"'Now that you've asked me I realise that I never intended to come,' I confessed. 'And I'm damned if I know why, either!... If I come at all I shall be among the crowd outside, admiring you and Carlo.'
"'But aren't you quite, quite sure that at the last moment you won't regretfully find it impossible to come at all?' the voice seemed to plead.
"'I'm beginning not to be sure of anything to-night,' I said fretfully.
"'Poor Howard!' Ah, I knew that voice, the firmer one with the little caress of mischief over it! I made a quick grab at it.
"'I say, you're going to write to me quite a lot, aren't you?'
"'Not one line,' she answered firmly.
"'But, Fay, you can't disappear from my life like that!' I protested heatedly. 'Of course you are going to write to me, aren't you?'
"'I don't intend to,' she said sweetly, 'but I suppose I will, sometime.... Don't you know, Howard,' the voice asked, as though getting farther and farther away, 'that you don't deserve a letter from me, ever?' No words of mine could hold that voice near, it was disappearing, a faint thing growing fainter, like phantom in a wind.
"'And you don't deserve ever to see me again.... Good-bye, Howard.'
"'Fay!' I cried. Her name seemed to be on the wall before me, a written word. And I couldn't reach it, couldn't! Her receiver clicked—like a far away door clicking behind some one who has left a room empty of all that matters. And I was realising that only then! There was no more Fay Richmond! That voice over the telephone, with an unrealised shade and quiver in it, had wrenched aside in my consciousness what the eyes and body of that voice had seemed to leave intact for so long! As though a sudden ray of sunshine had awakened a man whom an alarm-clock had left sleeping. There was no more Fay Richmond! I didn't go to the wedding.