"You must like me _some_, else you wouldn't have cared about Fred."
He tried to frown at me for that, but instead laughed outright, and
said if it gave me any satisfaction to believe that, to go on believing
it.
My happiness was dashed when he said he had to return to Richmond on
the eleven o'clock train. I had been secretly hoping he would remain
in Chicago a few days. When I faltered out this hope, he said rather
shortly:
"I can only run down here occasionally for a day or a few hours at a
time. My affairs keep me in Richmond."
Little things exhilarate me and make me happy, and little things
depress me and make me sad. So while I was light-hearted a moment
before, I felt blue at the thought of his going. I said to myself that
this was how it would always be. He would always come, and he would
always go, and I wondered if a day would ever come when he would ask me
to go with him.
He saw that I was depressed, and began to talk teasingly:
"Do you know," he said--we were now at the steps of my
boarding-house--"that you are a very fickle little person?"
"I? Why I'm foolishly faithful," I declared.
"I say you are fickle," he asserted with mock seriousness. "Now I know
one chap that you used to think the world and all about, but whom you
have completely forgotten. The poor little fellow came to me, and told
me all about it himself."
I couldn't think whom in the world he could mean, and thought he was
just joking, when he said:
"So you've forgotten all about your little dog, have you?"
"Verley!"
"Yes, Verley."
"Oh, you've seen him?"