David laughed uproariously at this counsel.
"You blooming old cynic! You poor old he-Cassandra! Where did you get all your wisdom? Just wait until you find some one—"
"Huh! I have found her. Or rather she's found me. I could let her make a fool of me. But I won't. A long life and my own life for me. I'm wearing a sign, 'Nothing doing!' You'd better get one just like it."
David roared again.
"All right, laugh!" growled Dick. "Rope, tie and brand yourself. And then some of these days when you're one woman's property and you find the other woman is just around the corner waiting— That's another thing, Davy."
But David turned his back on the counselor and fled. What did Dick know about it?
The dream was being realized, the lonely gaps filled. He was to have some one of his own to love and to serve. This time his heart was a captive for life; any one who had been in love a baker's dozen of times could tell that. He expected great things of love. He saw it as something exquisitely fine and beautiful and yet proof against the vandal fingers of familiarity; a joy always, a light for the dark places, a guide and comrade in stressful times; and everlasting as the hills. Just as the poets have always sung of it. Would any man wear a sign, "Nothing doing!" in the face of that?
The last afternoon of Shirley's visit came, clear and crisp, a strong west wind lifting the haze from the tinted hills. They pretended to play golf, but their strokes were perfunctory, absent-minded. They talked little and that in strangely low tones, always soberly. After a while they gave up the pretense, sought a seat on a secluded sunny slope and fell into a long silence.
"Shirley!" he broke it at length.
"Yes, David?"