“Self-evident facts need no proving,” retorted Bertram. “Well, and what else has happened in all these ages I've been away?”
Billy brought her hands together with a sudden cry.
“Oh, and I haven't told you!” she exclaimed. “I'm writing a new song—a love song. Mary Jane wrote the words. They're beautiful.”
Bertram stiffened.
“Indeed! And is—Mary Jane a poet, with all the rest?” he asked, with affected lightness.
“Oh, no, of course not,” smiled Billy; “but these words are pretty. And they just sang themselves into the dearest little melody right away. So I'm writing the music for them.”
“Lucky Mary Jane!” murmured Bertram, still with a lightness that he hoped would pass for indifference. (Bertram was ashamed of himself, but deep within him was a growing consciousness that he knew the meaning of the vague irritation that he always felt at the mere mention of Arkwright's name.) “And will the title-page say, 'Words by Mary Jane Arkwright'?” he finished.
“That's what I asked him,” laughed Billy.
“I even suggested 'Methuselah John' for a change. Oh, but, dearie,” she broke off with shy eagerness, “I just want you to hear a little of what I've done with it. You see, really, all the time, I suspect, I've been singing it—to you,” she confessed with an endearing blush, as she sprang lightly to her feet and hurried to the piano.
It was a bad ten minutes that Bertram Henshaw spent then. How he could love a song and hate it at the same time he did not understand; but he knew that he was doing exactly that. To hear Billy carol “Sweetheart, my sweetheart!” with that joyous tenderness was bliss unspeakable—until he remembered that Arkwright wrote the “Sweetheart, my sweetheart!” then it was—(Even in his thoughts Bertram bit the word off short. He was not a swearing man.) When he looked at Billy now at the piano, and thought of her singing—as she said she had sung—that song to him all through the last three days, his heart glowed. But when he looked at her and thought of Arkwright, who had made possible that singing, his heart froze with terror.