“And didn't you sit close to the partition on your side? Sometimes I was sure of it. I could even fancy that I could hear your dress brushing against the wall-paper close beside me. Didn't you sit close to the partition?”
“I—I don't know where I sat.”
Old Grannis shyly put out his hand and took hers as it lay upon her lap.
“Didn't you sit close to the partition on your side?” he insisted.
“No—I don't know—perhaps—sometimes. Oh, yes,” she exclaimed, with a little gasp, “Oh, yes, I often did.”
Then Old Grannis put his arm about her, and kissed her faded cheek, that flushed to pink upon the instant.
After that they spoke but little. The day lapsed slowly into twilight, and the two old people sat there in the gray evening, quietly, quietly, their hands in each other's hands, “keeping company,” but now with nothing to separate them. It had come at last. After all these years they were together; they understood each other. They stood at length in a little Elysium of their own creating. They walked hand in hand in a delicious garden where it was always autumn. Far from the world and together they entered upon the long retarded romance of their commonplace and uneventful lives.
CHAPTER 18
That same night McTeague was awakened by a shrill scream, and woke to find Trina's arms around his neck. She was trembling so that the bed-springs creaked.