e by side; miles and miles and miles, as
she'd told her mother. And there had been other walks since. Do you
remember the last time they had walked together? It was from the stage
door of the Globe theater to her little room on North Clark Street. Rose
remembered it and she felt sure that he did. The same singing wire of
memories and associations that had vibrated between them then was
vibrating between them now and drawing up palpably tighter with every
half-mile they walked. Their pace quickened a little.

Straight down Fifth Avenue they walked to the corner of Thirteenth
Street, and then west. And when they stopped and faced each other in the
entrance to the gray brick building where Rose's apartment was, it was
at the end of a mile or more of absolutely unbroken silence. And facing
each other there, all that was said between them was her:

"You'll come in, won't you?" and his, "Yes."

But the gravity with which she'd uttered the invitation and the
tenseness of his acceptance of it, the square look that passed between
them, marked an end of something and the beginning of something new.

She left him in her sitting-room while she went through into her bedroom
to take off her hat and jacket and take a glance into her mirror. When
she came back, she found him standing at her window looking out. He
didn't turn when she came in, but almost immediately he began speaking.
She went rather limp at the sound of his voice and dropped down on a
cushioned ottoman in front of the fireplace, and squeezed her hands
together between her knees.

"I don't know how much you will have understood," he began, "probably a
good deal. You told me in Dubuque--as you were quite right to tell
me--that I mustn't come back to you. And now I've disobeyed you and
come. What I hope you will have guessed is that I wouldn't have come
except that I'd something to tell you--something different from
the--idiocies I tormented you with in Dubuque;--something I felt you
were entitled to be told. But I felt--this is what you won't have
understood--I felt that I hadn't any right to speak to you at all, about
anything vital, about anything that concerned us, until I'd given you
some sort of guarantee--until I'd shown you that I was a person it was
possible to deal reasonably with."

She smiled, then pressed her hands suddenly to her eyes.

"I understood," she said.

"Well, then ..." But he didn't at once go on. Stood there a while longer
at the window,