It was only when they were seated in the little room above and she had drawn off her gloves, and after a joyous insistence upon doing it all herself, had chosen some dishes from the card and sent the waiter off with the order, that their tongues were loosened.
David leaned back in his chair, and beamed broad content. He began to talk in the measured, smooth-flowing tone which she remembered so well. “First of all, dear girl,” he said, “I want to put on the record my boundless delight at finding you once more. I take off my hat to the gods. They have devised in my behalf a boon which swallows up all the imaginable ills of a lifetime. I swear to complain of nothing they do for the rest of my days. They have given you back to me; and if I am dull enough to lose you again, why, I will bow my head submissively to the deserved mishaps of an ass.”
The girl’s blue eyes twinkled with a soft, glad light. “It is a great joy to hear your voice again,” she said, gently. “The echoes of it have kept up a little faint murmur in my ears ever since we parted, as if some spirit was holding a phantom shell close to my head. And now it is as if we hadn’t parted at all, isn’t it?—I mean, for the present.”
“Ah, it matters so little what you mean,” he replied, in affectionate banter. “I erred once, to my profound misfortune, in deferring to your mental processes, and permitting them to translate themselves into actions. Do not think that I shall be so weak again. The key shall never fail to be turned on you hereafter.”
She laughed gaily, and shook her head in playful defiance. “Ah, but suppose——” she began, and then let a glance of merry archness complete her sentence.
“I confess to curiosity,” he said. “I should prize highly your conception of the motives which prompted you to run away from me.”
Her mood sobered perceptibly. “I did it because it was right.”
“As a mainspring of human action, that is inadequate,” he commented. “Almost all painful and embarrassing things are right, but wise people avoid them as much as possible none the less.”
“No, it was right for me to go,” she persisted. “I couldn’t stay and be dependent upon someone else, no matter who that someone else was. Your kindness to me that whole day was more grateful to me than you can think. I was so frightened in that early morning there on the bridge, so desolate and helpless and sick with dread of what was going to become of me, that I didn’t dream of hesitating to take shelter in your—your friendship. It was like going under some hospitable roof while there was a drenching rain outside, and I was very thankful for the refuge. But when it cleared up, I couldn’t go on staying, just because I had been made welcome, now, could I?”
“Since you ask me, I declare with tearful emphasis that you could.”