“I don’t want to go up.”

He surveyed the steep incline. “I am perfectly sure you don’t want to go down.”

“I do,” she hesitated, “but I suppose I can’t.”

He had a sudden inspiration. “Can I take you anywhere? My little flivver is up there on the bridge. Would you mind that?”

“Would I mind if a life-line were thrown to me in mid-ocean?” She said it lightly, but he fancied there was a note of high hope.

They went up the hill together. “I want to get an Alexandria car,” she told him.

“But you are miles away from it.”

“Am I?” She showed momentary confusion. “I—hoped I might reach it through the Park——”

“You might. But you might also freeze to death in the attempt like a babe in the wood, without any robins to perform the last melancholy rites. What made you think of such a thing?”

He saw at once his mistake. Her voice had a touch of frigidity. “I can’t tell you.”

“Sorry,” he said abruptly. “You must forgive me.”

She melted. “No, it is I who should be forgiven. It must look strange to you—but I’d rather not—explain——”

On the last steep rise of the hill he lifted her over[28] a slippery pool, and as his hand sank into the soft fur of her wrap, he was conscious of its luxury. It seemed to him that his mustard-colored coat fairly shouted incongruity. His imagination swept on to Raleigh, and the velvet cloak which might do the situation justice. He smiled at himself and smiling, too, at her, felt a tingling sense of coming circumstance.

[28]

It was because of that smile, and the candid, boyish quality of it, that she trusted him. “Do you know,” she said, “I haven’t had a thing to eat this morning, and I’m frightfully hungry. Is there any place that I could have a cup of coffee—where you could bring it out to me in the car?”

“Could I?” the morning stars sang. “There’s a corking place in Georgetown.”

“Without the world looking on?”

“Without your world looking on,” boldly.

 Prev. P 16/214 next