Some of the people were already leaving. Dick determined to slip away quietly. But, as he turned to the vestibule, he found himself face to face with Dorothy Ware.
All his gloom vanished. "I've been trying to talk to you all evening," he declared. "I've been wanting to ask you something. I asked you once before. But that seems a very long time ago." He found himself carried away in a whirl of eager enthusiasm and hope. "Dorothy," he said, looking down at her, "there is still hope for me, is there not?"
But in the girl's eyes there was nothing save pain, and shame. She looked away. She played nervously with the lace of her dress.
Blind, man-like, he took it all for shyness. "Only a little hope," he repeated, tenderly. He tried to take her hand.
She shrank away from him in a sort of horror. "No, no," she murmured, in a voice of torture. She did not look him in the face.
Dick stared at her dumbly. Now, at last, he understood her silence, her averted head. He saw the expression that told him she feared to wound him, even though she cared for him not at all.
"Forget me!" she said, and moved away quickly.
He stood, for an instant, looking after her, then he went, moving his lips in a queer, mumbling way, to the vestibule, and asked for his wraps.
As he was leaving the house Dorothy was sinking into a chair by her mother's side. She stared straight out in front of her. When her mother spoke to her she turned slowly around and said, "It's very cold in here." She shivered.
And her mother, knowing that it was as warm as an oven in those rooms, and watching the queer look on her daughter's face, decided the latter was not very well, and must be taken home at once.