"No, it wouldn't be much trouble, and I suppose it would be much more businesslike." He spoke briskly but she knew that her demand had astonished him. "You know," he admitted ruefully, "I don't pretend to be much of a business man. I think you may be right to insist upon an accounting."
"O Clint! I don't mean that. You know I don't mean that." Her voice held the stricken tone of the sensitive nature stabbed by the swift realization that it has hurt some one else. "You've been the best brother a girl ever had. You've been too good to me. I didn't mean that at all."
"What do you mean then, Crete?"
Her answer seemed to grope its way through an underbrush of tangled emotions. "I just thought it would be well for us each to know what we have because—you see, we may not always be living together like this."
CHAPTER IX
A month had passed since Kenwick became a member of the staff of the "San Francisco Clarion." The work had been going well, and the perpetual small excitement of a newspaper office brought back some of the old thrill that he had known in his college days. But every emotion came in subdued form now. There was a shadow across his sky, a soft pedal applied to every emotion. And until this was lifted he resolved to deny himself a sight of the house on Pine Street.
But during the beginning of his fifth week in the city desire overcame pride and caution, and late one night he walked up the familiar hill and looked into one of the lighted windows. There was no one in the room and the furniture and floors were covered with heavy canvas sheeting spattered with calcimine. An ugly step-ladder stood directly in front of the window, partly obstructing his view. He was about to turn away in bleak despair when the glitter of some small object in a far corner of the room caught his eye. Peering more intently under the half-drawn shade he saw that the gleaming thing was a small tinsel ball suspended from the lowest branch of a tiny Christmas-tree. It was almost New Year's day now, and the little fir with its brave showing of gilt and silver had been relegated to a distant corner to make way for the aggressive progress of the painters. The man at the window, staring in from the darkness at the drooping glory of the little tree, felt for it a sudden sense of kinship. And the Christmas-tree stared back at him with an inarticulate sort of questioning. There was to Kenwick a terrible sort of patience in its attitude. Torn away from its normal environment, transplanted suddenly and without warning into surroundings giddily artificial, and bereft of the roots with which to explore them, the little fir-tree stood there, holding in its out-stretched arms the baubles of an unfamiliar and irrelevant existence. He turned away, maddened by a fury that he did not comprehend. "Anything but that!" he cried savagely. "Anything but the patience of hopelessness!"
His thoughts were in a whirl, and he was unconscious of the fact that he was almost running down the slanting pavement. When he became aware of it he slackened his pace abruptly. He was a fool, he told himself. "Anybody watching me would size me up for an escaped convict—prowling around doorsteps at night; sneaking up to windows, like a professional burglar looking over his territory."
He let himself into his room at the St. Germaine and snapped on the light. The first thing his eyes fell upon in the bare, prim chamber was a letter propped against his mirror. It was a yellow envelope and it bore the dull black insignia of the dead-letter office. There was something ominous-looking about it. There is always something ominous about that pale yellow, unstamped envelope that issues, unheralded and unwanted, from the cemetery of letters. Inside of it was a communication written upon the St. Germaine stationery and addressed in his own handwriting to his brother, Everett Kenwick. It had been opened and sealed again, and across one end something was written. The single word seemed to leap out at Kenwick with the brutal unexpectedness of a bomb. He dropped the envelope as though it had stung him and stood gazing down at it. It stared malignantly back at him, burning a fiery path to his brain. Up and down the room he strode muttering over and over to himself that one horrible word: "Deceased! Deceased!"