His face clouded. November was a semi-sacred month, Thurley’s birth month—but then, was not all the village sacred because Thurley had lived there? Where could he turn without a haunting memory, what person could he pass without recalling some incident in their life together?
“All right—about the fifteenth; I’ll be ready to get away then. We’ll go to New York for a couple of weeks. Would you like that?”
Lorraine nodded. They were both thinking the same thing: suppose fate should cause them to meet Thurley Precore?
When Dan left her that night, kissing her dutifully and saying some polite thing about being a lucky fellow, Lorraine went upstairs to the little hope chest and began counting over her woman’s trifles.
“Poor Thurley,” she said out loud, “he’s mine now ... and he will learn to care.”
Dan returned to the Hotel Button and went up to his rooms. He sat at his desk, scribbling on a bit of paper. Then he took a fresh sheet and wrote: “Dear Thurley”—but nothing else suggested itself.
“She wouldn’t give a hoot, you poor fool,” he told himself.
Finally he tore the paper up and whistling with utmost cheeriness tramped about the room and tried to take an interest in planning the decorations of the twenty-thousand-dollar house. It was Thurley’s house no matter what all the ministers and marriage licenses might try to prove to the contrary.