“I mean—I’m in awe of him, a little.”
“Nothing awe-ful about Clive. He’s a nice fellow. I’ve always wanted you to meet him.”
“I wondered why you kept us so carefully apart,” said Rose-Ann. “I thought perhaps you felt that I didn’t measure up to his specifications. Do you think I will?”
He laughed tenderly, and looked at her. She was very sweet, and, it seemed, very tired despite the buoyant vivacity that always made her lovely. “You are wonderful,” he said. “But,” and he put his arm about her, to the amusement of two adolescent girls across the aisle, “it doesn’t make any difference what anybody in the world thinks about you, except me!”
“How possessive you are, of a sudden!” said Rose-Ann. But she relaxed deep within his caressing and protecting gesture, and closed her eyes.
He looked down, touching softly with his glance the delicate surface of her cheek as it slanted away from the high cheek-bones, and the forehead half hidden under the drooping tangle of red gold hair. Yes, she was very tired, and strangely enough he was glad to have her so, glad to feel her restless and vivid life relax to peace in the shelter of his arm. She had gone through a good deal of late; he thought of her home, and of that death-bed from which she had come, and the jarring family hostilities only half-repressed by the solemnity of that scene; it was strange to think of her—this lovely child made for happiness—emerging from those troubled shadows....
She was free now. And he too was free—free from dubieties and hesitations, strange and foolish suspicions of her—free from fear. How simple everything was, after all! By what strange ways they had come, to find each other—not knowing until this last moment the real meaning of their lives....
2
“It’s beginning to snow again,” said Rose-Ann, rousing herself and looking out of the window. And then—“What have you told Clive Bangs about me?”
“Not very much,” he confessed. “I suppose because of Clive’s manner about his own girls—or girl, I should say; it’s been a particular one for a long time now. He alludes to her, discusses her in an impersonal way, but he has never even told me her name. A queer sort of futile secrecy—Which reminds me of a curious story about him.” And he told her Eddie Silver’s drunken tale of the building of the house.