# The Girl With the Blue Sailor (Ladies' Home Journal serial)/Part 4

from The Ladies' Home Journal, 1905 July, pp. 13–14.
“The Long Days of the Voyage to London Seemed Almost Unendurable”

### Chapter VII

SHELDON discovered, next morning, that there was no chance of a tête-a-tête with Dorothy Merton, for Cecil carried her away after breakfast. So he mounted to his room and set doggedly to work. But his heart was not in it, and the dinner-bell brought him quickly to the table. Alas! only Roberts was there to greet him.
“Yes, we're deserted,” he said, answering Sheldon's questioning look at the empty places. “They had an early dinner and have gone tor a drive. They wanted you to go, I know, but Mr. Agens said you never liked to be disturbed when you were at work.”
“Sheldon ground his teeth.
“Very kind of Agens,” he murmured.
An hour later, lying away up on the hillside, he had regained sufficient quietness of spirit to reason calmly.
“It's going from bad to worse,” he said. “It's getting too big for me. I really think I'd better go away.”
But his work—the work he had started yesterday—the child of his heart! “She has no right to shut me out of that,” he told himself. “I'll stay. It would be cowardly to run.”
Not until the sun dropped suddenly behind the western hills did he notice how the shadows had deepened in the valley. He hurried downward, but the supper hour was long past and he found the dining-room deserted. Not a trace of his friends could he discover in the hall or on the veranda, but in the hammock, under the trees on the lawn, he caught a glimpse of a white dress that looked familiar. Not until he came quite near could he see that it was Cecil.
“Good-evening, Mr. Sheldon,” she said. “Won't you come and talk to a poor, deserted creature?”
“Deserted?”
“The others have left me to my own devices. I didn't feel equal to a walk this evening. We had a splendid time.”
“Oh, did you?” said Sheldon ironically, sitting down with his back against a tree. “Why didn't you ask me to go along?”
“Weren't you working?”
“But I need companionship occasionally.”
“Well, you have mine now; I fear that must content you for awhile. Besides,” and she sat up, looking at him earnestly, “I'm going to talk to you very seriously, Mr. Sheldon. But before I begin I think I should like you to smoke. I've heard that smoking softens a man.”
“Is it so serious as all that?”
“It is very serious. Please get out your pipe.”
He got it out obediently, and she watched him while he filled and lighted it.
“Now I'm ready to begin,” she said. “I feel that I may talk to you in the way I'm going to because I'm so much older——”
“Older? Nonsense!”
“To be as young as a man,” she smiled, “a woman must be at least five years younger. Mr. Sheldon, have you ever thought of marrying?”
He glanced up, surprised at her tone.
“Why,” he answered slowly, “I suppose every man thinks more or less of marrying.”
“Then why haven't you married?”
“I can't afford to,” he answered simply. “If I loved a girl well enough to marry her I'd love her too well to ask her to share my potatoes and bacon.”
She shook her head impatiently, her face turned toward him in the gathering twilight, very sweet in its seriousness.
“That's a man's view, not a woman's.”
“And then one must find the girl.”
“If one really makes up one's mind to look for her she'll soon be found. Every sane man ought to marry—it's a part of his heritage of happiness.”
“I grant that.”
“You're a sane man—therefore you ought to marry.”
“See here, Miss Cecil,” said Sheldon, suddenly facing her, “suppose I should fall in love with one of your sisters, would you want her to marry me?”
“If she were also in love with you—I certainly should.”
“Love in a cottage——”
“Or in a flat—I believe in it.”
“You're an optimist.”
“An idealist—anything you like. Let me tell you, Mr. Sheldon, in a cottage, in a flat, two people are very close together—they have only each other. In a mansion they're often very far apart. It's self-denial that brings people together. They call me romantic, old-fashioned, but I glory in it!”
“The man you marry should be very happy, Miss Cecil,” he said soberly.
There was a great light in her face; her lips were trembling.
“You are good. I'm going to speak to you frankly, Mr. Sheldon. I don't doubt that we shall be happy—very happy. But—we were not brave—we thought as you do—and we've lost five years!”
Her eyes were brimming. Sheldon felt his heart glowing with admiration.
“Miss Cecil,” he said, in a voice a trifle uncertain, “you're very good to me. I shall try to deserve it.”
She drew in her breath with a little gasp and rose to her feet.
“There,” she cried, “I said more than I intended to say; but I'm not sorry! There come the others,” she added, and turned toward them.
Dorothy Merton was among them, and Sheldon went to her directly, masterfully, not to be diverted.
“The first time I've seen you to-day,” he said, detaining her a little as the others moved on.
She glanced at him from the corner of her eye, detecting a new note in his voice.
“Yes,” she answered lightly. “We're still in the hands of our—loving friends.”
“How do you mean?”
“They've changed their tactics—they've decided to impose obstacles. Oh, it's plain enough; and it makes it so much easier for us.”
“Easier?”
“Yes—we've only to acquiesce.”
“Oh,” he cried, “but I won't acquiesce!”
“Yes, you will; you promised.”
“If I did it was under coercion. Such a promise is not binding. I renounce it!”
She glanced at him again, then away over the lawn, for his eyes were very eloquent.
“Really,” she said, “I don't recognize you,” and she quickened her pace.
The others had reached the house and were waiting for them. A moment, and it would be too late!
“You said last night that you thought you might forgive me. Have you?” he asked eagerly.
She did not answer; one step, two steps, three steps.
“Have you?” he repeated, trying desperately to hold her back, to look into her eyes.
She permitted it for just the briefest instant.
“Yes,” she said, so low that only he could hear.
Sheldon was up with the birds next morning, but he made no effort at mountain-climbing. Instead, to the surprise of his host, he loitered about the corridors, hoping against hope that Dorothy Merton would come down before the others. This, of course, she was careful not to do, and her greeting, when she did appear, had an unexpected, a disconcerting, aloofness. He was puzzled and a little angry, and at the table devoted himself to Cecil Roberts, who soon understood his state of mind.
“Are you going to church with us?” she asked.
“To church—is it Sunday?”
“You heathen! Of course it's Sunday!”
“And of course I'm going.”
“You'll enjoy the sermon,” she assured him. “Mr. McFerry is so comforting. He always reminds us that to err is human. He preaches the doctrine of do the best you can and don't worry.”
“Oh, yes,” said Sheldon; “I see. In the words of the poet—
<poem>“'Our egress from this world Will be nobody knows where, But if we do well here We shall do well there'<poem>
—which is a pretty good sort of doctrine.”
“Comfortable, but not uplifting. Now we must leave you,” she added, as they rose from the table.
“But there's plenty of time,” he protested, anxious for more advice. “An hour——”
“What can one accomplish in sixty minutes, when a minute is only sixty seconds long? There's one sin, Mr. Sheldon, which no true woman can forgive or forget.”
“What is that?”
“To keep her from her toilette!” and she ran up the stairs after the others.
Then suddenly Sheldon realized that his own attire was exceedingly unconventional.
“A fellow gets mighty careless about his clothes up here in the hills,” he said to himself, and mounted hastily to his room.
Half an hour later, when he descended again to the veranda, he found Roberts stationed there, impressively tall in his Prince Albert coat.
“I fear we're going to be late,” said Roberts, glancing at his watch; “but I've long since learned that the mysteries of the toilette take a certain invariable time.”
“Here they come,” said Sheldon. “My, what a rosebud garden of girls!”
“Aren't they?” agreed his companion, gazing appreciatively over his shoulder.
“Papa,” cried Cecil, who was always the generalissimo, “you will take mamma and Maud; Mr. Agens, you will take your wife; you two girls follow, and Mr. Sheldon will come here with Dorothy and me.”
“Attention,” shouted “The Rock,” grinning broadly. “Fellow-countrymen, we are here to do or die! Forward, march!”
“This is the proudest moment of my life,” observed Sheldon as they moved off.
Cecil smiled at him; then she stopped suddenly.
“Oh, there's Mrs. Van Dyne signaling me,” she said. “I must wait for her. You don't mind?”
“We'll try not to get lost,” said Sheldon, and he walked on beside Miss Merton. A glance at her showed him that she was frowning.
“You said you had forgiven me,” he protested.
“I have,” and she colored a little under his eyes.
“I should never have suspected it. Forgiveness, it seems to me, implies something more——”
“Something more?”
“At least, it doesn't imply frowning.”
“It is not at you I'm frowning.”
“Then please smile at me and frown only upon the guilty person. It isn't fair that I should suffer for another's sins—just when I was getting my own account squared up, too! I think I deserve a reward. Will you go boating with me to-night, Miss Merton?”
“And run the risk of another shipwreck? Certainly not!”
“Miss Merton, if we meet with another accident you shall wade to shore if you wish to. It will break my heart, but I'll permit it.”
“How kind you are! How self-sacrificing! Shall I wear my bathing-suit?”
“'It was Your Image Which Blotted Out the Other in My Heart; it is You I Love'”
“You will be admirable in any costume.”
She dropped him a little, mocking courtesy.
“That came so trippingly on the tongue, Mr. Sheldon, that I believe I shall accept!”
“Oh, if you would!” he cried.
Perhaps he was too obvious, for she frowned again.
“Yes; and I'll bring Cecil with me!”
“Miss Merton——” he began tensely.
“Oh, there are the Hamertons,” she cried, her eyes unnaturally bright. “Excuse me, Mr. Sheldon.”
Sheldon watched her, his hands gripped tight behind him. He saw her greet a middle-aged man and woman; then she gave her hand to a handsome young fellow, who bent over it devotedly. Sheldon saw how their eyes met, how she smiled up at him——
He wheeled short around, and ran straight into two ladies.
“Why, Mr. Sheldon!” cried Cecil Roberts.
“I—I beg your pardon,” he stammered.
“This is Mrs. Van Dyne,” she continued rapidly, and Sheldon heard himself mumbling unintelligibly.
Mrs. Van Dyne had the penetration to see that something was amiss, and turned away to greet Mrs. Roberts and the others.
“You were running away!” whispered Cecil Roberts, shaking his arm. “You were actually running away!”
“I was—I admit it,” he said. “Let me go.”
“Never! I'm ashamed of you! To run at the first shot!”
“It isn't the first shot. It's the last one; the battle's over and I'm not the victor. I'm routed.”
“Nonsense! How ignorant men are! Come with me.”
He saw Dorothy Merton enter the church with the Hamertons, and he followed his own guide obediently enough.
“Sit here,” she said, and he sat down. “You're like a raw recruit. You're dodging bullets that are away up in the air. You'll get your ginger back!”
“I hope so,” he murmured. “I'll need it!”
He did, indeed, need it during the next hour; but he was no baby: he had fought losing battles before this one, and had accepted defeat as philosophically as might be. So he sat up and squared his shoulders and kept his eyes resolutely away from the Hamertons' pew, though it was beyond his power to compel his ears to hear the sermon, Yet a sharper pang was reserved for him.
“Dorothy is going home with the Hamertons,” Mrs. Roberts told them as they left the church. “She says she will have them drive her over this evening.”
Sheldon walked on gloomily to the door; he felt some one beside him, and turned to find Cecil there.
“Let us go on together,” she said; and then, as they reached the street, “but you mustn't blame her.
“Blame her? I shouldn't blame any one for preferring gold to pewter!”
She did not answer, though her lips trembled a little, and they walked on in silence to the house. Van Valkenburg met them at the door. He had a little envelope in his hand.
“Here's a message for you, Mr. Sheldon,” he said.
“Excuse me a moment, Miss Cecil,” and Sheldon tore the envelope open. He unfolded the slip of paper within and ran his eyes along the lines; his face flushed, hardened, brightened.
“Can I send an answer?” he asked.
“Yes, sir; I'll have it sent for you.”
On the back of the envelope Sheldon penciled two words, signed his name, added the address, and handed it to Van Valkenburg.
“Thank you,” he said. “I should like you to get that off as soon as you can.”
Cecil Roberts had wandered to the far end of the veranda, and Sheldon joined her there.
“I used to laugh,” he said, “at those old Greek comedies where things were always happening 'just in the nick of time.' I believed things never happened that way in real life; but I find they do sometimes.”
She looked at him quickly. “You mean one has happened to you?”
“Yes—just in the nick of time. It permits me to withdraw gracefully, and gives me work to do.”
“Will you tell me?”
For answer he held out the slip of paper. She read:
“J. R. Sheldon, Lexington, New York:
“Hunter has resigned on account sickness, to take effect as soon as can fill place. Will you take it, starting at once? Answer.
McLandberg.”
“What does it mean?” she asked. “Who is McLandberg? Who is Hunter? What is the place?”
“McLandberg is managing editor of the 'Record.' Hunter is his crack special-assignment man. The place is with the Boer army in South Africa.”
“Oh!” she cried, and then grew still, looking at him. “You're going?” she asked at last.
“I wired at once that I accept. Wasn't that right?”
“Right? Yes! Oh, you men!” she cried. “You can go to the ends of the earth; you can do things; while we women——”
“Would you be a man?” he questioned, smiling.
She caught the smile and answered it.
No,” she said; “I should be afraid.”
He went to his room at last, to do his packing, and presently Agens sought him out there for a parting smoke. The supper-bell summoned them downstairs, and Sheldon looked up and down the table with a quick glance, which Cecil Roberts, at least, understood.
“She hasn't returned,” she said. “She'll prefer to drive back in the cool of the evening.”
He did not answer, but when they were alone together under the trees he 'laid the case before her.
“This doesn't make any difference,” he said. “How should it? I'm going away for a year, maybe more than that. Perhaps I'll succeed, and perhaps I'll fail; it's a toss-up. It wouldn't be fair to ask any girl to wait and see.”
She smiled a little sadly.
“I suppose you're right, ethically,” she agreed; “but really you're quite wrong. You're like most men, thinking always of what we women ought to do, not of what we should love to do. If a girl cared for you she'd love to wait, and success or failure wouldn't make any difference.”
“A man hasn't any right to ask a girl to share his failure.”
“I thought we went over that ground last night.”
“We did; but with the optimistic sunshine of your reasoning in my eyes I couldn't see clearly.”
“And you think you see clearly now?”
“I'm sure of it. I see something I didn't suspect before—that what is right for a woman may be wrong for a man; that what is unselfishness in a woman may be selfishness in a man!”
“Do you know, she said, “you remind me of Gigadibs.”
“Yes,” he smiled; “I, too, am a newspaper man who hasn't accomplished much.”
“Oh, the resemblance is closer than that! You've built up for yourself an abstract intellectual plan of life; you don't accept things as they are and try to make the best of them.”
“Don't I? I rather imagined I did. I'll puzzle it out on the voyage over. You'll write to me and tell me—things?”
“Of course; but I'm sorry you can't see things as I do.”
“It's the fault of my gross masculine vision.”
“I suppose you'll have to be guided by it, since it's the best you have; but it's a pity,” she said, and sighed a little wearily.
The shadows deepened to twilight, twilight to darkness; but still there came no sound of wheels along the road.
“We would better go back to the house,” said his companion at last, and they went back slowly and joined the others on the porch.
Sheldon longed to get away from them, longed to go indoors, yet dared not; he could not run the risk of missing her; he must see her and speak to her; must see if she really cared. If she did—and he drew a quick breath—if she did——
“There comes some one,” said Mrs. Roberts, and in a moment he, too, caught the sound of a horse's hoofs far down the road. Nearer and nearer they came, thundering over the bridge and up the drive to the house. A man in livery swung himself out of the saddle.
“I have a note for Mrs. Roberts,” he said, touching his hat as he mounted the steps.
That lady stretched out her hand for it, rose and read it under the porch lantern.
“Very well,” she said; “there's no answer,” and as the messenger turned away she added to the group on the porch: “It's from Dorothy. She's going to spend the night with the Hamertons.”
They were all down to see him off, next morning, to shake hands with him, to wish him Godspeed—even to cry a little. It came to him as a kind of amazing miracle that in one short week he should have formed all these attachments—he who, in six years, had formed so few. But as he drove away through the gray of the dawn one face stood out before all the rest, and it was at Cecil Roberts he looked last and longest.

### Chapter VIII

IT WAS not until two years later, after the peace conference at Vereeniging, that Sheldon finally turned his face southward toward Capetown and home. With the history of those years this story has no concern; he emerged from them stronger, broader, bigger every way, with a veneration for the essential goodness of human nature which he had not before possessed. For many months he was almost alone in the field; the other correspondents had returned home long before. He held on grimly to the end.
During those long months on the veldt personal news from the outside world had reached him almost not at all. One letter he had had from Cecil Roberts—a long, kind, sisterly, gossipy letter, and over one paragraph of it he had hung with an intense interest:
“I was right and you were wrong in our estimate of Dorothy Merton, for she has refused to marry Luther Hamerton, just as I knew she would, and has returned to her teaching in New York. She says that is her career and that it satisfies her; and I sometimes fear she really means it. Concerning yourself she prefers to be reticent; and fearing to do more harm than good—as I once did—I am keeping my hands off.”
At Capetown he found two other letters from Cecil Roberts awaiting him, both dated more than a year before. One of them was little more than a wail of utter desolation:
“So the five years that we missed are to be forever missed,” she wrote, “for he is dead—quite suddenly of pneumonia—and I know not where to turn. I blame myself—it was I who should have been brave. As you said, my friend, a woman may do what a man may not—she may give herself.”
The other, written six months later, was in a quieter tone, an almost cheerful one. It ran:
“I was ashamed of that last letter I wrote you almost immediately I had mailed it; not that I wrote more than I felt, but because the writing will endure and the feeling will not, in its first intensity. I have found that there are many things in life left me—many interests and many dear friends.
“My sister, Maud, is to be married next month—very happily—and we are planning another summer in the mountains. We are hoping that Mr. Agens and his wife will be able to come, too—it will be almost like old times, only you will not be there and I shall miss you. But I have heard so many splendid things concerning your work for your paper—Mr. Agens, who has some friends among the newspaper men, comes regularly to tell me, and you should see his face shining when he talks about 'old Deacon!' So you see I have many things to be thankful for.
“Mr. Agens, by-the-way, has a supreme source of happiness—a boy, such a darling little fellow; and he has named him—guess!—John Sheldon Agens.
“I know there is some one else about whom you are anxious to hear, but there isn't much to tell. She is keeping on with her work, and seems more and more devoted to it. She does not come to see us as often as she used, and I think she is working too hard. But we shall have her with us again the coming summer; and I shall try to teach her moderation.”
He had not cared particularly, before, about returning home. Now there was a sudden change. A hot, homesick passion for New York took possession of him.
The long days of the voyage to London seemed almost unendurable. There he found a letter from McLandberg awaiting him. It ran:
“You have earned a vacation, and we want you to take a long one. If you care to remain abroad you might take a look at the Balkans, where there seems to be trouble brewing. But probably you'll want to come back to New York, and I'll be mighty glad to see you and have a talk with you about your plans. You're too good a man to stay idle long. The paper needs you.”
A month before Sheldon instantly would have chosen the Balkans; now he wired McLandberg a terse message: “Home by first boat.”
He stood on the deck and watched the serrated sky-line of the great town grow and broaden as the big boat steamed slowly into the bay. At quarantine a swarm of reporters came aboard.
“We want Sheldon, of the 'Record,'” he heard one of them say to the steward, and in a moment they had discovered him, charged down upon him, and were shaking him wildly by the hand.
“You've made a mistake, fellows, haven't you?” he laughed. “There's Lord Rockminster, the new Ambassador, over there; and there's Melba and Marconi.”
“Oh,confound them! They'll keep! How are you, anyway?”
“Fine as silk.”
“Brown as a berry, tough as leather. You look like an athlete in training.”
“I haven't picked up any superfluous flesh, that's a fact,” laughed Sheldon. “I didn't have time.”
“We're proud of you, old man,” they said, and shook hands with him again.
McLandberg was waiting on the pier and was the first man up the gangplank. The other fellows saw him and stood around with smiling faces to see the “old man” greet his great special.
“But I'll not keep you now,” said McLandberg, after the first moments, nodding his gray head paternally. “Of course there are others you want to see—at least, I hope there are,” and his little eyes twinkled and his face beamed. “But I'll look for you at the office this evening. Speed will be there,and Raymond, and half a dozen others. They all want to see you.”
“You take my breath away. I don't understand yet what it's all about.”
“It's a recognition of as fine work as was ever done by a correspondent in the field,” said McLandberg a little solemnly. “You needn't smile—I've known the best of 'em, and I know what I'm talking about.”
They left the boat together and walked down the pier.
“Remember—to-night,” said the chief, holding up his finger, then hurrying away to plunge again into the whirlpool of “the row.”
Sheldon made his declaration, called a cab, and settled down for the long ride uptown. His heart was glowing with the warmth of his welcome. But when, at last, the cab turned into a quiet side street, and stopped before a sedate old house, all thought of the past, of paltry, worldly triumphs, was wiped away.
“Is Miss Cecil Roberts in?” he inquired of the girl who answered his ring.
“Yes, sir,” she said, and took his card, showing him into a wide, old-fashioned parlor, very coo] and pleasant with its drawn blinds. He looked about it with quick interest—this was where she had lived——
There came a quick step on the stairs, a low cry from the door. He turned and saw her standing there.
For a moment neither of them moved. Then she came forward and gave him her hand, and he gripped back his self-control.
“How glad I am!” she said tremulously. “But you know without my telling. When did you arrive?”
“Just now—an hour ago—I drove straight here.”
“Why didn't you let me know. I would have come——”
“I thought I would rather come to you. There was such a crowd on the pier——”
“To welcome the returning hero?” and she dropped him a little courtesy. “How tall you are!”
“That's because I'm so thin.”
“And you've got a new air, somehow. Do you know, sir, I'm a little afraid of you. I shall call my mother.”
“No, no!” he protested quickly. “Not yet—I—have something to say to you first.” He paused, a little miserably. “I don't know just how to say it—I don't know what you will think of me——”
“Need you tell me?” she asked.
“Yes—I must—I want to—I will.”
“Is it about Dorothy?”
“Partly about her”
“You mean you don't love her any more?” she asked steadily, though her face was very white.
“I don't love her; I don't believe I ever really loved her, and I'm sure she doesn't care for me.”
“How can you know that? Wait till you see her.”
“I don't want to see her because—because—Cecil, I love some one else.”
He blurted out the words hastily, desperately. He did not see how she quivered under them.
“I am glad if you have found happiness, John,” she said faintly; but she was looking at him bravely.
“I haven't found it yet, but I'm going to find it; I'm going to make the fight of my life for it; I'm not worthy: I know it; but you told me once that a woman loves to make sacrifices——”
“No woman would have to make any for you, John,” she interrupted proudly.
“I thought I loved Miss Merton,” he went on, not heeding; “I was sure of it; but out on the broad veldt, Cecil, in the long, still nights, a man comes to know himself as he never did before; and after a time I found her image fading from me. I couldn't understand it; I fought desperately against it; but it faded and faded, and at last I was not sorry. For another image was taking her place, Cecil, though I didn't suspect it, I didn't know how completely, until I got your letter at Capetown—you know I got only one of your letters in the field; after that communications were cut off.”
“You—you got the second letter?” she asked, crimsoning.
“At Capetown—yes—and the third one.”
“I am ashamed of it—the second one,” she said. “I wish you would give it to me to destroy.”
He took it from his pocket and gave it to her.
“Has the wound quite healed, Cecil?” he asked.
“Quite healed,” she answered, smiling at him. “All wounds heal, my friend.”
“But, oh! I am afraid that I may open it!” he cried. “And I won't do that—not that!”
“It is healed past opening,” she said.
“Cecil,” he caught her hands; “don't you see—don't you understand? It was your image which blotted out the other in my heart; it is you I love. Oh, I'm quite sure,” he added, as she shook convulsively and would have drawn away. “It is you I want; without you all the rest will be less than nothing. Why, it was you I loved from the first, Cecil, only I hadn't the sense to see it. But in two years—alone—a man has time to think. On the boat coming home there was a stack of nice girls, but none who could compare with you—I tried them, one by one. And when I got to London there was a letter from dear old McLandberg rather asking me to take a jaunt through Europe—I fancy that's what he'll ask me to do to-night. And do you know what I had planned, Cecil?—that we should go together and see all Europe—yes, and Africa and Asia, too, if you like—for our wedding trip.”
She was laughing now, and her eyes were very bright.
“That's like a man,” she said, “to plan his wedding trip before he has a bride. I suppose you'll have to start soon?”
“Oh, McLandberg would give me a week.”
“Would he? How very considerate of him! Can't you go alone?”
“I won't go alone! I'll throw up the whole thing. If you won't have me what do I care for the rest of it? Think of it, Cecil; what a trip it will be!”
“I don't think I care for the trip so much, John,” she said, still laughing. “Certainly not enough to marry you because of it, though I don't doubt it will be very nice. I could never marry a man unless I loved him, John.”
“No, of course not,” he said miserably, and released her hands. “I—I've been a fool, haven't I?”
“To fall in love with me?”
“Oh, Cecil! To hope that you could ever fall in love with me!”
She was thankful for the drawn blinds, for the half-light—she could look at him, she need not hide her glowing face.
“John!”
She was very close to him—she could feel his hands trembling.
“Yes?”
“Keep on being a fool, John!”
Close and closer—oh, for his arms about her!
“For I do love you, John!”
THE END