‘Mr. Crosby!’ Susan’s face is crimson. ‘I wish—’
‘I know. I beg your pardon. Of course I should not have mentioned it. But you and I are old friends now, Susan; and somehow it is permissible for me to confide to you the hollow fact that no one ever gave me a silver brooch with—’
Susan lifts Bonnie’s head gently, and shows a dignified, but most determined, desire to rise.
‘Don’t,’ says Crosby quickly. ‘You’ll wake him.’ He points to Bonnie’s lovely little head, and Susan pauses in her flight. ‘Besides, I shan’t say another word—not one. I swear it. What I really wanted was your compassion. I have never had a keepsake given me in all my life, save one.’
‘Surely one is enough,’ says Susan slowly. Curiosity, after a moment, overcomes her dignity, and she says unwillingly: ‘Is it a nice one?’
‘I desire no nicer,’ says he. He pulls his watch from his pocket, and on the chain close to it—on a tiny silver ring of its own—hangs a silver sixpence.
‘That! Only a sixpence!’ Susan’s voice is rather uncertain. What sixpence is that? She—she didn’t— ‘Of course,’ says she, ‘I know a broken sixpence is a very usual thing between lovers. But this— It is not broken, and—and not old, either. I must say when she gave you a keepsake she—’
‘She hardly gave it,’ says Crosby. ‘She only laid it on the last rung of a ladder that led up to some—’
That sentence is never finished. Bonnie’s head is now lying on Susan’s rug. But Susan herself is already far over there, her head very high indeed, and her rage and her indignation even higher.