“I’m going to have dinner up here with you,” she said cheerfully, after an interval. “I’m tired of eating alone downstairs with Miss Rankin; her white cap gets on my nerves.”
She satisfied herself that this plan pleased him, and ran downstairs whistling—then was up again in her room, where he heard her quick step, the opening and closing of drawers.
She faced him across the small table in the plainest of white frocks, with her hair arranged in a simple fashion he had once commended. She told stories—anecdotes she had gathered while dressing, from the back pages of “Life.” He was himself a capital story-teller, though at the age when a man repeats, and she listened to tales of his steamboating days that she had heard for years and could have told better herself.
Soon a thunder-shower cooled the air, and made necessary the closing of windows, with a resulting domestic intimacy. The atmosphere was redolent of forgiveness on his part, of a wish to please on hers.
At nine o’clock, when she had finished reading some chapters from “Life on the Mississippi,”—a book that he kept in his room,—and Miss Rankin appeared to put him to bed, he begged half an hour more. He hadn’t felt so well for a year, he declared.
“Look here, Nan,” he remarked, when the nurse had retired after a grudging acquiescence, “I don’t want you to feel I’m hard on you. I guess I talk pretty rough sometimes, but I don’t mean to. But I worry about you—what’s goin’ to happen to you after I’m gone. I wish I’d gone first, so mamma could have looked after you. You know we set a lot by you. If I’m hard on you, I don’t mean—”
She flung herself down beside him and clasped his face in her hands.
“You dear old fraud!—there can’t be any trouble between you and me, and as for your leaving me—why, that’s a long, long time ahead. And you can’t tell! I might go first—I have all kinds of queer symptoms—honestly, I do! And the doctor made me stop dancing last winter because my heart was going jigglety. Please let’s be good friends and cheerful as we always have been, and I’ll never, never tell you any fibs any more!”
She saw that her nearness, the touch of her hands, her supple young body pressed against his worn knees, were freeing the remotest springs of affection in his tired heart.
Nan wanted to be good—“good” in the sense of the word that had expressed the simple piety of her foster-mother. She had the conscience of her temperament and from childhood had often been miserable over the smallest infractions of discipline. Her last words with Copeland on the club veranda had not left her happy. It had been in her mind for some time that she must break with Billy. She had never been able to convince herself that she loved him. She had liked his admiration, and had over-valued it as coming from a man much older than herself; one who, moreover, stood to her as a protagonist of the gay world. No one but Billy Copeland gave suppers for visiting actors and actresses or chartered a fleet of canoes for a thousand-dollar picnic up the river. It was because he was different and amusing and made love to her with an ardor her nature craved that she had so readily lent herself to the efforts of the Kinneys to throw them together.