"You dear!" she said.
He had to go at last. The morning train for Ripley, but he would write her every day. "And you'll see—about it—right away?"
"Yes, right away." The leaves of the rose-vines over the porch rustled softly; a scented petal floated down through the moon-light. "Good-by, dear."
"Good-by." He hesitated, holding her hand. "Oh, Helen,— sweetheart—" Then, quickly, he went without kissing her.
She entered a house filled with a silence that turned to her many faces, and switching out the little lamp she sat a long time in the darkness, looking out at the moonlit lawn. She was tired. It was good to be alone in the stillness, not to think, but to feel herself slowly growing quiet and composed again around a quietly happy heart.
Something of the glow went with her to the office next morning, stayed with her all day, while she talked sub-soils, water-depths, prices, terms, while she answered her letters, wrote her next week's advertising, corrected proofs. The news in the papers was disquieting; it appeared that the cloud over Europe was growing blacker. How long would it be if war did come before its effects reached her territory, slowly cut off her sales? Ted Collin's bill for gasoline was out of all reason; there was a heated discussion in the office, telephone messages to Clark in San Francisco. Business details engulfed her.
On Wednesday she took her difficult prospect to the Sacramento lands in the machine. He was hard to handle; salesmen for other tracts had clouded the clear issue. She fell back on the old expedient of showing him all those other tracts herself, with a fair-seeming impartiality that damned them by indirection. There was no time for dreaming during those hard three days; toiling over dusty fields with a soil-augur, skilfully countering objections before they took form, nursing an engine that coughed on three cylinders, dragging the man at last by sheer force of will power to the point of signing on the dotted line. She came exhausted into the Sacramento hotel late the third night, with no thought in her mind but a bath and bed.
Stopping at the telegraph counter to wire the firm that the sale was closed, she heard a remembered voice at her elbow, and turned.
"Mr. Monroe! You're up here too! How's it going?" She gave him a dust-grimed hand.
"Well, I'm not complaining, Mrs. Kennedy—not complaining. Just closed thirty-five acres. And how are you? Fortune smiling, I hope?"