But he tossed the suggestion aside with, “A little over pleasantness that you’re able to check for yourself.”
“It’s plain I’m not the stuff romantic heroines are made of.”
He didn’t contradict that. “You certainly haven’t given me much excuse for coming along.”
She was glad he wasn’t looking her way at that moment. It was like him to declare his mission so simply, and yet he stood there in the sunshine, smiling philosophically, as he turned down his collar, saying, “The merest superfluity. That’s what I am. Except,” he added more seriously, “that if I hadn’t come I should never have believed I was so little needed. So it turns out that what I’ve come for is my own enlightenment.”
“Not only your enlightenment,” and her eyes invited him to understanding of a friend’s gratefulness to a friend. But he lifted his bare head to the breeze that swept in with the sunshine at the open door, as though, having delivered himself of his grievance, he could think of nothing now but the comfort of being free of that all-enveloping cap. His eyes seemed to shine only for joy in the sun, as he stood there ruffling still more his short, wavy hair—the hair that did, as Bella said, “fit” him so uncommonly well. And he certainly looked as little sentimental as some sturdy mountain pine.
“Some people,” Hildegarde remarked in a detached tone, “would think it was a waste for two old friends—we might have had all these days together.”
“Yes. I give you my word I never meant—” He seemed to intend an apology as though he assumed the deprivation to be chiefly, if not solely, hers. “The very first time I passed you I thought, of course, you’d find me out. Then, as you didn’t. I kept putting off—Morning, Captain.”
“Morning!”
“I should think you did keep putting off!”
“I didn’t want you to”—he lowered his voice—“I didn’t want to take you by surprise before people.”