It was five o’clock of a fierce July day, and the sun still blazed unabated in a cloudless sky. Before him, along Fifth Avenue, went an unceasing stream of busses and motor cars. The noise, the heat, the reek, the tireless movement, exasperated him. He wanted to go home for a cold shower and a quiet smoke. He wanted to be let alone.
Then he saw her, and there was nothing else in the world. She was coming down a side street with that eager, beautiful gait of hers, so straight and gallant, so self-possessed and debonair—and so touchingly slight and young. He noticed for the first time, with an odd contraction of the heart, how thin she had grown this summer.
She had stopped at the corner. She smiled at him across the stream of traffic, and a pang shot through him, because her dear face was so tired. He raised his hat, but he could not smile in return. All the other things—the minor things that had troubled him—were lost in his great anxiety for Jacqueline. He dashed across the street, with the luck of the foolhardy, and stood before her, looking at her in alarm.
“Jacko!” he said. “Jacko! You’re tired!”
“Well, I know it,” she answered, laughing. “So are you! Who isn’t, this awful weather?”
But she stopped laughing as their eyes met. They stood there, looking at each other in silence for a long minute. Then the color rose in her cheeks, and she turned her head aside.
“Barty, don’t be silly,” she said.
He did not answer. He took her arm to pilot her across the street again. It seemed to him a terribly frail arm. He seized it tightly, in a sort of panic. She meant to make a laughing protest against being hustled along in this fashion, but somehow the light words would not come. A glance at Barty’s face made her heart sink.
“Oh, he is going to be silly!” she thought, in despair. “And I’m so tired, and so hot, and so—unconvincing!”
It had been decided between them that spring that they were to be simply good pals—until a more propitious season. They were not even engaged. No, they were both perfectly free. She had insisted that it should be so, and so it was. She was free to worry about him and yearn over him—even to cry over him night after night, if she liked. He was free, too, to do as he chose; but when she looked at him now, at the close of this weary day—