“I suppose so.” Tower’s gravity increased; but he brightened at a thought that came to him as his departing caller reached the door. “I suppose, Hobart, to-morrow—to-morrow——”
“To-morrow what?” Hobart inquired, staring at him.
“Ah—to-morrow——” Old John hesitated, then finished hopefully: “We might return to our former arrangement?”
“To-morrow? Oh, yes, certainly—to-morrow we’ll return to our former arrangement,” Hobart said; and as he passed through the anteroom beyond he murmured the word incredulously to himself, “ ‘To-morrow.’ ” He laughed shortly, and in his imagination continued the dialogue with old John. “Day after to-morrow, too, I suppose? And the day after that? And the next, and the next? Why, yes! Why not?” Then he became serious. “You poor dear old thing, there’s got not to be any ‘to-morrow’!”
He took the affair into his own hands for complete settlement; and at noon he went to a jeweller’s and bought the most expensive wrist-watch in the place—a trifling miracle of platinum intricately glittering with excellent white diamonds. He put the little packet in his coat pocket, and at about five o’clock that afternoon he showed it to Miss Julietta Voss.
Old John Tower, absent-minded and not playing well, had driven his ball into a thicket fifty yards away from where Hobart and Julietta had paused;—he was in the underbrush, solemnly searching, with his caddy.
“Something for you,” Hobart said, tossing the little packet up and down in his hand.
She looked surprised. “For me? From you?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”