shade of refined hauteur, then looked out the window again, grimacing eloquently at her parents who gazed at her raptly from the platform. Several prosperous merchants went down the aisle in expensive tan shoes that creaked under the fan’s drone.
“Not going to leave us, are you, Mr. Morris?”
“Hello, Jim. No, I’m running up to Richmond for a few days.” But even the gray weather of their lives could not deaden the excitement of that hot chariot to the East.
“’Board!”
He got up trembling.
“In a few days, dear.” She looked up, taking his hand in her small gloved palms.
“You will write as soon as you get there? Please!”
“Yes. To-morrow—at once.”
He bent down suddenly and whispered, “Laura—you will come back. You will come back!”
She turned her face away and wept bitterly. He sat beside her once more; she clasped him tightly as if he had been a child.
“My dear, my dear! Don’t forget me ever!”
“Never. Come back. Come back.”
The salt print of her kiss was on his mouth, his face, his eyes. It was, he knew, the guttering candle-end of time. The train was in motion. He leaped blindly up the passage with a cry in his throat.
“Come back again!”
But he knew. Her cry followed him, as if he had torn something from her grasp.
Within three days he had his letter. On four sheets of paper, bordered with victorious little American flags, this:
“My dear: I got home at half-past one, just too tired to move. I couldn’t sleep on the train at all last night, it seemed to get hotter all the way down. I was so blue when I got here, I almost cried. Little Richmond is too ghastly for words—everything burned up and every one gone away to the mountains or the sea. How can I ever stand it even for a week!” (Good! he thought.
