“I can't think of any. Perhaps I'd better go and tell her you're here and wish to see her.”
“Do you think you'd better?” asked Dan doubtfully. “Perhaps she won't come.”
“She will come,” said Mrs. Pasmer confidently.
She did not say that she thought Alice would be curious to know why he had come, and that she was too just to condemn him unheard.
But she was right about the main point. Alice came, and Dan could see with his own weary eyes that she had not slept either.
She stopped just inside the portiere, and waited for him to speak. But he could not, though a smile from his sense of the absurdity of their seriousness hovered about his lips. His first impulse was to rush upon her and catch her in his arms, and perhaps this might have been well, but the moment for it passed, and then it became impossible.
“Well?” she said at last, lifting her head, and looking at him with impassioned solemnity. “You wished to see me? I hoped you wouldn't. It would have spared me something. But perhaps I had no right to your forbearance.”
“Alice, how can you say such things to me?” asked the young fellow, deeply hurt.
She responded to his tone. “I'm sorry if it wounds you. But I only mean what I say.”
“You've a right to my forbearance, and not only that, but to my—my life; to everything that I am,” cried Dan, in a quiver of tenderness at the sight of her and the sound of her voice. “Alice, why did you write me that letter?—why did you send me back my ring?”