“I’ll have you both down for dinner some day. I think we are going to be friends”—again that light touch on his arm.
He caught her hand in his. “I shall only ask that you let the page twang his lyre.” Then with a deeper note, “Miss Towne, I can’t tell you how much your friendship would mean.”
“Would it? Oh, I am going to have some good times with you and your little sister, Jane. I am so tired of people like Eloise and Adelaide, and Benny and—Del....”
On this same afternoon little Lucy Logan was writing to Delafield Simms.
“It seems like a dream, lover, that you are to come for me in February, and that then we’ll be married. And that all the rest of my life I am to belong to you.
“Del, it isn’t because you are rich. Of course I shall adore the things you can do for me. I am not going to pretend that I shan’t. But if you were poor, I’d work for you—live for you. Oh, Del, I do hope that you will believe it.
“The other day, Mr. Towne said in one of his letters that you had always been fickle, that there had been lots of girls, Eloise Harper before Edith. And I wanted to scream right out and say, ‘It isn’t true. He hasn’t ever really cared before this.’ But of course I couldn’t. But I broke a pencil point, and as for Mr. Towne, who is he to say such things about you? I haven’t taken his letters for the last three years for nothing. There’s always somebody—the last one was Mrs. Laramore, and now he has his eye on a little Jane Barnes, whose brother found Miss Towne’s bag and the ring. She’s rather a darling, but I hope she won’t think he is in earnest.
“And now, my dear and my darling, good-night. I wonder how I dare call you that. But I am always saying it to myself, and at night I ask God to keep you—safe.”
Five days later, Delafield read Lucy’s letter. He was on his yacht in southern waters. His man had been sent in for the mail.
When he had finished, Delafield lay back in his deck chair and thought about it. Queer thing for him to fall like that for little Lucy. He had not believed that it was in him to care in that way for a woman. But he did. The letter lay like a live warm thing under his hand. It seemed to beat with his heart as Lucy’s heart had beat against his own on that last morning in Frederick Towne’s office, while his bride waited.