"Very well. And you can take Malachi home with you."
They entered the drug-store, stamping the snow from their feet.
To be with him just a little while longer.... Because she loved him, she, Hilda Nordstrom, the proud! Not because she wanted to, but because it was written. The one man in the world, and he did not care. Friendly and interested, mystified until now; and to-morrow he would go his way. The daughter of a circus-rider, the sister of The Yellow Typhoon. The Farrington was no more; to him she would always be Hilda Nordstrom. Her fame would not touch him, for he was without vanity. What had her heart been calling out through it all, since the miracle of the violets? "Love me! Love me!" She had thrown it forth as a hypnotist throws the will. "Love me! Love me!" And all the while he was busy with this affair of the manila envelope, the blue-print and vengeance. All he had sought her for was to prove that there were two women, so that he might minimize the confusion, make no future misstep. Was there another woman? Had he not hinted at the supper-table that there was? And yet, on board the Nippon Maru, hadn't he told her there was no one? She just could not make him out. There, on the Pacific, his every act had been boyish, tender, whimsical. Here, he was smiling, bronze, inscrutable, primordial. Blood and iron. The one man; and he was only friendly, he didn't care. When she paused to analyze the situation, however, the question arose: Why should he care? As Hilda Nordstrom—The Farrington—he had known her less than three hours. It was so hard to remember that on board the ship he had been John Mathison to her, but she had been to him a baffling, begoggled old lady, hugging shadowy corners and keeping her back to the moon.
What had happened to the world? Only a little while gone—a few months—she had been happy, gay with the gay, enjoying life, success, the rewards of long and weary endeavor. And up over the fair horizon had risen The Typhoon. Berta, always Berta!
"Pardon! I did not hear," she said.
"I said I was going to do a bit of telephoning. I'll round up a taxi. The boy is making you a cup of hot chocolate. Better drink it."
"Oh."
Mathison was gone for a quarter of an hour. He came back to her smiling. The taxi was at the curb.