“Well, why don’t you speak?”
“It is true I went in Miss Dolly’s room, but I thought it was my room,” said Bob monotonously. “It was a mistake.” And Bob told how the brooch happened to fall to the floor. Strange to say, truth didn’t ring in his accents. He hadn’t much confidence at that moment in the old saw that truth is mighty and will prevail. Truth wasn’t mighty; it was a monster that sucked your heart’s blood. And Bob gazed once more with that famished look upon Miss Gerald. He found her a joy to the eye. Though she stood in a practical pose, the curves of her gracious and proud young figure were like ardent lines of poetry in a matutinal and passionate hymn to beauty. And Bob’s lips straightway yearned to sing hexameters to loveliness in the abstract—and in the flesh—instead of plodding along half-heartedly through unconvincing and purposeless explanations.
“You certainly do look fine to-day!” burst from Bob. It wasn’t exactly a hexameter nor yet an iambic mode of expression. But it had to come out.
Roses blossomed on the girl’s proud cheek. Bob’s explosive and uncontrollable ardency would have been disconcerting, under any circumstances, but under such as those of the present—Miss Gerald’s eyes flashed.
“Isn’t—isn’t that rather irrelevant?” she said after a moment’s pause.
“I—yes, I guess it is,” confessed Bob, and his head slowly fell. He looked at the hard marble pavement.
A moment the girl stood with breast stirring, like an indignant goddess. “Have you—have you any information to volunteer?” she said at length icily.
“Oh, I don’t have to volunteer,” answered Bob. And then rushed on to a Niagara of disaster. “Why don’t you ask that hammer-thrower? I suppose you’d believe anything”—he couldn’t keep back the bitter jealousy—“he tells you.”
An instant eyes met eyes. Bob’s now were stubborn, if forlorn and miserable. They braved the indignant, outraged violet ones. He even laughed, savagely, moodily. What would he not have given if she would only believe him, instead of—? But it was not to be. Yet this girl had his very soul. His miserable and forlorn eyes told her that. Whose eyes would have turned first, in that visual contest is a matter of uncertainty, for just then the enthusiastic voice of Gee-gee was heard “through the land.”
“Why, Mr. Bennett—you here? So glad to see you!”