“He ought to have told me he was going,” she said, a little impatiently, but her reverie proved too strong for her to escape, and she sank back into her dreamy abstraction. The twilight began to come down as we sat watching and as I listened. As it fell, the fire’s rose played yet more softly on Dorothy’s beautiful hands lying on the arm of her chair, showed a bit of rounded cheek and a translucent shell-like ear. Gradually I forgot my whole mission. The man became a ghost and faded silently away. Tom waiting on tiptoe in the office next door was quite forgotten. Dorothy and I and the fire. This new Dorothy, dreamy, quiet, almost clinging, with those new depths in her eyes, was carrying me quite beyond myself.
“Dorothy,” I said, in a low voice, “Dorothy.”
She turned. “What is it, Jim?” she said.
I tried to speak but I could not. The rushing words overwhelmed me. I could not make myself intelligible, and I sat there shivering with the intensity of my feeling, and yet unable to say what I wished. I found my voice again. “Dorothy,” I began, “I want to tell you.”
Dorothy’s eyes met mine for a moment, and then her long lashes fell. “I’ve been thinking,” she stammered—“thinking—thinking”—I bent forward eagerly—“of our old home on Long Island Sound.” The words came with a rush, as if she had just seized them from the air. “You never went down there, but it is the loveliest place,” she went on hurriedly. “The sea, in a great crescent bay, paved with the whitest sand, and an old colonial house on a little rise.” She was talking at top speed now.
“But, Dorothy,” I broke in, “I want you to know—”
She gave me no chance to finish. “Tom has a laboratory that he has fitted up down by the shore,” she went on, still more swiftly, the words fairly tumbling over each other, “and we work there when we’re not off on the Black Arrow. When we get back, I’m going straight down; I want to see the place so badly.”
“Dorothy,” I began again.
“Oh, and did you see the account of the reception at the Ambassador’s,” said Dorothy, as hastily as before. “They had the whole thing twisted upside down; names all tangled up. They got Tom’s name as Professor Thomas Orrington, and you as James.” She stopped short.
“How did they get yours?” I asked eagerly.