“You’re going home to marry me.”
I think she gave a little bitter laugh. At any rate, there was the echo of it in her tone, as she said, with sardonic promptness: “How can I be going home to marry you, when—when I never knew till within half an hour that you—that you cared anything about me?”
I, too, must have laughed, the statement struck me as so absurd.
“What? You never knew—?”
She shook her head with an emphasis almost violent.
“You may have known,” she said, in that voice which, after all, could not be called bitter, for the reason that it was reproachful, “but I’d come to the conclusion that”—she tried to carry the situation off with a second laugh, a laugh that ended as something like a sob—“that you didn’t.”
I leaned down toward her, speaking the words right into her face.
“Didn’t care?”
She nodded silently.
“For God’s sake, what made you think that?”