"I note in jealous anguish of spirit," remarked Dickie. "that you do not simply say 'a girl and boy next door.'"
Ruth's mischievous laugh affirmed his accusation. "The wall was not very high—I kicked a foothold into it half-way up, and Tommy gave me a pull from the top."
"Tommy was ungallant enough to leave the wall to you?"
"There were cherries in his garden—sweet black cherries. And only crab-apples in ours."
"He might have filled his pockets with cherries, and then climbed. No—I reject Tommy, he was unworthy of you. I may have been a horrid little Casino brat, I may even have worn a white satin sailor-suit with trousers down to my ankles—"
"Oh!" Ruth winced.
"I may have danced too well, and I understood too early the art of complimenting ladies whose hats were too big and whose eyes were too bright.... But once, after Annunciata Maddalena's nose had bled over this same sailor-suit, I said it was my own nose, because I knew how bitterly she was ashamed of her one bourgeois lapse...."
"Tommy would have disowned her, instead of owning the nose. Oh, I grant you the nobler nature ... but it breaks my heart that you didn't have the wild English garden and the cherries and the grubby old dark-blue jersey."
"If we have a kiddie—" Dickie began softly, his mouth puckered to its special elvish little smile. Then he met her eyes lapping him round with such velvet tenderness—that Dickie suddenly knew he was loved, knew that impulsively she was going to tell him so, and breathlessly happier than he had ever been before, waited for it—
"I did kill my husband. They acquitted me, but I was guilty. It was an accident. I was so afraid. They would never have believed it could be an accident. But I had to, in self-defence."