As he strolled, slowly, for he wished to preserve his collar intact until he should present himself immaculate before the woman of his love, Garwood felt some of the peace of the sleepy town fall upon him. He gave himself up to the sensuous effect of it, inhaling the odors of a summer night, and when he turned into the yard of the Harkness home his heart leaped. A filmy figure in white slowly floated, as it seemed to his romantic vision, out of the darkness that lay thick under the veranda. Half way down the walk, under the oaks, they met.
“Jerome! I’m so proud!”
The pride she had felt in him still glowed in her eyes as they sat there in the wicker chairs, but now when she heard him sigh, she bent toward him, and her voice filled with a woman’s pity as she said:
“You’re tired, aren’t you—poor boy?”
“Yes, very tired,” he assented, with a man’s readiness to be coddled. “But then,” he added, “it’s rest just to be here.”
He laid his hand on hers and she drew closer, looking eagerly into his face. She needed no light other than the glow of the summer night to make his features plain to her. She looked long at him, and then she withdrew her hand, and sat erect, smoothing her skirts with an affected primness and folding her hands in her lap.
“Now you must tell me all about it,” she said. “The newspapers are so unsatisfactory, and you know I’ve only had the one little note you wrote me Wednesday night—when you thought you were beaten.”
They laughed, now that they could do so with impunity, at the danger he had been in so short a time before.
“Well,” he began, “it was a close shave, after all. If it hadn’t been for Jim Rankin I’d have come home to-night beaten, and there wouldn’t have been any band or any carriage or any crowd to greet me—as Rankin reminded me this afternoon when I was near bursting at the reception I did get.” He laughed, but the laugh had a tinge of bitterness.
“I would have been there,” she said simply.