Late that afternoon he decided to call on Fancy Gray. He had hardly seen her since the night she left, and he was troubled in her regard, also. He. dreaded to know just what she was doing, and how she stood it. He had long attempted to deny to himself that she cared too much for him, and always their fiction had been maintained—that fiction which, during their pretty idyl at Alma, so long ago, had crystallized itself into their whimsical motto: "No fair falling in love!" He had kept their pact well enough. He dared not answer for her.
Fancy lived in a three-story house on O'Farrell, Street, near Jones Street, a place back from the sidewalk, with a garden in front and on one side. Fancy had a room on the attic floor, with two dormer windows giving upon the front yard. As Granthope turned in the gate and looked up at her windows, he was surprised to see one of them raised. Fancy's arm appeared, a straw hat in her hand. The next instant the hat sailed gracefully out into the air, curving like an aeroplane. It dropped nearly at his feet. He picked it up, thinking that she would look out after it, but instead, the sash was lowered.
A minute afterward a young man, bareheaded, and apparently violently enraged, appeared at the front door. Granthope walked up and presented the hat to Mr. Gay P. Summer, who took it, staring, without a word of thanks, and stalked sulkily away.
The door being left open, Granthope walked up three flights of stairs and knocked at Fancy's room. There was no reply. He called to her. The door was instantly flung open.
"Why, hello, Frank! Excuse me. I thought it was my meal-ticket coming back to bore me to death again." Fancy began to laugh. "You ought to have seen him. He simply wouldn't go, after I'd given him twenty-three gilt-edged tips, and so I had to throw his hat out of the window to get rid of him."
"I saw him. I think he won't come back. He looked rather uncomfortable."
Fancy sat down on the bed unconcernedly, clasping her hands on her crossed knees, while Granthope took a seat upon a trunk.
"Say, Frank, these people who expect to annex all your time and pay for it in fifty cent table d'hotes are beginning to make me tired. There's nothing so expensive as free dinners, I've found! The minute you let a man buy you a couple of eggs, he thinks he's in a position to dictate to you for the rest of eternity. Why, one dinner means he's hired you till eleven o'clock, and I run out of excuses long before that. No, you don't get anything free in this world, and many a girl's found that out!"
Granthope smiled. Fancy was at her prettiest, with a whimsical animation that he knew of old. Nothing delighted him so much as Fancy in her semi-philosophic vein.
She ran on: "Gay has just proposed to me again—I've lost tally, now. The one good thing about him is that he's always ready to make good with the ring whenever I say the word. He takes me seriously just because I never explain. But all the encouragement I've ever given him is to accept. Gay's the kind that always calls you 'Little girl,' no matter how high you are, and tells you you're 'brave'! There's no one quite like you, Frank—"