"Have you, really?" she asked so eagerly that he turned his head away for a moment and set his lips firmly together as if he feared he might presently be tempted to go beyond those strait boundaries of friendship. Somehow from the lips of such a girl as Nan this sort of thing was the most appealing flattery; at the same time it was unquestionably sincere.
"So you will seal the compact? Think it over carefully. I can never give you the strong arm a well man could."
"If you will teach me to acquire the sort of strength you have learned yourself," she said—and there was a hint of mistiness about those eyes of hers—"you will have given me something worth while."
Presently they were talking of her journey, to be begun on the morrow; of her work, in which she had come in the last year to remarkable success; of his work—the part which he could do and would continue to do, he said, with added vigour. They talked quietly but earnestly, and each time she looked up into his face she saw there a new brightness, something beyond the mere patient acceptance of his hard trial.
"Jerry," she said all at once, breaking off in the midst of a discussion of certain phases of the illustrator's art, "you don't know how suddenly rich I feel. All the while you were doing such wonderful, beautiful things with your pen in New York and being made so much of, I was thinking, 'What an inspiration Jerrold Fullerton would be as a real friend.' But all the girls were——"
He laughed. "They won't trouble you, now."
"But your friendship is worth more now than then."
He shook his head.
"It is—because you are more than you were then."
"I'm a mere wreck of what I was, Nan." He did not say it bitterly, but he could not quite keep the sadness out of the uncompromising phrase.