"Now tell me everything, Bob, from the beginning, from the window as you looked over the chimney-pots with the hyacinthine smoke curling up in the air—tell me everything, to the last word the manager said."
"Hark!" exclaimed Dearborn, lifting his hand.
"Nora is coming. I want to tell it to her as well. No one can tell twice alike the story of his first success—the first agony of first success." He caught his breath and struck Fairfax a friendly blow on his chest. "It will be a success, thank God! There is Nora," and he crossed the studio to let Nora Scarlet in.
CHAPTER XX
The third day he went up to see her and found her in the garden, a basket on her arm, cutting flowers. She wore a garden hat covered with roses and carried a pair of gilded shears with which to snip her flowers. As Antony came down the steps of the house she dropped the scissors into the basket with her garden gloves. She lifted her cheek to him.
"You may kiss me, dear," she said; "no one will see us but the flowers and the birds."
Antony bent to kiss her. It seemed to him as though his arms were full of flowers.
"If you had not come to-day, I should have gone to you. You look well, Tony," she said. "I don't believe you have been ill at all."