"David," she said, looking up, "you won't forget me, will you?"
Forget you! I swore to Gladys Todd that I had been idly boasting. I would have carried her image to the grave, burned on my heart. The memory of her would have been the only light in all my life of darkness. But now there was no darkness. For us there was only glorious day. The astonishing thing, the incomprehensible thing, was that Gladys Todd could love me; that it was really true that she loved me that first night we met; that she loved me yesterday when she sat on the vine-clad porch painting tulips so carelessly.
"But I did, David," she protested.
"Then why didn't you say so?" I returned reproachfully.
"Because I wanted to make you say so," she answered.
"But, Gladys," I cried, "I was sure you were in love with Boller."
She stared at me with eyes full of wonder.
"With Boller," I exclaimed. "Boller of '89."
"Why, David Malcolm, you poor, dear child," she cried. "How could you have been so foolish. He left yesterday—yesterday at three."
A cloud suddenly hurled itself across the brightness of my day. It seemed that after all I had hurried unnecessarily, for the financial problem forces itself even into the seventh heaven of love, and now it came like a ghoul to devour my happiness. It assumed concrete form in a picture of Doctor Todd when I went to him empty-handed, and I could not help feeling that it would have been better had I not let suspicion and jealousy hurry me to the attainment of what could have been mine a year later under less embarrassing circumstances.