A man was looking down at her, and in his eyes there was a puzzled expression to match the puzzled expression in her own.
She turned, with subdued excitement, to Thomason, sitting on his bench near the middle of the room, with his bed and an old trunk for a shabby background. If he would only go away!
She looked up at the man in the window opposite and smiled. In a guarded tone she remarked: “It’s a very nice day!” and instantly she turned toward Thomason again, so that he might believe she was addressing him in the event of his looking up from his work.
But Thomason, believing this needless remark had been addressed to him, had borne enough. He arose laboriously, grasping his coat in one hand and his spectacles in the other, and left the room. At the door there was a muttered “Women!”—and then a bang.
Bonnie May clasped her hands in delighted relief and drew closer to the window. “It’s Clifton!” she exclaimed to the man in the window opposite.
“It’s Bonnie May!” came back the eager response.
“Oh!” she moaned. She smiled up at the man across the open space helplessly. Then she took her left hand into her right hand, and shook it affectionately.
“You dear thing!” came back the word from Clifton. “Where have you been?”
“Oh, why can’t I get at you?” was Bonnie May’s rejoinder, and she looked down at the ground and shuddered at the abysmal depths.
The man she had called Clifton disappeared for a moment, and when he stood at the window again there was some one close beside him, looking out over his shoulder.