“Oh,” he said queerly; then added with his haggard smile: “So the color was put on too thick—that’s too bad.”
“Does Mr. Higgins know that you have been over there in Tunis?” Pidge asked.
“I figured he would, but maybe he will decide, as you did, that I sat here in New York and stabbed at that setting.”
“I’ll place the story before him to-morrow. I could say to him that you’ve been to the desert——”
“Oh, I wouldn’t. Don’t tell him that. I was hoping, though, that you could tell him you liked it.”
Pidge now looked up into a smile almost childlike in its eager purpose.
“Couldn’t you tell him that? Couldn’t you tell him that—just for what others may find in the story?”
The catch was in her throat again. His hand rested lightly upon her shoulder; his smile was altogether disarming in its wistfulness. She thought he couldn’t mean what he said. She thought of the face in the baby carriage in Santa Monica; of this tortured child of whims and imaginations, in a room with no window, and the pallor around his mouth. She didn’t like any of it, but did not feel exactly separate from it. She thought of a little box upstairs in her own room, of the check her father had sent, which she had so far refused to cash. She was in a blur, her sense of belonging to Melton’s dilemma over all.
“You can’t mean for me to tell Mr. Higgins what I don’t believe,” she said. “I’ll ask him to read the story to-morrow. If he’s against it, I could—I might help you to pay for the room in Union Square, or—enough to get to Cleveland.”
Then the thing happened which she would have apprehended, except for her pity and personal involvement in his trouble. She was drawn in between the open flaps of his coat, and held there against the soft shirt which he wore. And all through her were his whispers—soft delighted laughter from lips that pressed into her hair and cheeks, searching for hers.