'Perhaps, then,' he muttered, 'you'd better not see me at all.'
'No. I want to see you. If you want to come. I love your stories. You're more interesting than any of them.'
At this, he turned square around; stared at her. But she, very quietly, finished what she had to say. 'I think you're a genius. I think you're going to be famous. It's--it's exciting to see the way you write stories.... Wait, please! I'm going to tell you the rest of it. Now that we're talking it out, I think I've got to. It was aunt who didn't want to ask you. She likes you, but she thought--well, she thought it might be awkward, and--and hard for you. I told her what I've told you, that I've either got to be your friend before all of them or not at all. And now that she has asked you--don't you see, it's the way I wanted it all along.'
There wasn't another girl in Sunbury who could have, or would have, made quite that speech.
She looked delicately beautiful in the growing light. Her hair was a vignetted halo about her small head.
Henry, staring, his hands clenched at his sides, broke out with:--
Words came from him, a jumble of words. About his hopes, the few thousand dollars that would be his on the seventh of November, when he would be twenty-one, the wonderful stories he would write, with her for inspiration.
Inwardly he was in a panic. He hadn't dreamed of saying such a thing. Never before, in all his little philanderings had he let go like this, never had he felt the glow of mad catastrophe that now seemed to be consuming him. Oh, once perhaps--something of it--years back--when he had believed he was in love with Ernestine Lambert. But that had been in another era. And it hadn't gone so deep as this.
'Anyway'--he heard her saying, in a rather tired voice--'anyway--it makes it hard, of course--you shouldn't have said that--'
'Oh, I _am_ making it hard! And I meant to----'
'--anyway, I think you'd better come. Unless it would be too hard for you.'
There was a long silence. Then Henry, his forehead wet with sweat, his feet braced apart, his hands gripping the rail as if he were holding for his life, said, with a sudden quiet that she found a little disconcerting:--
'All right. I'll come.... Your aunt said a quarter past six, didn't she?'