“Sit down for a moment, Ernie,” she said, “and make yourself happy. I’ll be with you again in five minutes.” And he looked after her with a dog’s eyes and sat down to watch the door with a dog’s patience.
In her own room she went to her desk, unlocked a drawer and took out a page cut from The Tatler on which was reproduced a photograph of Fallaray. She had framed it and kept it hidden away under lock and key, and always when she came home from her walks, and several times a day when she could slip up and shut herself in for a moment or two, she took it out to gaze at it and press it to her breast. It was her last link, her last and everlasting link with the foolish dreams with which that room was so intimately associated,—a room no longer made up to represent that of a courtesan; a normal room now, suitable to the daughter of a watchmaker in Queen’s Road, Bayswater.
The evening sun gilded the commonplace line of the roofs opposite as she stood in the window with Fallaray’s face against her heart.
“I love you,” she said, “I love you. I shall always love you, and if I die first, I shall wait for you on the other side of the Bridge.”
She returned it to its hiding place, took off her hat, tidied her hair, picked up a little book and went back to the drawing-room.
“Listen,” she said, “this is for you.
“‘I shall see my way as birds their trackless way.
I shall arrive,—what time, what circuit first,
I ask not; but unless God send His hail
Or blinding fire-balls, sleet or stifling snow,
In some time, His good time, I shall arrive;
He guides me and the bird. In His good time.’”
And as the boy watched her and saw her light up as though there were something burning in her heart, he knew that those lines were as much for herself as for him.
THE END
“The Books You Like to Read at the Price You Like to Pay”