"Exactly as before," he said; and saw himself going down the years with this burden upon him—and bearing it cheerfully.
She said—"Thank you, Jimmy"—and turned away from him; she whispered it quite humbly, without looking at him. When he would have taken her hand, perhaps with the impulse to say some more kindly word, she shrank away from him, and got to the door, and went out.
Jimmy, sitting alone, decided that the interview had not gone in any way as he had intended.
CHAPTER III
TWO WAYS OF LOVE
It was on a morning of late summer that Jimmy, playing with that fire at which he had, on occasion, warmed his hands for months past, set out to see Alice. London, so far as he was concerned, was empty of people in whom he was interested or who were interested in him; but he had lingered in it, chiefly because Alice, on a whim, had decided to keep the Baffalls and herself to their town house; and Jimmy, striding along through the bright sunshine, thought over the months that had gone by, and wondered a little where he stood, or what the future was to hold for him. Almost on this bright morning he decided that there was mighty little in life worth the grasping.
Yet Jimmy had not done badly; and in a future that was looming brightly before him Jimmy was a marked man. For that one who was greater than the now despised Bennett Godsby had paid Jimmy much money, and had commissioned another play; and others were coming after Jimmy, and seeking him out, and assuring him that he alone could "fit them"; a phrase which meant, as Jimmy knew, the writing of a play in which, like Bennett Godsby of old, they carried the thing on their shoulders. But then Jimmy was getting used to the business. And Jimmy was passing rich—for Jimmy, at least; and had changed his quarters long ago from the dingy little rooms in the little turning off Holborn.
Casting his mind back over those months, Jimmy seemed to see all that had happened; seemed to see also all that might have happened, had his life been directed in other channels. On this bright morning, while the sunlight lay upon the streets, he walked with the memory of another morning strong upon him—a morning of rain and wind, when he had stood in a draughty old church, hand in hand with the woman who was to be his wife.
It had been the strangest wedding; so different from anything he had imagined could ever happen to him; something with the shadow of the dead over it—something that spoke of disaster. He remembered particularly that the clergyman had seemed puzzled that two young people should stand hand in hand like this, with such tragic faces; he had tried to improve the occasion in more than ordinary fashion, with hopes of happiness and what not; and had wondered that he could not move them. Jimmy, remembering it all, wondered now that they were not moved to tears by the irony of it.