“This has been the nicest of little parties! I thank you—the first of my clients! But I must skip!”
He had been dreading the moment when she might take it into her head to skip. They had lingered long and the sun had dropped like a golden ball beyond the woodland.
“But you will let me help with the tea things?” he cried eagerly. “I can telephone from the crossroads for my machine.”
She ignored his offer. A dreamy look came into her eyes.
“I wonder,” she said with the air of a child proposing a new game, “whether anyone’s ever written a story about a person—man or girl—who undertakes to find some one; who seeks and seeks until it’s a puzzling and endless quest—and then finds that the quarry is himself—or herself! Do you care for that? Think it over. I throw that in merely as a sample. We can do a lot better than that.”
“Oh, you must put it in the bill!”
“Now,” she said, “please, when you leave, don’t look back; and don’t try to find me! In this business who seeks shall never find. We place everything on the knees of the gods. Thursday evening, at Mr. Banning’s, at eight o’clock. Please be prompt.”
Then she lifted her arms toward the sky and cried out happily:
“There, sir, is the silver trumpet of romance! I make you a present of it.”
He raised his eyes to the faint outline of the new moon that shone clearly through the tremulous dusk.