This thing that Rodney had offered her, the valiant, heart breaking pretense that she needn’t give him anything—­to her, whose aching need was to give him everything she had!—­was just as absurd as the child’s toy could have been.  But it had cost him....  Oh, what must it not have cost him in struggle and sacrifice, to construct that pitiful, transparent pretense!—­to maintain that manner!  And the struggle and the sacrifice must not be cheapened, made absurd by a sudden shattering demonstration that they’d been unnecessary.  His pretense must be melted, not shattered.  And until it could be melted, that aching need of hers must wait.

And then she realized that the ache was gone—­the tormenting restless hunger for him that had been nagging at her ever since the first rush of spring was somehow appeased.  She’d have said, twenty-four hours ago, that to be with him, have him near her, in any other relation than that of her lover, would be unendurable.  Twenty-four hours ago!  She thought of that as she was winding her watch.  It seemed incredible that it was no longer than that since the saccharine little sob in John McCormack’s voice as he had sung “Just a little love, a li-ttle ki-iss,” had driven her frantic.

She turned out her light and opened her bedroom window.  The phonograph across the court was going again.  But now, evidently, its master had come back from Pittsburgh, for it was singing lustily, “That’s why I wish again that I was in Michigan, back on the farm.”

Rose smiled her old wide smile, and cuddled her cheek into the pillow.  She was the happiest person in the world.

When he called her up the next morning, she asked him to come down to the premises of Dane & Company (it was a loft on lower Fifth Avenue) about noon and go out to lunch with her, and she made no secret of her motive in selecting their rendezvous.  “I’d like to have you see what our place is like;” she said, “though it isn’t like anything much just now, between seasons this way.  Still you can get an idea.”

He said he would be immensely interested to see the place, and from the cadence of his voice was apparently prepared to let the conversation end there.  But she prolonged it a little.

“Do you hear from—­Chicago while you’re down here, Roddy?” she asked.  “Whether everything’s all right—­at home, I mean?”

It was a second or two before he answered, but when he did, his voice was perfectly steady.

“Yes,” he said.  “I get a night-letter every morning from Miss French.  (This was Mrs. Ruston’s successor.) It’s—­everything’s all right.”

“Good-by, then, till noon,” she said.  And if he could have seen the smile that was on her lips, and the brightness that was in her eyes as she said it ...!

It was a part, you see, of his Quixotic determination to make no claims, that he had not said a word, during his evening call, about the twins—­her babies!