"That's what they all say once they git their senses jerked back. Come in here and pull yourself together, girl, or I'll call an ambulance or a patrol, suiting your pleasure."
"Let me go, you! I won't stand it. I must have been mad! Bruce, you tell him, please—it wasn't—that!"
"You're wrong, old man. Here—take this for your trouble, but this young woman is my sister. We walked out here together."
Quieted suddenly to the merest timbre of insolence, the old man shambled off.
"Sure!" he said, far too knowingly. "Sure!" And faded shaggily, impudently into darkness.
Bruce Visigoth took Lilly home in a taxicab. At her door she broke her shamed silence.
"You understand, Bruce, it wasn't anything—like that. It must have been nerves—tiredness—but nothing, Bruce, that you think it was. That old man was wrong. You must understand—for her sake—it wasn't that."
"Of course it wasn't, Lilly." His voice drained off, as if from exhaustion.
But for years, like a wound whose jagged lips were slow to close, the memory of this night lay palpitating between them.