragged past Peter appeared in person. He ignored the children, and apparently avoided me, and went straight out to the pergola, where he and Dinky-Dunk fell to pacing slowly up and down, with the shadows dappling their white-clad shoulders like leopards as they walked up and down, up and down, as serious and solemn as two ministers of state in a national crisis. And something, I scarcely knew what, kept me from going out and joining them.
It was Peter himself who finally came in to me. He surprised me, in the first place, by shaking hands. He did it with that wistful wandering-picador smile of his on his rather Zuloagaish face.
“I’ve got to say good-by,” I found him saying to me.
“Peter!” I called out in startled protest, trying to draw back so I could see him better. But he kept my hand.