Fearless, now, his awe gone in tenderness, he lifted her chin, looked straight into her eyes, smiled. But his courage was slipping. He wanted to run and hide.
He turned abruptly, grumbling, "Well, better get back to work now, I guess."
Her cry was hungry: "Oh, please don't go." She was beside him, shyly picking at his sleeve. "I know what you mean. I like you for being so understanding. But—— I do like you. You were the perfect companion. Let's—— Oh, let's have a walk—and try to laugh again."
He definitely did not want to stay. At this moment he did not love her. He regarded her as an estimable young woman who, for a person so idiotically reared, had really shown a good deal of pluck out on the road—where he wanted to be. He stood in the hall disliking his old cap while she ran up to put on a top coat.
Mute, casual, they tramped out of the house together, and down the hill to a region of shabby old brown houses like blisters on the hillside. They had little to say, and that little was a polite reminiscence of incidents in which neither was interested.
When they came back to the Gilson hedge, he stopped at the gate, with terrific respectableness removed his cap.
"Good night," she said cheerily. "Call me up soon again."
He did not answer "Good night." He said "Good-by"; and he meant it to be his last farewell. He caught her hand, hastily dropped it, fled down the hill.
He was, he told himself, going to leave Seattle that evening.
That, doubtless, is the reason why he ran to a trolley, to get to a department-store before it closed; and why, precipitating himself upon a startled clerk, he purchased a new suit of chaste blue serge, a new pair of tan boots (curiously like some he had seen on the university campus that morning) and a new hat so gray and conservative and felty that it might have been worn by Woodrow Wilson.