“I don’t want you not to come back,” said Barbran, in a queer, frightened voice. She put out her hand to him and hastily withdrew it.
He said desperately: “What’s the use? I can’t sit here forever looking at you and—and dreaming of—of impossible things, and eating my heart out with my nose painted green.”
“The poor nose!” murmured Barbran.
With one of her home-laundered handkerchiefs dipped in turpentine, she gently rubbed it clean. It then looked (as she said later in a feeble attempt to palliate her subsequent conduct) very pink and boyish and pathetic, but somehow faithful and reliable and altogether lovable.
So she kissed it. Then she tried to run away. The attempt failed.
It was not Barbran’s nose that got kissed next. Nor, for that matter, was it young Phil’s. Then he held her off and shut his eyes, for the untrammeled exercise of his reasoning powers, and again demanded of Barbran and the fates:
“What’s the use?”
“What’s the use of what?” returned Barbran tremulously.
“Of all this? Your father’s a millionaire, and I won’t—I can’t—”
“He isn’t!” cried Barbran. “And you can—you will.”