He told Lilian of his dreams, and she shook her head and smiled.
"It's a nice picture, isn't it?" she said.
"Sometimes. I used to see it quite a lot at one time. Before I knew you."
"How could you have been when I hadn't met you? I forget who was the ideal for me at the moment. Lewis Waller, perhaps, or William Gillette." She laughed. "Silly Humphrey, it's the picture you're in love with, and you can put anybody in the arm-chair."
He protested against it, yet all the while he was wondering how she could have known that! He had not considered that point of view himself, nor would he now. It was Lilian he wanted; she was just as beautiful as ever, and nobody else was within his grasp.
He sighed. "I do wish we could settle about--about our marriage. Let's fix it up for next week."
She pretended to be horrified. "Only a week to prepare in! Look at the things I've got to buy. My bottom drawer isn't half full."
"Well!" he said, hopelessly, "when are we going to get married? Do let's try and fix a day."
He could not understand why, sometimes, she would seem so eager and delighted with the prospect of marriage, and at other times she would be in a mood for indefinite postponement, as though she wished to keep him for ever lingering after her with all his thirst for love unquenched.
He could not know that she was beginning to realize, with that intuition which no man can fathom, that her dreams had been but dreams, and the love that they thought everlasting but the passing shadow of a moment.
When he got back to the reporters' room that evening--he had been reporting the visit of a famous actress to a Home for Incurables--Willoughby met him with a grave face.
"No--what is it?" Humphrey said, feeling that evil news was coming.
"Double pneumonia--they thought it was a chill at first ... he got it at that mine disaster last week. You were there, weren't you?"
"Yes. He would insist on staying out all night ... it was raining...."
"That was Wratten all over," Willoughby said.
Humphrey winced. "Don't say 'was,'" he said, almost fiercely. "Wratten's going to get better. It's impossible for him to die ... why, he is only just begun to live ... and there's his wife ... and, perhaps...."
He stopped short. Nobody could quite understand what Wratten meant to him. Not even Wratten himself.