She thought incessantly of Jim Dyckman. Remembering
the song she had played for him, and his bitter comment on the verse,
"Tell her that wastes her time and me," she hunted it out, and the
plaintive chimes of Carpenter's music made a knell for her own hopes.
She had played it this very afternoon and wrought herself to such
sardonic regret that she forced herself into the open air. She walked
a mile or two, but slunk back home again to be rid of the crowds.
She was thinking of Dyckman when she entered her house. She let
herself in with her own key, and, walking into the drawing-room,
surprised him at the piano, reading the tender elegy of the rose.
"Jim!" she gasped.
"Charity!" he groaned.
Their souls seemed to rush from their bodies and embrace. But their
bodies stood fast before the abyss that gaped between them.
She whipped off her glove before she gave him her hand. That meeting
of the flesh was so bitter-sweet that their hands unclasped guiltily
by a kind of honest instinct of danger.
"What on earth brought you here?" Charity faltered.
"Why--I--Well, you see--it's like this." He groped for words, but,
having no genius in invention, he blurted the truth helplessly: "I
came to ask you if you wouldn't--You see, my poor wife isn't making
out very well with people--she's lonesome--and blue--and--why can't
you lend a hand and make friends with her?"
Charity laughed aloud. "Oh, Jim, Jim, what a darling old numskull
you are!"
"In general, yes; but why just now?"
"Your wife will never make friends with me.
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