"Yes.... I don't hear you very well.... Where are you?"
"I'm in New York, if you please, to sail for Europe next week! We left home last night.... Is that better?"
"Yes.... That's much better."
Mr. V.V.'s voice, over the long miles of wire, sounded strained and hard; but the girl noticed nothing, being full of novel thrills.
"Perhaps you can guess why I've called you up.... Though, you know, it was to be a secret unless you saw me again, and I really don't count a letter as seeing!..."
"I didn't see you," came back the unfamiliar voice. "I am to blame."
"Ah, but the letter was just as good," said Carlisle, and laughed excitedly into the transmitter. And then, having never admitted any particular sense of guilt, having felt almost no "conviction of sin" as religious fellows would term it, she went on without the smallest embarrassment: "You see, I flew into a panic for some reason, and didn't mean for you ever to see me again. I ran away! And then I couldn't get his letter out of mind--I'd never taken it in that he was so miserable, really!--and I was quite ashamed of being such a coward. And so," she said, the upward-lifting lip pressing the instrument in her eagerness, "I've called up now to say I want--"
His voice broke in, not with the burst of praise and thanksgiving she had looked for, but only to say abruptly and anti-climacterically:
"I can't hear you. Will you say that again?"
However, but few words were needed, after all, to ring this climax. Carlisle said, slowly and distinctly: