“If I didn’t come home at all.”
“What?”
“At least for a long time, like—”
“I certainly hope”—nervously she forestalled the utterance of that other name—“that you won’t do anything so disappointing to all your old friends. It’s the kind of fortune-hunting expedition for the ne’er-do-well. It isn’t for a man like you.”
“Well, I’ve thought it over,” he said, “and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m best out of Valdivia for a time. You see, Hildegarde, you’re too used to me.”
“I’m not ‘too used.’”
“Too certain of me—yes, you are. I’ve been uncommon helpless in the matter. I’ve got nothing of the actor in me. I can’t be near you, and inspire you with the smallest doubt as to how things are with me. The one thing I can do is not to be near. And that’s what I’m going to do.”
She wrinkled up her white forehead with a harassed attempt to keep her wits about her, and not be betrayed into rash professions. “You can go away from Valdivia for a while, if that idea is so attractive, without going to the horrible Klondike.”
“Yes, I could go to Pasadena or some seaside resort, so that I could come running back, as I did last year from Monterey, on the first hint that you might be missing me a little. No, all that’s been tried. It doesn’t work. I must go to some place where I can’t take the first train back; where I won’t live through the day expecting a letter from you. It isn’t easy in these times for anybody to be really ‘out of reach.’ When we all know that we’ve only to go to the nearest telegraph office for news, we can’t know what it would be like utterly to lose some one—unless death teaches us. The nearest approach to the sort of thing I mean—this side of Kingdom Come—is the Klondike.”
“Oh, Klondike, Klondike! I’m sick of the very sound of those two syllables. There’s something uncanny about them. People have gone mad since they heard the ugly word, but not you!”—to give her words more than common emphasis, to insure winning the day, she laid her hand on his arm, and said again, with soft deliberation—“Not you, Louis.”