"I can only run down here occasionally for a day or a few hours at a time. My affairs keep me in Richmond."
Little things exhilarate me and make me happy, and little things depress me and make me sad. So while I was light-hearted a moment before, I felt blue at the thought of his going. I said to myself that this was how it would always be. He would always come, and he would always go, and I wondered if a day would ever come when he would ask me to go with him.
He saw that I was depressed, and began to talk teasingly:
"Do you know," he said—we were now at the steps of my boarding-house—"that you are a very fickle little person?"
"I? Why I'm foolishly faithful," I declared.
"I say you are fickle," he asserted with mock seriousness. "Now I know one chap that you used to think the world and all about, but whom you have completely forgotten. The poor little fellow came to me, and told me all about it himself."
I couldn't think whom in the world he could mean, and thought he was just joking, when he said:
"So you've forgotten all about your little dog, have you?"
"Verley!"
"Yes, Verley."