Polly opened her eyes wide. “That’s as plain as my nose. I should think so! So, of course——”
“Yes, of course I had to go.” She looked down at her toes, just as if Senhouse had been standing above her, bidding her go.
“I dream sometimes,” she said, “that he comes to me in the night, and looks at me—never speaks, but just looks. Not at me, you know, but through me—right through to the pillow. That’s enough. Then he turns and goes away, and I follow him out of door, into the warm dark—and he turns sharply upon me and is dreadfully angry. I’ve never known him angry; but dreams are like that. I see his face quite changed—wild and cold at once, and terribly stern. And I run away into the empty house, and wish that I were dead. No, no. I could never bear that—to seek him and be spurned. I would sooner never see him again.”
Polly was deeply moved, but practical. A girl must look ahead—far beyond dreams. “You had best not, Miss,” she said, “if that’s likely to be the way of it. Is he that sort—your hot-and-cold?”
“Oh, I don’t know—how can I tell? That has never been between us, save that once, when he told me to go away. He’s a wonderful talker about all sorts of things; he can make them all extraordinary. I feel, after listening to him, that I understand all life, all experience. Everything seems reasonable. But when it comes to—us—he won’t speak. I believe he can’t. And I understand him better when he doesn’t.”
“So would any one, I should think,” said Polly Merritt. “But how’s he going to look at you if he never sees you, and don’t know where you are?”
“Ah,” said Mary with far-sighted eyes, “I don’t know.”
“You might write to him, I suppose—and slip in your address, by accident like.”
Mary shook her head. “I couldn’t. Besides, he has no address. He just comes and goes—like the wind.”
“Has he no house of his own?”