"I don't care to hear a good young girl spoken of so lightly," said he, with some stiffness.
And now Courtney colored. After a moment she said, apologetic without knowing why: "Perhaps I shouldn't have done it. But I always feel free to speak out to you any stray thought that drifts into my head—without choosing my words."
Helen now reappeared, cast a peculiar glance in their direction, blushed rosily, hastened away toward the house. "She'd better be careful how she blushes at sight of you," said Courtney smiling, "or you'll be thinking she's in love with you."
"Nonsense!" protested Basil, again unaccountably irritated.
"How solemn you are to-day, dear. And, why shouldn't she fall in love with you? I can see how a woman might."
He did not respond to her glance. He stared straight ahead, answered awkwardly, "Helen and I are simply good friends."
The phrase jarred upon her a little. "Simply good friends." As she repeated it, she remembered suddenly, vividly, the beginning of their own love. They too had been "simply good friends." The phrase kept recurring to her, dinning disagreeably in her ears. She frowned on herself; she laughed at herself. But it continued to ring and to jar. "I certainly have a nasty jealous streak hidden away in my disposition," she said to herself. "I mustn't encourage it."
During the next few days every time Helen and Basil were together, she caught herself watching them for signs—"Signs of what?" she demanded of herself. But in spite of herself she kept on watching. That specter of the dreadful days without him—that specter so easily called up—began to glide about in the background of her thoughts, rousing those fears before which she was abject coward.
Helen had the young girl's usual assortment of harmless little tricks. Her favorite was to note when a man made a remark which she thought he regarded as clever, to go back to it after a moment or so, and repeat it and laugh or admire according as it had been intended to be amusing or profound. She was constantly doing this—with Richard, with Basil, with every man she met. The time came when the overworked trick began to get upon Courtney's nerves, especially as Helen, being entirely without humor and a close-to-shore wader in the waters of thought, was not always happy in her selection of the remark. Still, her intentions being of the best, Courtney endured; and at times she got not a little secret amusement from seeing how Basil and even Richard were flattered by the trick, never suspecting, even after Helen had again and again laughed or admired effusively in quite the wrong place. As she watched Helen and Basil now, the only "sign" she saw was this clever-stupid subtlety of Helen's for flattering male vanity—Helen practicing it on Basil, Basil purring each time like a cat under the stroking of an agreeable hand. This certainly was not serious. She laughed at herself with a reproachful "You don't deserve happiness—trying to poison it with contemptible suspicion." And the specter faded, and she no longer heard the sound of rain beating, of rain drizzling, of rain dripping through days and nights of aloneness and despair.
Spring was smiling from every twig. The birds, impatient at winter's reluctant leave-taking, had arrived before the young leaves were far enough advanced to cover them. So, every tree was alive with them, plainly in view, boldly about their courting and nesting, like lovers who, despairing of finding a quiet place, march along the highway embracing in defiance of curious eyes. One morning, half an hour after Basil went out for his habitual stroll and cigarette, Courtney changed her mind and decided to join him. She looked along the retaining wall. No Basil. She walked up and down, noting, and feeling in her own blood, the agitations of the mightiest force in the universe—those agitations that in the springtime set all nature to quivering. Ten minutes passed—fifteen—half an hour—nearly three quarters of an hour. Still no Basil. She decided he must have gone up to his rooms and fallen asleep. She resisted the temptation to go and waken him, and went slowly toward the laboratory doors. Just as she was about to jump from the wall, out of the apartment entrance came Helen, her face aglow, her eyes sparkling, all the austerity gone from her regular features. "How pretty she looks," thought Courtney. "I wonder what's delighting her so. One'd think she was in love and was loved. There never lived a sweeter, more unselfish girl. Nothing petty in her. She even has a nice way of being prudent about money."