Kit let the poet shake his limp hand, though Kit’s tight grasp was famous.
“Good morning, Miss Dallas,” Kit said, and Anne greeted him with the sweet cordiality that had always been one of her chief charms.
“It was silly of me to wait,” Kit said, “but that’s a nice step to sit on! Now it’s too late for me to do more than say I’m going.”
“Oh, but we have more than that to say to you!” protested Richard. “We’ve had a great morning, Kit! We’ve done the third act. And it’s a great third act, if I do say it as shouldn’t! We’ve made our notes on it these past two days and to-day we’ve written it. I needn’t hesitate to say it’s great, either: Anne did it. She saved it from being a sad third act; she changed the play back to our first idea of it. I was going to spoil it!”
“You don’t as a rule,” Kit managed to say; he had had too much of the “we” to answer easily.
“There is no rule, Kit, my son!” Richard laughed. “There is no rule, no precedent, because there is no old me! There’s not even English grammar left of my old self, you see! All the world is new. Do you know that this is Anne now?”
He held out his hands to Anne and she came over to him and laid her own hands into his. She was pale, her eyes cast down, her lips parted as if she were breathing quickly; Kit saw her breast rise and fall. He could not guess that Anne was wondering why she found her new part almost impossible to play. She had been thankful to find herself peacefully, unemotionally happy since she had made Richard ecstatically happy, but now the situation crushed her.
Kit made an attempt to answer, but Richard forestalled him.
“She was Anne all along, you are going to say? Indeed, she was not! She was my devoted, wise, unselfish little secretary, Miss Dallas! But now she is Anne. Don’t you see, Kit? We have made a happy end of the play. I didn’t know how; I should have spoiled it, but she saved it—and me! We made a happy end of the play, good old Kit!”
Anne raised her eyes and looked at Kit, gravely, steadily. Then she smiled at him. He had no idea of what that smile conveyed; for that matter Anne was equally in the dark. Kit threw back his head, pulled himself together as he had done on the football field more than once when the game demanded him and he was nearly finished. He smiled back at Anne and put out his hand, first to her, then to Richard.