But in the girl's eyes there was nothing save pain, and shame. She looked away. She played nervously with the lace of her dress.
Blind, man-like, he took it all for shyness. "Only a little hope," he repeated, tenderly. He tried to take her hand.
She shrank away from him in a sort of horror. "No, no," she murmured, in a voice of torture. She did not look him in the face.
Dick stared at her dumbly. Now, at last, he understood her silence, her averted head. He saw the expression that told him she feared to wound him, even though she cared for him not at all.
"Forget me!" she said, and moved away quickly.
He stood, for an instant, looking after her, then he went, moving his lips in a queer, mumbling way, to the vestibule, and asked for his wraps.
As he was leaving the house Dorothy was sinking into a chair by her mother's side. She stared straight out in front of her. When her mother spoke to her she turned slowly around and said, "It's very cold in here." She shivered.
And her mother, knowing that it was as warm as an oven in those rooms, and watching the queer look on her daughter's face, decided the latter was not very well, and must be taken home at once.
He went down the steps with his hand clutching the rail with the fervor of a tooth biting on a lip. If it had been daylight the twitching of his eyes and lip-corners would have been peculiarly noticeable.
For some reason or no reason he scorned the sidewalk; the middle of the road presently felt his nervous footfall. Underneath him he could feel and hear the droning of the cable. Some hundred yards before him he saw the vivid glare that betokened the headlight of an approaching cable-car. For an instant or two he asked himself why he should not continue walking in that direction, in the path of the Juggernaut, and allow himself to be ground into fragments--into the everlasting Forget. Gravely he pondered it: why not? Could the game be worth the candle that was snuffed? And yet, there was something so commonplace, so cheaply melodramatic in that manner of going out that he drew back; he stepped aside and let the dust of the passing car brush him spatteringly. To commit suicide, to choose such a moment for it--a moment that, after all, was but the repetition of a million similar ones--had something so ordinary, so vulgar in it, that after he resisted the thought of it, he shuddered. His lips took on a semblance of smiling.