An odd smile edged the boy’s lips at her wistful earnestness. It was a twisted little smile which might have been born of the pain of stinging lids and dryer, aching throat. He could not have spoken at that moment had he tried. Instead he lifted her bodily and drew her huddled little figure into his arms. It was his first face to face glimpse of the wonder of woman.
But he knew now something which she had only sensed; he knew that the big, lonesome, bewildered boy whom she had tried to comfort in his bitterness that other night when she had hidden her own hurt disappointment with the white square card within her breast, had come back all man.
He looked down at her––marvelled at her very littleness as though it were a thing he had never known before.
“And––and you still––would stay?” he managed to ask, at last. “You’d stay––even if it did mean being like them,” he inclined his head toward the distant village, “like them, old and wrinkled and worn-out, before they have half lived their lives?”
She nodded her head vehemently against his coat. He felt her thin arms tighten and tighten about him.
“I’ll stay,” she repeated after him in a childishly small voice. “You––you see, I know what it is now 308 to be alone, even just for a week or two. I think I’ll stay, please!”
There had been a bit of a teasing lilt in her half smothered words. It disappeared now.
“I––I’d be pretty lonesome, all the rest of my life––man––if I didn’t!”
And long afterward she lifted her head from his arm and blinked at him from sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes.
“Why, Denny?” she asked in drowsy curiosity. “Why did you go––why, really? Don’t you realize that you haven’t told me even yet?”