"Come as Beelzebub!" said the old man, testily. "We've had enough of hiring a name for the Post. This time we're after a man, and by the Lord, we've got one!"
Henry Surface turned away from the telephone, struggling with less than his usual success to show an unmoved face.
"You—know?"
She nodded: in her blue-spar eyes, there was the look of a winged victory. "That was the little secret—don't you think it was a nice one? It is your magnificent boast come true.... And you don't even say 'I told you so'!"
He looked past her out into the park. Over the budding trees, already bursting and spreading their fans of green, far off over the jagged stretch of roofs, his gaze sought the battered gray Post building and the row of windows behind which he had so often sat and worked. A mist came before his eyes; the trees curveted and swam; and his visible world swung upside down and went out in a singing and spark-shot blackness.
She came to his side again: in silence slipped her hand into his; and following both his look and his thought, she felt her own eyes smart with a sudden bright dimness.
"This is the best city in the world," said Henry Surface. "The kindest people—the kindest people—"
"Yes, little Doctor."
He turned abruptly and caught her to him again; and now, hearing even above the hammering of his own blood the wild fluttering of her heart against his, his tongue unlocked and he began to speak his heart. It was not speech as he had always known speech. In all his wonderful array of terminology there were no words fitted to this undreamed need; he had to discover them somehow, by main strength make them up for himself; and they came out stammering, hard-wrung, bearing new upon their rough faces the mint-mark of his own heart. Perhaps she did not prize them any the less on that account.
"I'm glad that you love me that way—Henry. I must call you Henry now—mustn't I, Henry?"