“I don’t know exactly. But very soon.”
“How long are you going to stay there?”
“I don’t know that, either. A year at least, I suppose. Perhaps longer.”
“Indeed you are not!”
“Why, Bob Griffin! What do you mean?”
“I mean—well, never mind now. I guess I don’t know what I mean. Or, if I do, it can wait. Tell me all about it. Tell me!”
So she told him, told as much of the plan as her uncle had told her. He listened without speaking. At the end she said: “If I weren’t for leaving him I should be so wildly happy I shouldn’t know what to do. But, oh, Bob, I know what letting me go means to him. And he had planned to go with me. He and I have talked ever so many times about going to Paris together. Now he can’t go. That miserable suit and the horrid lawyers are keeping him here. But because he thinks I ought to go he is sending me and not thinking of himself at all. He will be perfectly wretched without me. I know it. I almost feel like saying that I won’t go until he does. Perhaps I ought to say it—and stick to it. What do you think?”
He did not reply, nor did he look at her. She bent forward to look at him.
“Why, Bob!” she cried. “What is the matter?”
He shook his head. “I wonder if you think your uncle is going to be the only wretched person in this neighborhood?” he muttered. “Do you think that?”