"Intensely. And narrow-minded, and morbid, and petty and--," the words came charged with bitterness, "and intensely foolish."
"I 'm glad you crawled out before you became all those things."
"Perhaps--perhaps this is another of the things that could n't have happened to either of us alone."
"Perhaps that is true of all the good things in the world," she hazarded.
Once again the golden mist--once again the aching yearning.
The telephone jangled harshly. It was a warning from the world beyond the hedge, the world they had forgotten.
The sound of it was to him like the savage clang of barbaric war-gongs.
With her permission he answered it himself. It was a message from his man at the Waldorf.
"He's making an awful fuss, sir. He says as how he wants to go home. I can hold him all right, only I thought I 'd let you know."
"I 'd better go back to your brother," he said to her as he hung up the receiver. "I want to have a talk with him before bringing him home."
"How am I ever going to repay you for all you 've done?"
"You 've repaid me already," he answered briefly and left at once.
Donaldson with hands in his pockets stood in front of Arsdale, who had slumped down into a big leather chair, and admired his work. There was much still to be done, but, comparing the man before him with the thing he had brought in here some thirty hours before, the improvement was most satisfactory. Arsdale, with trimmed hair and clean, shaven face, in a new outfit from shoes to collar, and sane even if depressed, began to look a good deal of a man.
"How do you feel now?" inquired Donaldson.
Arsdale hitched forward and resting his chin in his hands, elbows on knees, stared at the floor.
"You deserve to, but you oughtn't," he said.
"Oh, I deserve it all right. I deserve it--and more!"
"Yes, you do. But that does n't help any."
"There is n't any help. I 've made a beastly mess out of my life, out of myself."
"I wish I could disagree, but I can't," answered Donaldson.
He walked up and down a moment before the fellow studying him. He was worried and perplexed. The task before him was an unpleasant one. He had to overcome a natural repugnance to interference in the life of another. Under ordinary circumstances he would have watched Arsdale go to his doom with a feeling of nothing but indifference. In his own passion for individual liberty he neither demanded nor accepted sympathy for personal misfortunes or mistakes, and in turn was loath to trespass either upon the rights or duties of another, but his own life, through the medium of the boy's sister, was so inextricably entangled with this other that now he recognized the inevitability of such interference. On his success or failure to arouse Arsdale largely depended the happiness of the girl.