He stepped into the inner room and returned with a typed manuscript.
“Another play?” Melody inquired in a languid tone. “Have you taken to writing plays, too?”
“Not exactly,” Brainard replied, running over the sheets.
“Leaventritt came to see me yesterday,” Melody remarked carelessly.
“You want to be careful. There’s a mercenary streak in his blood, and success is likely to bring it out; but he’s intelligent and honest enough.”
“You’re still set on making an idiot of yourself about the money and things?”
“If you mean that I am still determined to render unto Melody the riches that are Melody’s by rights, why, yes!”
“Any one of a number of things,” Brainard replied cheerfully. While Melody negligently turned over the pages of his elaborate report, he continued musingly: “It was just six years ago this month when my play was turned down—the last one I ever wrote. I walked back up the avenue with the manuscript in my pocket, feeling that the bottom of the world had dropped out. I was a forlorn, broken specimen. It was a day something like this, too.” He glanced at the lowering April sky. “It is very different now. I’m not much richer than I was then, but I am a totally different being. In fact, I think now I could call myself a man!”
“I think so,” Melody agreed, in a rather doleful voice.
“And a man can always face the world with a light heart, no matter how light his pockets happen to be.”
Melody nodded sympathetically, and murmured,—“for the great adventure!”
After a long silence, Melody looked up into Brainard’s face and stretched out her hands to him.
“Won’t you take me—with you—on the great adventure?”
Brainard grasped her hands, and, leaning forward, tried to read the full purpose in the gray eyes.
“Must I ask twice?” she said, blushing. “It’s more than most women have the nerve to do once. You see, after you left that night, I guessed—and—”
As Brainard took her in his arms she threw back her head, and, holding him away, said:
“And you’ll have to take the Melody mine along with Melody. I said I’d make you keep the old thing!”
“And what shall we do with the theater?” Brainard asked, in a lucid interval, early in June. “Shall we sell it to Einstein & Flukeheimer for vaudeville? Or shall we keep it for a certain American actress when she wearies of matrimony? Or shall we try to put new life into the great Idea, and keep on giving the dear Public what bores it, because it’s good for the dear Public to be bored?”