“I’ve told her all I know,” he said readily, and the unconscious pathos of the answer smote me. “And all that Keredec has let me know. You see I haven’t—”
“But do you think,” I interrupted quickly, anxious, in my remorse, to divert him from that channel, “do you think Professor Keredec would approve, if he knew?”
“I think he would,” he responded slowly, pausing in his walk again. “I have a feeling that perhaps he does know, and yet I have been afraid to tell him, afraid he might try to stop me—keep me from going to wait for her. But he has a strange way of knowing things; I think he knows everything in the world! I have felt to-night that he knows this, and—it’s very strange, but I—well, what WAS it that made him so glad?”
“The light is still burning in his room,” I said quietly.
“You mean that I ought to tell him?” His voice rose a little.
“He’s done a good deal for you, hasn’t he?” I suggested. “And even if he does know he might like to hear it from you.”
“You’re right; I’ll tell him to-night.” This came with sudden decision, but with less than marked what followed. “But he can’t stop me, now. No one on earth shall do that, except Madame d’Armand herself. No one!”
“I won’t quarrel with that,” I said drily, throwing away my cigar, which had gone out long before.
He hesitated, and then I saw his hand groping toward me in the darkness, and, rising, I gave him mine.
“Good night,” he said, and shook my hand as the first sputterings of the coming rain began to patter on the roof of the pavilion. “I’m glad to tell him; I’m glad to have told you. Ah, but isn’t this,” he cried, “a happy world!”