"Why are you sending me alone, Jim Crow?"
I think, then, that she saw the anguish in my eyes. She sank on her knees beside my chair.
"I don't want to go alone, Jim Crow. I want to stay—with—you."
Well, the jewel is on her breast and a ring to match is on her finger. And when the spring comes we are to sail for Italy, for France.
Perhaps we shall never come back. And I am going to give Rosalie all the loveliness that life can hold for her. Now and then she whispers that she never knew love until I taught it to her. That what she felt for Perry was but the echo of his own need of her.
"But I'd tramp the muddy roads with you, Jim Crow."
I wonder if she really means it. I wish with all my heart that I might know it true. I have never told her of my fears and I believe that I can make her happy. I shall try not to look too far beyond the days we shall have in the Louvre and the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace. We shall search for beauty, and perhaps I can teach her to find it, before it is too late, in the things that count.
PETRONELLA
"If you loved a man, and knew that he loved you, and he wouldn't ask you to marry him, what would you do?"