"It does! It does!" he assented glumly, and fell to staring into the fire as if therein he could bring it all back to vision. "We agreed, then, that some day when summer came again, we'd do it all over. And now—there will be no more summers!"
Unconsciously he had betrayed himself in a despair of voice and twitch of movement.
"Are—are you sorry?" she asked, softly. "Are you sorry that Bill Jones and Mary Allen are finished?"
All his previous resolutions were forgotten, swept away as it by the hand of grief. All his pre-imagined repression vanished. He was but the heart-broken jester now, impulsive, outspoken.
"Oh, if I could live these few times over again, I think I could die happy! Mary! Mary! I never knew until yesterday how precious they were. Never knew that when Bill Jones died, the heart of me died with him! I'm—I'm——" He checked himself, shut his hands tightly over the arms of his chair, and exclaimed, "I'm sorry I said that. I didn't mean to tell you anything; because I've no right to say anything of the sort to you—now that Bill Jones is dead! I can't seem to remember that he was executed in that moment when you told me of your betrothal."
She abruptly dropped the steaming kettle back into the fender and he feared that she thus indicated resentment of his outburst. She got to her feet and walked across to the window where the rapidly waning light seemed hastily pulling drop curtains over their brief romance and he, fearful that he had offended her, sat dejectedly in his chair.
"One imagines many things! One is curious about them, sometimes," she said, softly. "And so—and so I wonder what you would have said, if Bill Jones had not passed out."
She stood as if considering something of grave importance and then, as if resolved, turned and came back until she stood near the chair in which he sat with bent head and shoulders, so unlike the buoyant, erect man she had known.
"It is but a week ago when being—being somewhat tired of neglect, I wrote a letter. Oh, I could kick myself for that! I suppose it must have been rather—let's say—familiar. It was addressed to Judge Granger. By return mail came a proposal of marriage and—well—I accepted it. Then he came on and—oh, it was a dreadful mixup! After just one evening together I knew that he wasn't, and never could have been, Bill Jones, the Pirate. And I didn't know what to do, or who, or what Bill Jones really was, and—and I was furious, disappointed and humiliated, and then you returned and—and——"
She paused and he looked up to find that her eyes were not on him, and that she was twisting her wisp of a handkerchief between her fingers quite as if considering whether such fury, disappointment and humiliation could ever be forgiven. He felt that he was on trial and that his future hung upon her judgment.