"Of course." She relapsed into silence for a moment. Then she added:
"What does it all mean, anyway? How dared they carry me off like this?
How did you happen to come? When did you find that I had gone? What
do you think we'd better do?"
"Answer one question at a time," said Garrison, stuffing his handkerchief into the tube, lest the driver overhear their conversation. "There is much to be explained between us. In the first place, tell me, Dorothy, what happened just after I 'phoned you last evening, and you made an appointment to meet me in the park."
"Why, I hardly know," she said, her face once more a trifle pale. "I went upstairs to get ready, thinking to slip out unobserved. In the act of putting on my hat, I was suddenly smothered in the folds of a strong-smelling towel thrown over my head, and since that time I have scarcely known anything till this morning, when I waked in the bed at Theodore's house, fully dressed, and chained as you saw me."
"But—these roses?" he said, lightly placing his hand upon them. "How did you happen to have them along?"
It was not a question pertinent to the issues in hand, but it meant a great deal to his heart.
"Why—I—I was wearing them—that's all," she stammered. "No one stopped to take them off."
He was satisfied. He wished they might once and for all dismiss the world, with all its vexations, its mysteries, and pains, and ride on like this, through the June-created loveliness bathed in its sunlight—comrades and lovers, forever.
The hour, however, was not for dreaming. There were grim facts affecting them both, and much to be cleared between them. Moreover he was merely hired to enact a rôle that, if it sometimes called for a show of tender love, was still but a rôle, after all. He attacked the business directly.
"We require an understanding on a great many topics," he said to her slowly. "After I 'phoned you I went to the park, was caught in the rain, and attacked by two ruffians, who knocked me down, and left me to what they supposed would be certain destruction."
"Jerold!" she said, and his name thus on her lips, with no one by to whom she was acting, gave him an exquisite pleasure. There was no possibility of guilty knowledge on her part. Of this he was thoroughly convinced. "You? Attacked?"