“I could send a night message,” he said, finally. “I really don't want to go. Miss Adele, I don't want to go at all.”
“I don't want you to either,” she said, softly. “It seems almost as if we are quite old friends. Isn't that strange?”
He restored his watch to his pocket. “I shall stay,” he said, “and I shall call to-morrow afternoon.”
Some one came for her a few minutes later, and he went down to the office and out into the street. He wanted to walk, to feel his body in action, keeping pace with his throbbing, bounding brain. His whole being was aflame with a fire which had never burned in him before.
“Alan' s little sister!” he kept repeating to himself. “Little Adele—she's wonderful, wonderful! Perhaps she may be the woman. By George! she is—she is! A creature like that, with that soul full of appreciation for a man' s best efforts, would lift a fellow to the highest rung on the ladder of human effort. Alan's little sister! And the idiot never told me, never intimated that she was—a goddess.”
In his room at the hotel that night he slept little, his brain being so active with his new experience. He saw her the next afternoon alone, over a dainty tea-service of fragile china, in a Turkish corner in William Bishop's great, quiet, house, and then proposed driving her the next day to the Driving Club. He remained a week, seeing her, under some pretext or other, every day during that time. Sometimes it was to call with her on friends of hers. Once it was to attend a barbecue given by Captain Burton at a club-house in the country, and once he gave her and her cousin a luncheon at the Capitol City Club with a box at the matinée afterwards. He told himself that he had never lived before, and that, somehow, he was just beginning.
“No,” he mused, as he sat in his train homeward bound. “I can't tell Alan. I simply couldn't do it, after all the rubbish I have crammed into him. Then she's his sister. I couldn't talk to him about her—not now, anyway.”