"But if you win—if you break the record?"
"It shall be just the same—I'll never run again. Under those circumstances I should be afraid to—afraid I couldn't do it a second time. I'll keep my record all to myself that way, don't you see?"
"Oh Bunny!" she cried suddenly as she gave his arm a little squeeze; "I've been more than half teasing you. Run if you want to. Run all the time. But if you don't break the record I'll never speak to you again as long as I live!"
He stopped and looked down at her, into her eyes, and saw the laughter lurking there. That instant he thought nothing in the world would be so much to the purpose—nothing at least that he could do—as to take her in his two big hands and shake her until her bronze hair fell about her shoulders. But he did no such thing.
She said, "Well?"
"You'll see," he answered and they walked on.
They sat on her porch for an hour and talked of other things. They did not hear the bells in the library tower as they rang out quarters, halves, three-quarters of the hour.
In her room, after he had gone, her eyes chanced to fall upon his picture fixed with many others on a tennis-net ingeniously draped between two windows, and she said to the picture:
"You're a great, tall, awkward, foolish old dear! There...."
But Bunny, in the solitude of his own alcove, lay awake half the night floundering in that tossing sea of doubt.