Buddy sighed. “It ain’t as big a cinch as it looks, ownin’ a paper, is it!”
“Not these days, son.”
“Anyway, I guess She knows,” asseverated the stout little loyalist. “She’s lived there an’ she oughta know. What She says goes, with me.”
The clear single-mindedness of a boy! How the editor of The Guardian, feeling a thousand years old, envied his lowliest assistant! How the unstilled ache for Marcia woke and throbbed again at her words! She had begged him not wholly to forget her. Had it been a spell laid upon him it could have been no more compelling. He wondered whether, twenty years hence, her influence would have become less vital, less intimate upon him, and, wondering, knew that it would not.
He went home deviously by way of Montgomery Street. The early shoots had lanced their way into the sunshine of the Pritchard garden, and Miss Letitia was making her rounds, inspecting for the winter-killed amongst the tenderer of her shrubbery. Jeremy leaned upon the fence saying nothing. There were reasons why he felt hesitant about approaching Miss Pritchard. In his campaign against the tax-dodgers he had fallen foul of old Madam Taylor, one of her particular friends.
Shortly after the publication, Miss Pritchard, meeting Jeremy at her own front gate as he was about to enter, had presented the danger signal of two high-colored spots upon the cheek-curves, and a pair of specially bright eyes; also the theorem, for his acceptance, that a newspaper ought to be in better business than attacking and abusing lone and defenseless women. Declining to accept this theorem without debate, Jeremy was informed that Miss Pritchard would disdain thenceforth to harbor The Guardian upon her premises. Interpreting this to mean that the editor of that fallen sheet would be equally unwelcome, the caller had departed, divided between wrath and melancholy. Up to that time the Pritchard house had been one of the few ports of call in his busy but rather lonely life. Now, another of those gossamer links with Marcia Ames was severed. Miss Pritchard soon came to regret her severity, too; for the steadfast, unspoken, hopeless devotion of the boy—he was still only that to her—to the memory of her golden girl, had bloomed for her like one of the flowers in her old maid’s garden.
Now, seeing the lover, forlorn and mute, outside what was once his paradise, she gave way to compunction. But not wholly. There was a sting in her first words.
“Are you reckoning up taxes on my place, Mr. Jeremy?”
“That’s been done long ago,” he said uncompromisingly.
“When are you going to print it?”