Patiently, trying to puzzle it out, she sat beside him and pleaded, “I don’t know what I’ve done. I just don’t know. Won’t you please—oh, please explain, and give me a chance to make up for it!”
“Oh, hell!” He sprang up, hat in hand, groping for his overcoat. “If you can’t understand, I can’t waste my time explaining!” And was gone, relieved but not altogether proud.
But by Tuesday he admired himself for his resolution.
Tuesday evening came her apology; not a very good note, blurry, doubtful of spelling, and, as she had no notion what she was apologizing about, not very lucid.
He did not answer it.
During his sermon the next Sunday she looked up at him waiting to smile, but he took care not to catch her eye.
While he was voluminously explaining the crime of Nadab and Abihu in putting strange fire in their censers, he was thinking with self-admiration, “Poor little thing. I’m sorry for her. I really am.”
He saw that she was loitering at the door, behind her parents, after the service, but he left half his congregation unhandshaken and unshriven, muttered to Deacon Bains, “Sorry gotta hurry ’way,” and fled toward the railroad tracks.
“If you’re going to act this way and deliberately persecute me,” he raged, “I’ll just have to have a good talk with you, my fine young lady!”
He waited, this new Tuesday, for another note of apology. There was none, but on Thursday, when he was most innocently having a vanilla milk-shake at Bombery’s Drug Store, near the seminary, when he felt ever so good and benign and manly, with his Missions theme all finished and two fine five-cent cigars in his pocket, he saw her standing outside peering in at him.