The Greek's face quivered, in anticipation of another blow at the fabric of his precious dream. “I know,” he said.
“No, yeh don't know. She didn't croak. She's alive.”
Orpheus's hands went to his temples.
“She's alive and waiting for you in the dominie's hallway. Come wit' me. Ready? Hep!”
Then Cyrus the Gaunt, Terry the Cop, and I had to fall on the Little Red Doctor and pin him to a bench to keep him from ruining it all, for the great bulk of the Greek loosened in every fibre and he collapsed into the clutch of the fragile Rat in a manner calculated (so the maddened physician informed us in technical and violent terms) to rip every condemned stitch out of the latter's foreordained peritoneum. Presumably, however, the Little Red Doctor had stitched better than he knew. For Pinney straightened the big man up and marched him across the way. As the strange pair mounted the steps the vestibule door opened. A little, quick figure sped to meet them. We heard across the leafage of Our Square the cry of a man who has come back to life and of a woman who has come back to love. When my eyes, which are growing old and play me strange tricks, had cleared, the doors were closed and Pinney the Rat was playing watchdog on the steps, jealously guarding that sacred vestibule.
Oh, the vestibules of Our Square! What Arcadia has fostered a thousandth part of their romance! Between those narrow walls, behind those ill-guarded doors, in that pathetic travesty of solitude which is all that our teeming hive affords, what heights and depths of love and anguish, what hope and despair, what triumphs, what abnegations, what partings, what “infinite passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn,” pass, and are forgotten! When the blight of ages shall lie heavy and dusty over a forgotten metropolis, when the last human habitation totters to its fall in some far future cataclysm, two lovers shall stand clasped in its vestibule forgetful of ruin, of death, of all but each other. Oh, for the pen of Euripides to celebrate fittingly those narrow and enchanted spaces! Or the pipe of my friend Orpheus to turn their echoes into golden music!
They came out, those two, arm enlaced in arm, with the glory on their faces, into a world that was theirs alone for the time. They vanished into the shadows, and the watcher on the step lifted his head and saw them go. But the face of Pinney was no longer the face of the Rat.
He rose and slouched down the steps. We went forward to meet him.
“I wanta drink,” he muttered.
The Bonnie Lassie put her hand out to him. “No, you do not,” said she.