Sitting in the very chair in the shaded lamplight from which she had looked so admiringly on Boller two years before, she now studied the prospectus of our contemplated venture. She was very lovely, but I remember noticing what I had never before noticed, the wisps of hair which floated a little untidily about her ears. And I did what I had never done before—I compared her with another woman, with Miss Tucker, whose piano had so often disturbed my evening labors. Miss Tucker taught mathematics in an uptown girls' school. She was not as pretty as Gladys Todd, but I remembered how wonderfully neat she was, with never a hair blowing loose, and I remembered too that, though she had disturbed me with her music, I never complained of it, for the sake of the picture which she made every morning when she descended the stoop beneath my window, going to her work as cheerfully and daintily as many of her sisters would to a dinner or a dance.
"We shall only have a hundred dollars left for doctor's bills and car-fare then, David," said Gladys Todd, looking up from the paper. There were tears in her eyes, but they did not affect me as much as her way of doing her hair. How I longed for the courage to tell her that it was decidedly bad form!
"But we shall only have to wait a little longer, Gladys," said I, and I moved my chair beside her chair.
"I know," she returned more bravely, putting her hand in mine. "But you don't realize how lonely I am without you. I want to be with you, helping you—to be at your side comforting you when you are tired, cheering you when you are discouraged."
For that moment I forgot the stray wisps and the Langtry knot.
"But it is only a little while longer," I pleaded. "Let us say in
June. I shall come for you in June. You will wait for me till June?"
Her hand was on my shoulder, and I forgot all about Miss Tucker. For that moment I was the happiest of men.
"Wait for you till June?" she cried. "Why, David, I'd wait for you to eternity."
"You need not," I replied, laughing. "In June I am coming to take you to a little house on a green hill, with a veranda where we can sit on my holidays, you painting tulips on black plaques, and I—well, I with you, just thinking how wonderful it all is and——"
"How wonderful it will be in June!" said Gladys Todd.