"Helmeth, Helmeth, Look! Look at me!" I demanded voicelessly across the bank of chairs.
He heard me; slowly he turned; his attention wandered from the group.
"Helmeth! Helmeth!" All my will was in my cry. Now he looked in my direction. There was that in his face that told me my cry had touched the outer ring of his consciousness. Then the lady who stood by, took advantage of his detachment to touch him on the arm. Only a man's wife touches him like that. I knew her at once; she was the type of woman who subscribes to the Delineator, and belongs to the church because she thinks it is an excellent thing for other people. She had blond hair, discreetly frizzled about the temples, and her dress had been made at home.
As soon as she touched him, Helmeth Garrett turned to her with divided attention. I saw her take his arm; he looked back; the cry held him; his eyes roved up and down; the moving mass closed between us and carried me completely out of sight.
It was fully a quarter of an hour before the crowd released me, and by that time he had quite vanished. I hung about the entrance to the hall, I pushed here and there in the press, elbowed out of it by resentful citizens. At last when the hall was closed and even the policemen had gone from before it, I went home, to lie awake half the night planning how to get at him. And the moment I woke from the doze of exhaustion into which I finally fell, I knew that the thread which bound me to Chicago had snapped. I stayed on two or three days, vaguely hoping to come across him. I even looked in the hotel registers before I accepted Sarah's urgent invitation to spend the rest of the month with her at Lake View.
One night when the wind out of the lake was fresh enough to suggest, in the closed window and the drawn blind, a reciprocated intimacy, I told Sarah all about Helmeth Garrett.
"And to think," I said, "how different it all might have been if only I had got that letter."
"Yes," Sarah admitted, "but that doesn't prove you'd have been happy."
"Not if we loved one another?"
"Oh, I am not sure loving has anything to do with happiness, or is meant to. Sometimes I think God—or whoever it is manages things—has a very poor opinion of happiness, because you don't find it invariably along with the best of experiences. It happens, or it doesn't. If love does anything for you it is just to give you the use of yourself."