She turned to him suddenly.
“What do you talk about when, say, you are with Captain McCall?”
Hamilton smiled.
“Oh, the same things I talk to you about.”
“No you don’t. You don’t say he has a lovely uniform. You discuss things.”
“Has McCall been here?”
“Why no. When will he be discharged?”
“He left the day before yesterday. I was almost certain he’d visit you before leaving for Chicago. It’s queer.”
“Queer? Why should it be? He’s probably forgotten all about me, or was in too much of a hurry to stop off here.”
For some reason Hamilton felt immensely relieved. It was as though a curtain had been lifted from before his eyes. He had been mistaken in thinking that McCall had referred to Dorothy at the café. The poem had not been written to her. Hamilton’s mind ran back to the finding of the snapshot. It, too, probably had no particular significance. McCall had probably a hundred snapshots of Paris. Hamilton talked on without being fully conscious of what either he or Dorothy were saying. It was something about men and women, and Hamilton reflected that any conversation with women invariably resolved itself into the relations of the two sexes—to love, to marriage, to standards of morality.