“It’s too big for some folks,” he said. “Well, I must go.” He drew himself erect, and started toward the door; then he turned back. “Miss Rose—Miss Julie,” he said, “I want to tell you—I didn’t tell you the truth—I don’t have to tell you anything but what’s the truth. I opened that door and found you on purpose. Of course I knew where it went. I was sitting there all alone after what she said. And then someway I had to see if you were laughin’ like all the rest. Now you know—I don’t have to tell you anything but what’s the truth.” He went then. And presently Julie heard the door at the top of the steps shut and locked, and the key withdrawn from the inside.
Not long afterward Elizabeth Bixby and Aunt Sadie returned, and presently upstairs Julie heard Elizabeth’s high voice taunting her husband. The walls were thin, and certain words came vividly down to her. “Oh, yes you would, too! You’d be just like him!”
“That woman’s a devil. She’s just a devil!” Julie whispered to herself.
XII
That was the first time Mr. Bixby unlocked the door and came down the stairway to Julie, but it was not the last. Almost every evening Elizabeth and Aunt Sadie went out to the moving pictures, and there was no one in the house except Mr. Bixby upstairs and Julie in her sitting-room below. Two or three nights after his first appearance he came again. This time he offered a small excuse. “Could I trouble you to lend me a pair of big shears?” he asked awkwardly. But after she found a pair and put them in his hands, he stood and looked at them uncertainly as though he did not know what to do with them, then suddenly he flushed and laid the scissors back on the centre table.
“I wasn’t tellin’ you the truth,” he confessed abruptly. “I don’t need your scissors. That wasn’t anything but just an excuse. But, someway I can’t lie to you.”
Julie looked straight up at him. “You don’t have to,” she said simply. “You don’t ever have to tell me anything but what’s the truth.”
With the words she came as it were into a place of peace. All the whirling haste and nervous anxiety of her existence, all its terrors and subterfuges, fell away, and left her still and secure.
She saw the tension of his face relax also.
“That’s so,” he said with quick relief. “That certainly is so, Miss Julie. You’re one person I don’t have to try to fool.”