“How?”
“Care-free. That's it. Except when you feel sorry for me about something, you always have that splendid look. It puts courage into people to see it. If I had a struggle to face I'd keep remembering that look—and I'd never give up! It's a brave look, too, as though gaiety might be a kind of gallantry on your part, and yet I don't quite understand why it should be, either.” He smiled quizzically, looking down upon her. “Mary, you haven't a 'secret sorrow,' have you?”
For answer she only laughed.
“No,” he said; “I can't imagine you with a care in the world. I think that's why you were so kind to me—you have nothing but happiness in your own life, and so you could spare time to make my troubles turn to happiness, too. But there's one little time in the twenty-four hours when I'm not happy. It's now, when I have to say good night. I feel dismal every time it comes—and then, when I've left the house, there's a bad little blankness, a black void, as though I were temporarily dead; and it lasts until I get it established in my mind that I'm really beginning another day that's to end with YOU again. Then I cheer up. But now's the bad time—and I must go through it, and so—good night.” And he added with a pungent vehemence of which he was little aware, “I hate it!”
“Do you?” she said, rising to go to the door with him. But he stood motionless, gazing at her wonderingly.
“Mary! Your eyes are so—” He stopped.
“Yes?” But she looked quickly away.
“I don't know,” he said. “I thought just then—”
“What did you think?”
“I don't know—it seemed to me that there was something I ought to understand—and didn't.”