“Sing to you?”
“Of course you are going to sing to me. Every one who visits a hospital should sing. It was found wonderfully soothing to the patients in the big army hospitals during the war. After they had listened to the performers they were more contented to endure their suffering.”
“They would have died on the spot if I’d sung,” she answered.
They both laughed in the exuberance of their youth at their own nonsense until his injured ribs stopped him and she became very serious.
“I came, today–” her manner was almost shy–“to tell you how sorry I am for that accident. It makes me unhappy to think of you suffering here through my fault.”
“How can you blame yourself? You had nothing at all to do with it,” he declared with great earnestness.
“I told our chauffeur to hurry,” she explained, and then with finality, “if he hadn’t, there would have been no collision.”
Again his injured ribs subdued his laughter. “If everybody had stayed off the street, I wouldn’t have been hurt. That’s your argument.” He studied her face for a moment and then resumed. “Listen, I am going to tell you a secret. Promise never to tell.”
“Honest,” she agreed.
“I was running away over the speed limit. I must have been going forty miles an hour.”