"And I'm just the one another girl wouldn't have told. Why did you, Kit?"
"I don't know. I suppose even then I must have had a feeling that you were the real one." Her head dropped on his shoulder. "You know you are the real one, don't you?"
"I guess!"
X
That winter there was a meeting of an Association of Electrical Engineers in Hamilton. Louie Marsellus, who was a member, gave a luncheon for the visiting engineers at the Country Club, and then motored them to Outland. Scott McGregor was at the lunch, with the other newspaper men. On his return he stopped at the university and picked up his father-in-law.
"I'll run you over home. Which house, the old? How did you get out of Louie's party?"
"I had classes."
"It was some lunch! Louie's a good host. First-rate cigars, and plenty of them," Scott tapped his breast-pocket. "We had poor Tom served up again. It was all right, of course—the scientific men were interested, didn't know much about him. Louie called on me for personal recollections; he was very polite about it. I didn't express myself very well. I'm not much of a speaker, anyhow, and this time I seemed to be talking uphill. You know, Tom isn't very real to me any more. Sometimes I think he was just a—a glittering idea. Here we are, Doctor."
Scott's remark rather troubled the Professor. He went up the two flights of stairs and sat down in his shadowy crypt at the top of the house. With his right elbow on the table, his eyes on the floor, he began recalling as clearly and definitely as he could every incident of that bright, windy spring day when he first saw Tom Outland.
He was working in his garden one Saturday morning, when a young man in a heavy winter suit and a Stetson hat, carrying a grey canvas telescope, came in at the green door that led from the street.