There was no way out, indeed. The paper was lying on my desk. An item in the “Social and Personal” column was marked in red ink. I handed it across.
COLE-GARDNER
A pretty home wedding was solemnized at the residence of Mr. and Mrs. P. H. Gardner on Temple Street last evening, when Mr. Gardner’s daughter Carol was joined in matrimony to Mr. Blodgett Cole, son of Mr. and Mrs. Roger Cole of Union Place. The marriage was the outcome of a boy-and-girl romance begun in the graded schools of East Gilead, when ...
I don’t think my friend ever quite finished reading that item. The paper dropped through his fingers, through his knees, down with a sharp plop! to the carpet.
“Bill!” cried my friend hoarsely, “Bill!”
“Hard luck, Nat!” was all I could say. “But don’t you let it upset you. If she’s that kind of girl, she wasn’t worth waiting for in the first place.”
V
The boy stumbled down our front steps. By the time I had spoken to my mother and secured hat and coat, he had disappeared.
Where he went no one knows. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. Around eight o’clock he appeared at the box-shop. He unlocked the office door and groped his way inside.
The office had expanded in keeping with the rest of the plant. It now bore little resemblance to the room in which Nat had kept bitter-sweet rendezvous with Carol in those Memory Nights. A private office—two of them, because Johnathan had insisted upon one—had been constructed off on the right. And Nathan stumbled into his own, leaving all doors open and lamps burning. He sank in his swivel chair and his forehead went down in his arms.