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“I don’t believe,” said he tenderly, “that you ever told a story in your whole sweet life.”

“Oh,” she cried, “I do love you when you say things like that to me…. Let’s not talk about horrid things any more, and mistakes, and bugbears…. If we’re going to show up at the golf club tea…. It’s Mrs. Carrol’s to-day and we promised her to come.”

“Oh,” said McAllen, “we need not start for ten minutes…. When will you marry me?”

“In May,” she said.

“Good girl,” said he.

“Billy,” she said presently, “it was all the first Mrs. Billy’s fault–wasn’t it?”

“No, dear,” said he, “it wasn’t. It’s never all of anybody’s fault. Do you care?”

“No.”

“Are you afraid?”

“No.”

“Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“So much,” and she made the gesture that a baby makes when you ask, “How big’s the baby?”

“What’s your name?”

“Dolly.”

“Whose girl are you?”

“I’m Billy McAllen’s girl.”

“All of you?”

She grew very serious in a moment.

“All of me, Billy–all that is straight in me, all that is crooked, all that is white, all that is black….”

But he would not be serious.

“How about this hand? Is that mine?”

“Yours.”

He kissed it.

“This cheek?”

“Yours.”

“And this?”

“Yours.”

“These eyes?”

“Both yours.”

He closed them, first one, then the other.

Then a kind of trembling seized him, so that it was evident in his speech.

“This mouth, Dolly?”

“Mumm.”

And so, as the romantic school has it, “the long day dragged slowly on.”

David may have thought it pure chance that he should find Dolly Tennant alone. But it was not. She had given the matter not a little strategy and arrangement. Why, however, in view of her relations with McAllen, she should have made herself as attractive as possible to the eye is for other women to say.

It was to be April in a few days, and March was going out like a fiery dragon. The long, broad shadow of the terrace awning helped to darken the Tennants’ drawing-room, and Venetian blinds, half-drawn, made a kind of cool dusk, in which it came natural to speak in a lowered voice, and to move quietly, as if some one were sick in the house. Miss Tennant sat very low, with her hands clasped over her knees; a brocade and Irish lace work-bag spilled its contents at her feet. She wore a twig of tea olive in her dress so that the whole room smelled of ripe peaches. She had never looked lovelier or more desirable.

“David!” she exclaimed. Her tone at once expressed delight at seeing him, and was an apology for remaining languidly seated. And she looked him over in a critical, maternal way.

“If you hadn’t sent in your name,” she said, “I should never have known you. You stand taller and broader, David. You filled the door-way. But you’re not really much bigger, now that I look at you. It’s your character that has grown…. I’m so proud of you.”

David was very pale. It may have been from his long journey. But he at least did not know, because he said that he didn’t when she asked him.

“And now,” she said, “you must tell me all that you haven’t written.”

“Not quite yet,” said David. “There is first a little matter of business….”

“Oh–” she protested.

But David counted out his debt to her methodically, with the accrued interest.

“Put it in my work-bag,” she said.

“Did you ever expect to see it again?”

“Yes, David.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“But I,” she said, “I, too, have things of yours to return.”

“Of mine?” He lifted his eyebrows expectantly.

She waved a hand, white and clean as a cherry blossom, toward a claw-footed table on which stood decanters, ice, soda, cigarettes, cigars, and matches.

“Your collateral,” she said.

“Oh,” said David. “But I have decided not to be a backslider.”

“I know,” she said. “But in business–as a matter of form.”

“Oh,” said David, “if it’s a matter of form, it must be complied with.”

He stepped to the table, smiling charmingly, and poured from the nearest decanter into a glass, added ice and soda, and lifting the mixture touched it to his lips, and murmured, “To you.”