"I must hurry back East."
"I'm sorry," she answered with sweet graciousness. Any woman in the country houses about her would probably have spoken in the same fashion, but to me it was a match touched to powder.
"I will quote you a parable," I said, and although I attempted to smile, that the speech might be taken lightly, I had that rigid feeling about the lips and brow which made me conscious that my face was drawn and tell-tale.
"Icarus was the original bird-man, and he came to grief. His wings were fastened on with wax, but they worked fairly well until he soared too close to the sun. Then they melted ... and the first aviation disaster was chronicled."
She looked at me frankly and level-eyed, but her face held only mystification.
"I'm afraid," she said, "you must construe the parable."
I shook my head gravely. "I'm glad you don't take its meaning."
"I don't understand," she repeated, yet we both felt that we were standing in the presence of dammed-up emotions which might at any moment break over and inundate us. She might yet have no realization of it, but I knew by an occult assurance, in no way related to egotism, that I could make her love me. My fable was false after all. I had already fallen and been broken; my pinions were trailing and blood-stained. There was yet time to save her. During our silence Weighborne opened the door and our interview was ended.
It had lasted a few minutes, yet during their continuance I had been several times perilously near the brink. I saw her rise and smile and leave the room, and I caught or fancied I caught a glance from her eyes and a miraculous curve of her lips at the threshold. The expression was subtle and challenging, seeming to say to me, "You will tell me many things before I am through with you." Of course, that, too, was my disordered imagination, yet for the moment it was as though she had actually spoken words of self-confidence and conquest. And I knew that if I saw her again I should say many things—forbidden things. Resentment and bitterness and utter heartache possessed me, and I heard my host's voice in a maddeningly matter-of-fact pitch as he commented, "Now I hope our interruptions are over."
As I went to my room at the hotel that night a telegram was handed me. I did not at once open it. I presumed that it was from Keller, and it was all of a piece with my grotesque ill luck that the answer should come just after I had myself in the most painful possible way solved the problem. In my room, however, I read, under a San Francisco date, "Name Weighborne, not Carrington. Keller." It was evidently a telegraphic mistake and should have read "Weighborne née Carrington." Keller had told me who she had been before she married Weighborne, the man whose name, in the words of my fellow unfortunate, Bobby Maxwell, "looked well on a check."