“I’ll be a blame sight better after I get this off my system. You see—well I couldn’t think just then, but now, when my think tank 280 has resumed business, I savvey a heap of things. One is that you weren’t telling me any news.”
“What makes you say that?” Eleanor bent her grave grey eyes on him.
“I had the signal already. I mightn’t have seen it fully if this smash hadn’t come, but just the same I caught it away ahead of you. That afternoon up on the Las Olivas trail when we came together. When I kissed you.”
Had she ever let him kiss her?
He made an incurved gesture of his free hand, as though joining two wires.
“It didn’t connect. That’s all. I was acting on a hunch when I told you to keep it dark. Told anyone?”
Not until afterward did she think to be offended by this question. At the time, she answered with a simple negative.
“That’s good. It is just between us now. I suppose the matter with me was that I wanted to fly high, and you were about the highest thing in sight—”
“Don’t, Bertram. I’m not high. Am I hurting you? Oh, am I unkind when you are ill?” 281
“Oh, if you think it’s hurting me, you’re off. This is a swell way to talk, isn’t it, considering that I’m here—” his eyes swept the aristocratic comforts of the Tiffany spare room.