“You’re going home on account of your father—and to interest him and
other Americans in American duty as to the war.”
“That’s a reason; it’s the reason I find it easiest to give. But I
mustn’t hide it from you now that—that I’ve—I’ve another.”
[Illustration: “You’re going home to marry me.” “How can I be going
home to marry you, when—when I never knew till within half an hour that
you—that you cared anything about me?”]
I made one of my long mental leaps. I made it as a man might take the one
chance of life in leaping a crevasse, knowing that there are more chances
that he will be dashed to pieces in the chasm.
“You’re going home to be married.”
There was a kind of awe in the way she drew off from me.
“You’re extraordinary,” she breathed, faintly. “Miss Ogden didn’t tell
you that.”
I had not cleared the crevasse. I was struggling desperately on the edge
of it, while beneath me was the abyss.
“You’re going home to marry me.”
I think she gave a little bitter laugh. At any rate, there was the echo
of it in her tone, as she said, with sardonic promptness: “How can I be
going home to marry you, when—when I never knew till within half an hour
that you—that you cared anything about me?”
I, too, must have laughed, the statement struck me as so absurd.
“What? You never knew—?”
She shook her head with an emphasis almost violent.
“You may have known,” she said, in that voice which, after all, could
not be called bitter, for the reason that it was reproachful, “but I’d
come to the conclusion that”—she tried to carry the situation off with
a second laugh, a laugh that ended as something like a sob—“that you
didn’t.”