"Forgot?"
"Absolutely."
"Forgot—me!"
"Of course," said Trafford, with a slightly puzzled air, "you don't see it as I do."
The kettle engaged him for a time. Then he threw out a suggestion. "We'll have to have a telephone."
"I couldn't imagine where you were. I thought of all sorts of things. I almost came round—but I was so horribly afraid I mightn't find you."
He renewed his suggestion of a telephone.
"So that if I really want you——" said Marjorie. "Or if I just want to feel you're there."
"Yes," said Trafford slowly, jabbing a piece of firewood into the glow; but it was chiefly present in his mind that much of that elaborate experimenting of his wasn't at all a thing to be cut athwart by the exasperating gusts of a telephone bell clamouring for attention. Hitherto the laboratory telephone had been in the habit of disconnecting itself early in the afternoon.
And yet after all it was this instrument, the same twisted wire and little quivering tympanum, that had brought back Marjorie into his life.