“I––I forgot,” he faltered at last. “I did not know it was so late. I must have been––pretty tired.”
Slowly the girl’s clenched hands came away from her throat while she stared up into his face, brown and lean and very hard and bitter. The ashen terror upon her own cheeks disappeared with a greater, growing comprehension of all that lay behind that dully colorless statement. For just a moment her fingers hovered over the opening at the neck of her too small blouse and felt the thick white card that lay hidden within, before she lifted both arms to him in impulsive compassion, trying to smile in spite of the wearily childish droop at the corners of her lips.
“I know, Denny,” she quavered. “I––I understand.” Her arms slipped up around his neck. “Hold me tight––oh, hold me tighter! For they forgot me, too, Denny; they forgot me, too!”
As his arms closed about her slim body she buried her bright head against the vividly checkered coat and sobbed silently––great noiseless gasps that shook her small shoulders terribly. Once, after a long time, when she held his face away to peer up at him through brimming eyes, she saw that all the numb bitterness was gone from it––that he had forgotten all else save her own hurt.
“Why, you mustn’t feel so badly for me,” she told 54 him then, warmly tremulous of mouth. “I––I don’t mind now, very much. Only”––her voice broke unsteadily––“only I did want to go just once where all the others go; I wanted them to see me just once in a skirt that’s long enough for me––and––and to wear stockings without any patches, and silk, Denny, silk––next to my skin!”
CHAPTER IV
At her first swift coming when she had cried out to him there in the dark and run across to kneel at his knees, a dull, shamed flush had stained his lean cheeks with the realization that, in his own great bitterness he had failed even to wonder whether she had been forgotten, too.
Now as his big hand hovered over the tumbled brightness of her hair, loose upon his sleeve, that hot shame in turn disappeared. After the quivering gasps were all but stilled, he twice opened his lips as if to speak, and each time closed them again without a word. He was smiling a faint, gravely gentle smile that barely lifted the corners of his lips when she turned in his arms and lifted her face once more to him.