In a corner of the library, by the window overlooking the little garden, he set me to sorting an incredible heap of notes, made illegibly on paper of varying sizes, unnumbered, but every sheet scrupulously dated. These covered two years and a half, and their arrangement was anything but chronological.
"Note-books have their uses," he admitted, surveying that hopeless pile. "But not the flap kind," he added hastily.
I set to work, and as I touched the papers which had been with him all those days when I had seen the sun off for China, it seemed to me that I must tell somebody: "It's true then! Excepting for the misery in the world, you can be perfectly happy!" I had always doubted it. You do doubt it, until you have a moment of perfect happiness for your own. And this was the first one that I had ever known. He was at some proofs, and he promptly forgot my existence. After all these years, after the few rare glimpses of him which had been food for me and a kind of life, here I was where by lifting my eyes I could see him, where countless times a day I could hear him speak. Better than all this, and infinitely dearer, I was, however humbly, to help him in his work. I, Cosma Wakely, who, on a day, had tried to flirt with him.
I went at the notes fearfully. What if I could not understand them? There were gods, I knew, whose written word is all but measureless to man, I own that his notes were far from clear. Perhaps it was just because I so much wanted it that I understood them. Moreover, I found, to my intense delight, that I some way felt what he was writing. This I can not explain, but every one who loves some one will know how this is.
In half an hour he wheeled suddenly in his chair at the table. I caught, before he spoke, his look of almost boyish ruefulness.
"Miss Wakely," he said, "I beg your pardon like anything. What salary do you have?"
I felt my face turn crimson. This had occurred to me no more than it had to him.
When it was settled, he rose and came toward the corner where I worked, and stood looking down at me. For a moment I was certain that now he knew me.
"Miss Wakely," he said very gently, "may I ask you one thing more? Do you wear black sateen aprons?"
"I loathe all aprons," I said.