'No good going to the rooms now,' Humphrey remarked. 'Let's walk the beach.'
Henry nodded dismally.
7
The sky out over the lake was a luminous vault of deep rose shading off into the palest pink. The flat surface of the water, as far as they could see, was like burnished metal.
Henry flung out a trembling arm.
'Look!' he said huskily. 'That star.'
It was still incandescent, still radiating its little points of light.
'Hump,' he said, a choke in his voice—'I'm shaken. I'm beginning life again to-night, to-day.'
'I'm shaken too, Hen. The real thing has come. At last. It's got me. It'll be a fight, of course. But we're going through with it. I want you to come to know her better, Hen. Even you—you don't know. She's wonderful. She's going to help with my work in the shop, help me do the real things, creative work, get away from grubbing jobs.'
It was a moment of flashing insight for Henry. He couldn't reply; couldn't even look at his friend. His misgivings were profound. Yet the thing was done. Humphrey's life had taken irrevocably a new course. No good even wasting regrets on it. So he fell, in a tumbling rush of emotion, to talking about himself.