“Wouldn’t you have come if you knew I was here?” she urged, archly.
“Not for two thousand dollars,” he answered, the look of trouble deepening in his eyes, but his lips were smiling. He had a quaint sense of humor, and at his last gasp would have noted the ridiculous thing. And surely it was a droll malignity of Fate to bring him here to her whom, in this moment of all moments in his life, he wished far away. Fate meant to try him to the uttermost. This hurdle of trial was high, indeed.
“Two thousand dollars—nothing less?” she inquired, gayly. “You are too specific for a real lover.”
“Fate fixed the amount,” he added, dryly.
“Fate—you talk so much of Fate,” she replied, gravely, and her eyes looked into the distance. “You make me think of it, too, and I don’t want to do so. I don’t want to feel helpless, to be the child of Accident and Destiny.”
“Oh, you get the same thing in the ‘fore-ordination’ that old Minister M’Gregor preaches every Sunday. ‘Be elect or be damned,’ he says to us all. Names aren’t important; but, anyhow, it was Fate that led me here.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t me?” she asked, softly. “Are you sure I wasn’t calling you, and you had to come?”
“Well, it was en route, anyhow; and you are always calling, if I must tell you,” he laughed. Suddenly he became grave. “I hear you call me in the night sometimes, and I start up and say ‘Yes, Di!’ out of my sleep. It’s a queer hallucination. I’ve got you on the brain, certainly.”
“It seems to vex you—certainly,” she said, opening the book that lay in her lap, “and your eyes trouble me to-day. They’ve got a look that used to be in them, Flood, before—before you promised; and another look I don’t understand and don’t like. I suppose it’s always so. The real business of life is trying to understand each other.”
“You have wonderful thoughts for one that’s had so little chance,” he said. “That’s because you’re a genius, I suppose. Teaching can’t give that sort of thing—the insight.”