“I’m tired, Bobby,” I gasp. “I’ve been having a party—and I’m not used to having parties. That’s what makes me such a cat. And, oh, Bobby, you’ll have to pardon things—Dicky just sprung your coming on us.”
“Dicky didn’t know that I was coming.” He speaks slowly, he takes my face in his hands and looks down at me, a long, deep look. The hard, black look on his own face has lifted.
As I try to tell him that Dicky didn’t tell me he was ill, that I have just learned it from Mr. Elliott’s letter, as I try to tell him what the bright May world would be to Dicky with him gone out of it, and as I flounder that I hope they will be heavenly happy, I splash more tears on my pretty clothes.
Bobby’s face flashes—all that a woman could want or dream of comes into it.
“Dicky didn’t know I was in the hospital. I went in under an assumed name. When a fellow’s tied up with publishers and theatrical people like I am——” Bobby drops the subject as one that holds no further interest. “If I had died, would it have spoiled the May world for you, Caroline?” There is a sharp note of anxiety in his voice.
“Bobby, Bobby!” I cry, wildly. “Don’t ask me! What have you done with Dicky! Where is Dicky?”
“I am not Dicky’s keeper.” The light glows and glows in his face. “She’s got one, though, and it was odd we should all three have left town together. I smoked like a furnace all the way down as an excuse to keep away from them. Caroline”—Bobby’s arms close about me—“I am not Dicky’s—I am yours.”
Walking home in the twilight that is gray and tender as a dove’s breast, Bobby tells me that he was afraid the night he ran away. He says he has tried and tried not to love me—that men like him should never marry—that they should live alone on the top of the Flat Iron. “But it is bigger than I,” he says, gravely. “It has swept me to your feet.”
“To my heart,” I correct, happily.
The hack lumbers around the curve, descends upon us. At sight of us Dicky and the strange young man who sits on the back seat [with] her—John and Ellinor are on the middle seat—roar with laughter.