This was his caressing name for her, as May alone was his father’s.
“The next book—our next book,” said Menie. “I do not know much, nor maybe care much, about anybody else’s. Randall—our own—when is it coming?”
“What if it should never come at all?”
Randall drew her fingers through his hand with playful tenderness, half as he might have done with a child.
“Yes—but I know it is to come at all, so that is not my question,” said Menie. “I want to know when—not if. Tell me—for you need not be coy, or think of keeping such a secret from me.”
“Did you never hear that it is dangerous to hurry one work upon another?” was the answer somewhat evasively given. “I am to be prudent this time—there is peril in it.”
“Peril to what?” Menie Laurie looked up with simple eyes into a face where there began to rise some faint mists. Looking into them, she did not comprehend at all these floating vapours, nor the curve of fastidious discontent which they brought to Randall’s lip and brow.
“My simple Menie, you do not know how everything gets shaped into a trade,” said Randall, with a certain condescension. “Peril to reputation, risk of losing what one has gained—that is what we all tremble for in London.”
“Randall!” Menie looked up again with a flush of innocent scorn. He might speak it, indeed, but she knew he could mean nothing like this.
There was a slight pause—it might be of embarrassment—on Randall’s part; certainly he made no effort to break the silence.