"Stay here--take anything from you--accept without service in return."
"I wouldn't care--if you--leave me here alone."
"I know. You said it this evening. There will come a time when you would not find it convenient to have me--around----"
"Dear, it's only because a man and a woman in this world cannot continue anything of enduring intimacy without business as an excuse. And even then, the pleasant informality existing now could not be continued with anything except very serious disadvantage to you."
"You will grow tired of painting me," she said under her breath.
"No. But your life is all before you, Dulcie. Girls usually marry sooner or later."
Again, at her words, the same odd uneasiness began to possess him as though something obscure, unformulated as yet, must some day be cleared up by him and decided.
"Let me enlist for service. Could you be patient for a few months so that I might learn something--anything!--I don't care what, if only I can go with you? Don't they require women to scrub and do unpleasant things--humble, unclean, necessary things?"
"You couldn't--with your slender youth and delicate beauty----"
"Oh," she whispered, "you don't know what I could do to be near you! That is all I want--all I want in the world!--just to be somewhere not too far away. I couldn't stand it, now, if you left me.... I couldn't live----"
But, suddenly, it was a hot-faced, passionate, sobbing child who was clinging desperately to his arm and staunching her tears against it--saying nothing more, merely clinging close with quivering lips.
"Listen," he said impulsively. "I'll give you time. If there's anything you can learn that will admit you to France, come back to town with me and learn it.... Because I don't want to leave you, either.... There ought to be some way--some way----" He checked himself abruptly, stared at the bowed head under its torrent of splendid hair--at the desperate white little hands holding so fast to his sleeve, at the slender body gathered there in the deep chair, and all aquiver now.
"We'll go--together," he said unsteadily.... "I'll do what I can; I promise.... You must go upstairs to bed, now.... Dulcie!... dear girl...."
She released his arm, tried to get up from her chair obediently, blinded by tears and groping in the starlight.