“You’re sorry I’m going,” she accused him then, 249 and she leaned toward him a little, eyes quizzically half closed. “I knew you’d be sorry!” And then, swiftly, “Aren’t you?”
Old Jerry scraped first one foot and then the other.
“I reckon I be,” he admitted faintly. “Kinda surprised, too. I––I wa’n’t exactly calculating on anything like this. It––it’s kinda thrown me off my reckonin’! Are you––are you figurin’ on goin’ right away?”
Dryad spun about and threw her head far on one side to scan the whole bare room.
“Tomorrow, maybe,” she decided, when she turned back to him. “Or the next day at the very latest. You see, everything is about ready now, and there isn’t any reason for me to stay, on and on, here––is there?”
A little tired note crept into the last words, edging the question with a suggestion of wistfulness. It was something not so very different from that for which Old Jerry had been stubbornly waiting throughout those entire two weeks, but he failed to catch it at that moment. He had heard nothing but her statement that she meant to remain at least another day. It made it possible for him to breathe deeply once again.
Much could happen in twenty-four hours. She might even change her mind, he desperately assured himself––women were always doing something like 250 that, wern’t they? But even if she did go it was a reprieve; it gave him one last opportunity. Now, for the present, all he wanted was to get away––to get away by himself and think! On heavily dragging feet he turned to go back down the rotting boardwalk.
“I––I’ll drop in on you tomorrow,” he suggested, pausing at the steps. “I’ll stop in on my way ’round––to––to say good-by.”
The girl stood in the doorway smiling down at him. He couldn’t meet her eyes. As it was he felt that their gaze went through and through him. And so he did not see her half lift her arms to him in a sudden quite wonderful gesture of contrite and remorseful reassurance. He did not hear the first of the impulsive torrent of words which she barely smothered behind lips that trembled a little. His head was bowed so that he did not see her eyes, and if he could but have seen them and nothing else, he would have understood, without the words or the gesture.
Instead he stood there, plucking undecidedly at his sleeve.