He thought it a marvelous coincidence that it should be there on the rack. Like most coincidences, this was not hard to explain. It chanced to be there because Charity played it often. She was lonelier than Kedzie and almost as helpless to amuse herself. She read vastly, but the stories of other people's unhappy loves were a poor anodyne for her own. She thought incessantly of Jim Dyckman. Remembering the song she had played for him, and his bitter comment on the verse, “Tell her that wastes her time and me,” she hunted it out, and the plaintive chimes of Carpenter's music made a knell for her own hopes.
She had played it this very afternoon and wrought herself to such sardonic regret that she forced herself into the open air. She walked a mile or two, but slunk back home again to be rid of the crowds.
She was thinking of Dyckman when she entered her house. She let herself in with her own key, and, walking into the drawing-room, surprised him at the piano, reading the tender elegy of the rose.
“Jim!” she gasped.
“Charity!” he groaned.
Their souls seemed to rush from their bodies and embrace. But their bodies stood fast before the abyss that gaped between them.
She whipped off her glove before she gave him her hand. That meeting of the flesh was so bitter-sweet that their hands unclasped guiltily by a kind of honest instinct of danger.
“What on earth brought you here?” Charity faltered.
“Why—I—Well, you see—it's like this.” He groped for words, but, having no genius in invention, he blurted the truth helplessly: “I came to ask you if you wouldn't—You see, my poor wife isn't making out very well with people—she's lonesome—and blue—and—why can't you lend a hand and make friends with her?”
Charity laughed aloud. “Oh, Jim, Jim, what a darling old numskull you are!”