Late in the afternoon of the day before Louise and Laura were to sail, John Blythe, having fled his office and a great mass of work at an unusually early hour and without any conscientious scruples whatever, strode up and down, back and forth, the entire length of his apartment—barring the kitchen—many dozens of times. He subjected his hair to an absurd hand-tousling as he paced; he kicked up corners of the rugs and then kicked them into place again on the next trip back; he stopped at tables to pick up books, glancing at their titles with unseeing eyes and then tossing them back on the tables with a bang; once he picked up an ordinary match-safe that he had owned for years, and caught himself holding it out in front of him and staring curiously at it—but really far, far beyond it—as if he had never before clapped an eye upon it, and, emerging for a moment from that trance, he replaced the match-safe on the table with a flickering smile.

Noticing all of which from the kitchen out of the corners of her solicitous and suspicious eyes, Sarah became worried. Sarah was the stout, grey-wooled colored woman who managed, not to say ruled, John Blythe's bachelor establishment, including John Blythe himself. She had been Blythe's boyhood nurse, and, never having been entirely out of touch with him through all of his early struggles, she had returned to him when he had won his way and set up his solitary Lares and Penates. She was highly privileged. There were times, indeed, when she exercised the actual veto power; as for example, when Blythe wanted to shift too early into lighter-weight linen, or sought to rush off to an appointment without his breakfast, and so on.

Now, polishing a glass to give her hands something to do, she appeared at the door of the kitchen, completely filling it, and waited for Blythe to stride back that way. So intense was his absorption that he did not see her until she coughed remindfully. Then he looked up and at her—still without seeing her, as she well knew.

"Yo' all ain't sick, is yo' Mistuh John?" inquired Sarah, gazing at him slantwise and showing a good deal of the whites of her eyes.

Blythe didn't hear her. He gazed right through her, and, thence on, through the rear wall of the kitchen. After quite a pause, however, it was borne in upon his consciousness that she had said something.

"How is that, Sarah?" he asked her, coming to a standstill.

"Ah said, Is yo' tuk sick, suh?" repeated Sarah. "Dis heah crazy, triflin', no-'count N'Yawk weathuh is 'nough tuh mek anybody tuhn ovuh an' die, an' Ah got de misuhy in mah haid mahse'f. Is yo' got any fevuh, suh? Yo' face looks raid on de tips o' de cheeks."

Blythe, only half-hearing, felt tentatively of the "raid" spots on his cheeks, which, as a matter of fact, were decidedly flushed. Then he thrust his hands into his pockets and resumed his up-and-down pacing, saying:

"Oh, I'm all right, Sarah. Not a bit under the weather. Just—er—fixing up a case, that's all."

Sarah, polishing away at the glass, gazed intently at his back as he walked away. Then she slowly turned and re-entered the kitchen, muttering to herself:

"Can't tell me no sich conjingulatin' stuff—'fixin' up a case.' De case dat boy is fixin' up weahs petticoats an' puffs an' maybe one o' dese heah D'rectory dresses—Ah reckon Ah can tell de symptoms!"

Wherein, as to the main point of her suspicion, the sagacious Sarah was exactly right.

John Blythe was indubitably, whole-heartedly, whole-mindedly in love with Louise Treharne. He knew that. He had known it for some time. That, however, in accordance with a by no means uncommon rule in such cases, was, he considered, an exceedingly unimportant factor in the problem. The problem, briefly stated, was this: What did Louise Treharne think of him? He remembered now, with impatience, his words to Louise in the Park, when he had hoped that she might accept his "devotion as a man," and her reply. His "devotion as a man?" That, Blythe reflected, might mean anything, especially to a girl placed in a difficult position and, as a natural consequence, in need of all the devotion of any sort that might be offered her. Had Louise understood his words as he had meant them? Blythe, with the customary self-depreciating pessimism of the lover, was afraid she had not. He reproached himself for not having made his meaning more plain—another grisly pastime in which love-possessed males indulge for the purpose of making themselves even more acutely miserable. Immediately atop of this regret that he had not been more explicit, he flared at himself and decided that he would have been an inexcusable scoundrel had he done anything of the sort. It would have been taking a mean and an unworthy advantage of her in her distress.

Then he pondered the few words of hers that had so thrilled him. What, after all, had they amounted to? She had said that she was ready to accept his devotion. What of that? Devotion, how? Devotion, from whom? Why, her guardian-to-be, of course! How else could her words possibly be viewed by a sane man? What right had he to seek to torture her simple utterance into anything more meaningful, more solacing to his wretched self-esteem? At this point of his cogitations Blythe became quite indignant with himself.

Here he was (he reflected, figuratively hiding his head), a man of thirty-two who had been brushing elbows with the world's people nearly all his life, and wearing a few more than the average number of scars to show for it—here he was, actually thinking of pouncing upon a girl of nineteen, who had scarcely forgotten the discipline of school; actually contemplating the imbecility (why, worse than that—the crime!) of hurling himself and his love at her, before she had so much as had a chance to meet any other man or men, before, in fact, she had had even a chance to turn around—for hadn't he (accidentally or not) begun to vaguely form these idiotic notions on the very day she was leaving school? And what would be her natural implication? That he was seeking to take advantage of her inexperience and her helplessness, solely on the strength of his being her legal guardian!

He had been all wrong (he mentally maundered on) the other day at Laura's when he had attributed Louise's perfectly proper restraint with him to her keener realization of her mother's ostracized status in its bearing upon her own position. What had Louise's mother's status to do with Louise? And hadn't he been a complaisantly self-satisfied numbskull to suppose that this was the reason for Louise's obvious aloofness on that day! The truth was (still he drivelled on, never sparing himself) that she had come to a perfectly proper realization of how presumptuous he, Blythe, had been in his attitude toward her, and she had distinctly meant to indicate to him in an unmistakable manner that any aspirations of that kind on his part might as well be immediately suppressed, inasmuch as they were foredoomed to fail. True (taking again for the moment his own case as plaintiff), the love of any reasonably honest and fairly successful man for a woman ought to be at least worth considering, and Louise Treharne was the first woman he had wholly loved; other little affairs, scattered through the flown years, had been mere inconsequentialities, the mutual amusements (and so mutually understood) of an hour, a day, a week, perhaps, at most, a month. Three months before Blythe would have smiled, if he had not laughed outright, if any smirking imp had whispered to him that the time was quite close at hand when he would be shamefully neglecting his decidedly important practice because of his work-disqualifying absorption in thoughts, not to say dreams, of a woman. And yet here he was, supposedly a self-contained, level-headed man of the law, a man rigorously trained in the austere school of experience—here he was, sighing like a furnace, drawing meaningless pictures on blotting pads when he should have been preparing briefs, forgetting his meals, to Sarah's profound worriment and scandalization, and walking the world in a veritable schoolboy trance! Blythe, in lucid moments, caught himself smiling inwardly at the thought of it. Was he sorry that such a thing had come to be? He quickly beat down that trivial question, tentatively submitted by his subconsciousness. Schoolboy, furnace-sigher, sentimentalist, imbecile, what not—he was glad!

Ceaselessly pacing the apartment, then, and mulling the matter over, first condemning himself for his presumptuousness and then wondering in a blank sort of a way if Louise herself took this view of his attitude, Blythe found himself on the horns of his life's dilemma. It would not be so bad, he thought with a catch at the throat, if she were not going away; but the thought of the wide Atlantic rolling between them caused his heart to thump against his ribs and incited him to rumple his hair still more outrageously.

At length, seized by an idea, he walked into his study, closed the door after him, sat down at his desk telephone, and called up Laura. Very promptly he heard her musically rising "Well?"

"Greetings, Laura," he said. "This is your insane friend, John Blythe."

"Greetings, Deserter Blythe," replied Laura. "You have not been to see us for an age. And how long have you been insane?"

"For several months, I believe. I am hardly a competent witness as to that."

"I am so distressed to hear it—when your career and—and everything looks so promising, too!"

"'Everything?' Define 'everything.'"

"I haven't the gift of being specific. You have. What, then, is the most convincing manifestation of your insanity?"

"I am thinking of taking a great chance; prematurely, and therefore insanely."

"You are talking rationally enough. Perhaps your madness is a sort of recurrent mania, with lucid intervals?"

"No, there are no lucid intervals. At this moment I am obsessed by a fear of the perils of the sea."

"That is odd, considering that you are not going to sea. Are you?"

"No; but you are—and she. Is she with you now?"

"No; she is in her room writing a letter to her father, the first she has ever written to him. A little sad, is it not? I am in my dressing room, quite comfortable, thank you, with my elbows on my writing desk; and so there is no danger of interruption. What is it you wish to tell me, John? Or ask me, perhaps?"

"It is something both to tell you and to ask you. In about an hour from now I want to ask Louise if she will marry me. That's the telling. The asking is this: Would that be a fair thing to do?"

"Such Druid-like deliberation! You speak, John, as if you were leading up to asking one for a cup of tea!"

"Do I? Well, I am mindful of this somewhat open medium of communication. Believe me, I feel anything but deliberate. But my question: Would it be fair?"

"How could it possibly be viewed as anything else but fair?"

"Because the circumstances are unusual. In the first place, I am almost the only man she knows—that she has had a chance to know. Then, I am her guardian. Would it not be rather presumptuous, not to say downright unfair, for me to take advantage of these things?"

"That, I think, is what might be called an obliquely conscientious view, John."

"Then the disparity in our ages."

"The difference between nineteen and thirty-two hardly constitutes a case of May and December. Another wholly trivial consideration of yours. Thirteen years' difference—and, by the way, haven't I heard you affirm that thirteen is your lucky number?"

"Finally, I haven't the least imaginable reason for supposing that she has ever thought of me in that respect."

"Haven't you? How perfectly unimportant! Isn't that quite the rule? How many men ever believed they were considered as possibilities until they endured the travail of finding out?"

"You are riotously optimistic this afternoon. I wish I were in the same humor. I think I shall be in need of a mood like that very soon."

"What a glorious opportunity for me to work in that antique bromidiom, 'Faint heart ne'er won,' and so forth. But I shan't. In an hour, you said?"

"About an hour."

"Don't expect to see me. I am horribly busy packing silver and things. Perhaps I may see you a moment before you leave. If not, then at the steamer in the morning."

"I wish I had words to tell you what a trump you are, Laura."

"I wish I had words to tell you how delighted I am, John."

"Not prematurely delighted, I hope, good friend. At this moment I find myself believing that the perils of the sea are nothing to certain perils of the land. Goodbye."

"Goodbye. Don't lose confidence in your lucky number—even if you do call it a 'disparity!'"

It would have been the obvious thing for Laura, after her telephone conversation with Blythe, to at least intimate to Louise that she was upon the verge of an event quite universally and correctly deemed of considerable importance in a young woman's life—her first proposal. Most women in Laura's place would have done so. But Laura's dislike for the obvious was almost a part of her religion. She had none of the benevolent marplot in her composition. She made it a point never to interfere with symmetrical sequences. Her own unhappy marital experience had by no means bereft her of sentiment; and she felt that a girl about to receive an offer of marriage should be entitled to enjoy the surprise—and in this case she knew it would be a surprise—inhering to so important an occasion. So Laura, although she visited Louise in her room after her telephone talk with Blythe, said nothing about it; but she craftily intimated, in order that Louise might look her best, that she would not be greatly surprised if Blythe were to drop in. The intimation was sufficient. Louise, a very human woman, promptly proceeded, as soon as Laura returned to her own quarters, to correct even her most trifling disarrays; so that when Blythe (astonishingly conforming to Laura's prophecy, Louise thought) arrived she looked very lovely in a one-piece dress of Quaker-grey rajah, with a band of grey velvet, which somehow suggested to Blythe the insignia of a princess, around her wonderful hair. She was at the piano, striving, soft pedal down, to extract musical sense from Strauss' "Salome" (impossible task!) when Blythe came in.

He noticed her grey dress at once.

"It is a comfort to have such a tractable, obedient ward," he said, studying the dress approvingly when she rose to greet him. "Here, a little less than a week after I threatened to insist upon your adopting the Quaker garb, I find that you've voluntarily assumed it—the color, at any rate. I know some guardians who would envy me."

Louise, quickly at ease—which had been Blythe's purpose in beginning with persiflage—smiled with a woman's usual deprecation of a complimented costume.

"Seeing that I have had this dress for more than a year," she said, "my obedience must have become an unconscious habit before I knew you."

Blythe, a trained hand at sparring, took advantage of the opening.

"Before you knew me, perhaps, Louise," he said. "But not before I knew you. Aren't you forgetting that I knew you when you still believed in Kris Kringle and Hans Andersen?" He sighed with rather too smiling an assumption of melancholy. "That reflection, I confess, makes me feel pretty aged."

"Does it?" asked Louise. "You forget that, if it makes you feel aged, it should make me feel at least middle aged, don't you? And I believe in Santa Claus and in fairy tales yet, I think." Then, resuming the first thread: "It seems singular that there should have been a time when you knew me and I didn't know you; that is, to remember you. For I didn't remember you at all on the train that day. Come to think of it, you didn't remember me, either, until you were reminded—that telegram, you know. An odd chance, was it not?"

"So odd," said Blythe, "that I catch myself wondering what my life had been before and what it would be now if—" He paused, already groping for words;—"if I had missed that train."

Louise, far from missing his meaning, grasped it so acutely that Blythe caught the tell-tale color mounting to her face.

"And now I am wondering," he went on, gazing for comfort at his nails, "since we are on the subject, whether my having known you for such a long, long time confers upon me the privilege of—well, of being entirely candid with you?"

"I should expect candor, in any case—from you," said Louise, trying desperately to concentrate her mind upon something quite matter-of-fact in order to keep her color down.

"Why, particularly, from me?" said Blythe, grasping at straws.

"Oh, I can hardly say—because you are the embodiment of candor, or candor itself," said Louise. "Aren't you?"

"I don't know," he answered as if really in doubt about it—as he was. "It seems to me that if I actually possessed that quality in such a high degree, I should have proved it to you, Louise, before this. Proved it, for example, in the Park the other afternoon."

Louise knew quite well what he meant. Moreover, it never occurred to her to pretend that she did not know.

"Are you sure that you did not?" she asked him, flushing, but with a direct enough gaze.

"I am afraid that I did not," said Blythe, nervously rising and facing her. "Perhaps it was as well, too. For the first time in my life I am in more than one mind as to whether a certain sort of candor is always desirable."

Having thus plunged into the domain of the purely ethical, Blythe could scarcely have expected an offhand reply. As a matter of fact, he got no reply at all.

"What I am striving to say, I suppose, Louise," he went on, taking himself a little better in hand, "is that, after you sail tomorrow, I am going to be more lonesome than I have ever been in my life before."

"Is that so hard to say?" Louise asked.

"Not when it is rewarded by so helpful an answer," said Blythe, conscious of a throbbing at his temples.

"I do not find it in the least hard to say that I shall miss you," said Louise, frankly enough; nevertheless, to give herself countenance, she picked up from the table a little carved ivory tiger and examined it with great apparent curiosity.

"Miss me for—for my guardianly wisdom and ghostly counsel?" said Blythe, his wide smile visibly nervous. Then, when there was a pause, he pressed the point: "Is that it, Louise?"

Her silence did not imply affirmation, and, the throbbing at his temples increasing, Blythe knew it. He bent over her chair, gently but firmly removed the ivory tiger from her hands, took one of them in his own, and said:

"Listen to me, Louise. I am fearful, if I do not plunge ahead, of becoming entangled in a weave of subtleties. I don't want to be incoherent, even if my excuse would be that I became so while taking a desperate chance. I haven't the least idea what you think of me—I don't mean as your guardian and interested friend, but as a man very susceptible to human impulses. But I am not debarred from finding out. And I should have no right to ask you such a question before telling you, as I tell you now, that I love you." She rose as he spoke, her hand still tightly grasped in his, and their eyes mingled. "You have set a new light to glow within me. I am conscious of a new propulsion that I never knew before—that I did not believe existed until I met you as a woman grown. It means everything to me—the world and all. I do not know that I am fair in saying this to you. I am incapable of judging. I do know that I want to be fair. After all, there is no unfairness in my simply telling you that I love you. It would be different, I think—but you are to judge of that—if I were to ask you to marry me—yet. But that, Louise, is what I came here to ask you."

There is no eloquence, however ornately phrased, to compare with that of a man or a woman who is altogether in earnest. Louise thrilled under the quiet, but, as she knew, deeply-felt words of this man whose clear-cut, rugged face, as he spoke, became positively handsome. She placed an impulsive hand on his arm.

"I told you that I should miss you," she said haltingly, but with a womanly sweetness that moved him like a harp-chord. "And I could not miss you if I did not care for you? I do care for you—as much as I esteem and honor you; and that is a great deal. I have not yet asked myself, I think, if I love you. It may be that I do. If to miss you dreadfully when I do not see you every day—and, until now, I had not seen you for nearly a week!—is—is that, then perhaps I—"

Blythe, fighting, as if in actual conflict with something tangible, the temptation to take her in his arms, grasped her other hand. His face was very close to hers, and her curved, girlish lips sent his blood swirling with their maddening proximity. But he held himself in a vise, knowing that the hour had not yet struck for their contact of lips.

"It is enough that you care for me, Louise," he said, hoarsely fervid; and he felt as weak as a man who has successfully come through a great peril. "I could ask no more; I ask no more. Your caring for me is, I know now, more than I ever hoped or dreamed. It is enough—for now. It is a start." He smiled vaguely at the homeliness of his phrase. "I scarcely know what I am saying, Louise. But it doesn't much matter what a man says, does it, when he is happier than he has ever before been in his life?"

She raised the hand which had been resting on his arm and took hold, with thumb and forefinger, of a button of his coat. The unconscious little intimacy set his pulses to throbbing again.

"I shall know when I come back," she said to him with a simplicity that was almost quaint, "whether—whether my caring for you is more than just that. I believe that it is, but—but there are reasons—you know what they are—that restrain me from owning it, even if I knew positively; which I do not, yet, John."

John!

A quiver ran through the man, which, as she still was unconsciously toying with the button of his coat, she could not help but feel.

"Louise," he said, bending so close to her that he felt her cool, fragrant breath upon his cheek, "I want you to call me that; but not again now. There must be an interval—tonight, say—for me to become used to it. I warn you of my irresponsibility if you call me that again before tomorrow. And I am not minding, my dear, about what you do not know positively. Neither am I presuming upon it. You have made me happy enough. Everything else can wait. You are not committed. I wouldn't dream of holding you committed. Your life is still all your unpromised own. I tell you that it is enough for me now—it will be enough for me hereafter, if nothing else is to be—to know that I am even cared for, have been cared for, by a woman like you. I am going now. My heart is raging with love and honor for you; I want to get out underneath the sky; feel the cold upon my face so that I shall know I am not dreaming. Goodbye, dear, until I send you away from me—send you away, not with wretchedness and despair in my heart, but with hope, and light, and happiness—tomorrow!" and he pressed her hands, gazed at her with wide, kindling eyes, and went reeling from the room, as one who seeks a secure footing after many days at sea.

Laura, by design, was standing in the doorway of her sitting room when he passed unsteadily out.

"Well?" she said to him. "Did the 'disparity' number win, John?"

He stopped, gazed at her for an instant unseeingly, then shook himself together and grasped her outstretched hands.

"I may be a John o' Dreams, dear friend," he said to her huskily. "In fact, I am sure that I am, right now. But it is worth a little delirium to find that, after all, I am not actually insane," and he strode out, Laura watching him with a dimpling face.

After a while Laura went in and found Louise standing musing before a window, seeming to watch the twilight settling upon the vaguely greening Park. Laura threw an arm around the girl's shoulder and kissed her.

"Did he tell you, dear?" Louise asked, turning.

"Not in words," replied Laura. "But one surmises. The air has been charged with it. I know, of course, that he has been worshipping you as did the shepherd of old a distant star. And you, heart of hearts?"

"I seem, somehow, to have been loving him all my life," said Louise.

"Did you tell him so?" asked Laura.

"I am afraid that he, too, surmises," said Louise, smiling shyly.