This was Charley Harman, a friend, but this was no time for friends to be butting in.
“Home,” said George briefly, by way of implying that he was not inviting company home with him.
“So am I, but I never walk fast when I’m going home. Let’s get a drink in here”; halting as they came opposite a drug store.
“Take one for me,” Cutter said with a short laugh and moved on so hurriedly that Harman took the hint.
Nothing else happened until he reached the place where Wiggs Street opened on the square. He stared down the flower-blooming vista of this street. He could see men watering their front yards and the women watering their flowers. He could hear the boom of his father’s voice half a block down, talking to some one in the next yard. He saw Mrs. Adams sitting, large and amorphous, in a rocking-chair on her front porch. He supposed that she also was waiting for Helen.
Then he saw her approaching from the other end of the street, not distant, but divided from him by the eyes of all these people sitting and puttering around in their front yards. He thought she walked as if she were sad or good or something. And he had this consolation, as she finally turned in and went up the steps of the Adams’ cottage, he was sure that she had seen him. He was sure that their eyes had met. He also observed when he came down into the street to his own home that she had not stopped on the porch with her mother, but had gone directly inside.
CHAPTER III
When you are in love, everything is important and everything is secret. You become a consummate actor and liar in vain, because the whole world knows your secret almost as soon as you do.