“Not my watch,” McKnight protested.
“It’s a family heirloom.”
“You’d better go home,” I said firmly.
“Go home and go to bed. You’re sleepy.
You can have Sullivan’s red necktie to dream
over if you think it will help any.”
Mrs. Klopton’s voice came drowsily from the
next room, punctuated by a yawn. “Oh,
I forgot to tell you,” she called, with the
suspicious lisp which characterizes her at night, “somebody
called up about noon, Mr. Lawrence. It was long
distance, and he said he would call again. The
name was”—she yawned—“Sullivan.”
THE GOLD BAG
I have always smiled at those cases of spontaneous
combustion which, like fusing the component parts
of a seidlitz powder, unite two people in a bubbling
and ephemeral ecstasy. But surely there is possible,
with but a single meeting, an attraction so great,
a community of mind and interest so strong, that between
that first meeting and the next the bond may grow
into something stronger. This is especially true,
I fancy, of people with temperament, the modern substitute
for imagination. It is a nice question whether
lovers begin to love when they are together, or when
they are apart.
Not that I followed any such line of reasoning at
the time. I would not even admit my folly to
myself. But during the restless hours of that
first night after the accident, when my back ached
with lying on it, and any other position was torture,
I found my thoughts constantly going back to Alison
West. I dropped into a doze, to dream of touching
her fingers again to comfort her, and awoke to find
I had patted a teaspoonful of medicine out of Mrs.
Klopton’s indignant hand. What was it
McKnight had said about making an egregious ass of
myself?
And that brought me back to Richey, and I fancy I
groaned. There is no use expatiating on the
friendship between two men who have gone together
through college, have quarreled and made it up, fussed
together over politics and debated creeds for years:
men don’t need to be told, and women can not
understand. Nevertheless, I groaned. If
it had been any one but Rich!
Some things were mine, however, and I would hold them:
the halcyon breakfast, the queer hat, the pebble in
her small shoe, the gold bag with the broken chain—the
bag! Why, it was in my pocket at that moment.
I got up painfully and found my coat. Yes, there
was the purse, bulging with an opulent suggestion
of wealth inside. I went back to bed again,
somewhat dizzy, between effort and the touch of the
trinket, so lately hers. I held it up by its
broken chain and gloated over it. By careful
attention to orders, I ought to be out in a day or
so. Then—I could return it to her.
I really ought to do that: it was valuable,
and I wouldn’t care to trust it to the mail.
I could run down to Richmond, and see her once—there
was no disloyalty to Rich in that.
