Now at the ungodly hour of one-thirty in the morning, Christina was expected home. She was to take the midnight train from some Connecticut town, and the thought of her approach began gradually to overcome, in Herrick's mind, the thought of justice. As he walked to meet her through the beautiful warm, windless dark, he told himself, indeed, that he had a great piece of news for her and took counsel of her how he should carry it to Kane.
But when, under the night lights of the station, he saw how she was ready to drop with fatigue, he simply changed his mind. He had sufficiently imbibed the tone of her colleagues to feel that nothing was so necessary as that she shouldn't be upset. It was bad enough that to-morrow she must be told of Nancy's message and add her identification of that curly hair; let her sleep to-night.
In the cab she drooped against him with a simplicity of exhaustion that was full, too, of content. "I was afraid I should never get you back!" she said, and again, "I thought, all the evening, how you had been—hurt; and how all that theaterful of women could see that you were safe—and I couldn't! Do you know how I comforted myself?" And she began to murmur into his shoulder a little scrap of song—
"Careless and proud,
That is their part of him—
But the deep heart of him
Hid from the crowd!"
"You know where my heart was!" he said. He had forgotten how large a part of it had been excited by the apparition of Denny.
Still humming, she drew back a little and let her look shine up to his.
"Simple and frank,
Traitors be wise of him!
Are not the eyes of him
Pledge of his rank?"
"Christina!" he said, humbly. "Don't!"
"You don't like it!" she softly jeered. And though when he put her into her mother's arms her little smile was so pitiful that it frightened him, and he would have given anything that to-morrow night were past, yet she turned on the stairway and cast him down, with a teasing fondness, a final verse.
"Vigor and tan!
Look at the strength of him!
Oh, the good length of him!
There is my man!"