Again, at her words, the same odd uneasiness began to possess him as though something obscure, unformulated as yet, must some day be cleared up by him and decided.
“Don’t leave me—yet,” she said.
“I couldn’t take you with me to France.”
“Let me enlist for service. Could you be patient for a few months so that I might learn something—anything!—I don’t care what, if only I can go with you? Don’t they require women to scrub and do unpleasant things—humble, unclean, necessary things?”
“You couldn’t—with your slender youth and delicate beauty——”
“Oh,” she whispered, “you don’t know what I could do to be near you! That is all I want—all I want in the world!—just to be somewhere not too far away. I couldn’t stand it, now, if you left me.... I couldn’t live——”
“Dulcie!”
But, suddenly, it was a hot-faced, passionate, sobbing child who was clinging desperately to his arm and staunching her tears against it—saying nothing more, merely clinging close with quivering lips.
“Listen,” he said impulsively. “I’ll give you time. If there’s anything you can learn that will admit you to France, come back to town with me and learn it.... Because I don’t want to leave you, either.... There ought to be some way—some way——” He 337 checked himself abruptly, stared at the bowed head under its torrent of splendid hair—at the desperate white little hands holding so fast to his sleeve, at the slender body gathered there in the deep chair, and all aquiver now.
“We’ll go—together,” he said unsteadily.... “I’ll do what I can; I promise.... You must go upstairs to bed, now.... Dulcie!... dear girl....”