“I want to come home!” It must have been a good night for ’phoning, he felt, as he heard those five cogent words, and an inconsequential little glow suffused him. Not an ohm of their soft wistfulness, not a coulomb of their quiet significance, had leaked away through all their hundreds of miles of midnight travel. It almost seemed that he could feel the intimate warmth of her arms across the million-peopled cities that separated them; and he projected himself, in fancy, to the heart of the far-off turbulence where she stood. There, it seemed to him, she radiated warmth and color and meaning to the barren wastes of life, a glowing and living ember in all the dead ashes of unconcern. And again it flashed through him, as the wistful cadence of her voice died down on the wire, that she was all that he had in life, and that with her, thereafter, he must rise or sink.
“I want to come home,” she was repeating dolefully.
“You’ve got to come, and come quick!”
“What was that?”
“I say, risk it and come,” he called back to her. “Something has happened!”
“Something happened? Not bad news, is it?”
“No—but it will open your eyes, when you hear it!”
“Everything at my end has been done, you know.”
“You mean it came out all right?”
“Not quite all right, but I think it will do. Is it safe for me to tell you something?”