Cecille sat quiet after Felicity had gone, until darkness crept into the room. She rose then, mechanically, and prepared and ate some supper. Later Perry Blair came and she found that pressing as her own problem seemed she could still think first of him. She would not tell him now of Felicity's dereliction. He needed a single mind to face his coming struggle. He would learn of it soon enough.
Later still they went out and walked, till he had only time enough left in which to catch his train. Both of them were silent. Neither felt any inclination to talk. But Cecille's brain had been as uncannily busy as that of one who lies awake throughout a white and sleepless night. And she had believed this bodiless activity to be the process of sound reasoning; she had found some security in the conclusions she had formed.
But when they turned back toward the apartment the whole brilliant structure proved treacherous. It toppled. She was back where she had started, cornered, driven now for time. She couldn't stand it. He would go—and he'd never come back. Never! What was there in it for her? What was she waiting for?
Play the game? Fight? She knew she wasn't clever like Felicity, but she conceived what she thought was a desperate expedient, nor realized that it was pitifully transparent. There was no elevator in their building. Perry had a habit of striking matches to light the darker portions of the stairs, though that was silly. She'd told him; she knew every step of the way. But to-night when he struck the first one, she raced ahead. When it flickered and suddenly went out, she crumpled. At her cry, which brought him swiftly, he found her a little heap upon the stair. Her ankle was doubled beneath her.
"I've twisted it," she said.
She wasn't clever, like Felicity, and yet how simple it was!
He picked her up. He carried her like no weight at all. And she lay very close against him, her head on his crooked elbow, her arms about his neck. They had left a light burning in the box of a sitting-room. And as he entered there Perry Blair, looking down at her delicately parted lips and faintly fatigue-penciled eyes, breathed deeply once, and smiled.
He'd been quickly skeptical; he was certain now. No one who had just twisted an ankle was content and serene as that.
And that was when Perry Blair first saw Cecille Manners—first saw her with seeing eyes. He looked down at her and in that instant learned how infinitely precious and flagrantly bold girlhood like hers could be.
He carried her to a couch. She lay quiet, her eyes still closed. But when, after a glance at his watch, he would have tried to ascertain the extent of the damage, which he knew was no damage at all, she sprang erect, and flamed at him, and struck his hands aside.