He hitched his armchair closer and took her hand in both of his.
“Listen, Jennie,” he pleaded; “this isn’t so. It can’t be so, it simply can’t! It’s the—the heat. And this—well, this waiting—for October, you know. Your nerves⸺ Look here! If I thought this would last I’d—yes, by gosh—I’d chuck⸺”
“No!”
The word was scarcely more than whispered but it carried the intensity and arresting power of an outcry.
“Billy! That was just what I was afraid you’d try to say. Don’t you see? You mustn’t—you can’t! Why, I wouldn’t marry you if you did. I’d hate myself too much. And—yes, it seems impossible but I know it’s true—I shouldn’t love you, either, as I do now. It’s so strange, so contradictory! I don’t try to understand it but I feel it and know it. I am afraid for you when you fly yet I couldn’t care for you, not wholly, if you didn’t. There is a part of you that belongs to the air. And that is the part that I love best. With that gone⸺” She dared not go on to the completion of the thought.
Billy Cobb drew a deep breath. He leaned far forward and kissed her. And when he took his face from hers there were tears on his cheek. But his own eyes were dry. He kissed her again and she clung to him forlornly.
At length they drew apart. Billy took her hand again and patted it.
“I understand,” he comforted. “It’s the same part of you that I love. The part that makes me think of airplanes way up top, and clouds, and the way an engine sounds, far off, when the wind is blowing. It may be hard on us to stick it out. Hard on you, because you worry, and hard on me because of you. But it would be a lot harder the other way. We couldn’t stick that out—not together—could we, Jennie?”
“We never could, dear. We’d be ashamed to look each other in the face.”
“It’s settled then. We’ll stay with it.”