"What do you know about him?" she asked.
"Nothin'," Tom replied, the smile that Hertha had felt in the background coming to the surface. "It wouldn't be anything but natural if you had a dozen. But Bob told me you had one."
"Bob! How did you have time enough to exchange confidences like that?"
"There weren't any exchange. Before he'd finished the car come. I reckon he was planning to have me give a wave of my hand and send the feller off the earth. What did you give him, Hertha? The kid thought I was a magician."
"Oh, I just told him a story," Hertha answered vaguely, "and used your name. But what did Bob mean? Didn't he like Dick?"
"Jealous, I reckon."
Hertha laughed. "Well, I'll tell you about him," she declared, "I was coming to him when I spoke."
Playing with her handkerchief, her mouth trembling sometimes as she talked, she seemed to Tom both nervous and tired. He had not thought she could so lose her old serenity. But he listened attentively as she told of her meetings with Dick in the library and at the park. As her story continued he grew to like the young southerner for his considerate and unselfish devotion. Looking at Hertha's too slender figure and at her restless hands he felt, as Dick so often felt, that she was not one who should be forced to battle with the world. And he knew, as Dick could not know, her utter loneliness. When he learned that the man was from Georgia he was not altogether unprepared for the close of Hertha's story, the quick breath and furious blush that came with the halting effort to tell of her lover's attitude toward the colored race.
"Oh, I can guess," he said tolerantly, coming to her rescue. "I've heard that kind of man talk. Colored folks are all niggers to him and he ain't got no use for 'em. But lawdy, that don't amount to much."
"But I think it does, Tom," Hertha said tremulously. "When he talks like that, I hate him."