Part 24 (2/2)

I shook my head wonderingly.

”Listen,” she commanded. ”Once upon a time--that's the way all fairy stories start--I saw you. You didn't notice me much. I was just a kid, but I fell in love with you. To be exact, it was ten years ago this month.”

There was no end to wonders. All the loose threads of coincidence were being plaited into a single cable, and the cable was my life line.

”As I grew up I met a lot of men and they insisted on saying nice things to me; but they were all things of one kind and that wasn't the kind I wanted--besides, you see, I was waiting. I knew that some day you would come and that if you had anything to say it would be different. I compared them all with you. It wasn't just a girl's romantic foolishness. There was destiny in it. You know the Moslem text--'man's fate is about his neck.' You had no chance to escape me.”

”I, too, knew it was written,” I told her, ”but I was afraid we should meet too late. When I saw you at Lexington I thought it was too late.”

”I was never afraid of that,” she affirmed. ”Sometimes I have known that you were in danger--and later I've known that you escaped. Then there was the dream--the one dream about the door that came over and over....

At times it seemed that you were very near. Once at Cairo I felt that I was going to meet you around some corner or in some bazaar--but I didn't.”

”You might, if you had turned your head,” I declared. ”Did you by any chance lose a diary at Cairo?”

This time it was she who was surprised.

”I lost one somewhere,” she acknowledged; then as she colored divinely she demanded, ”You didn't find it, did you? You didn't read those fool things?”

”It wasn't foolishness,” I quoted. ”There was destiny in it.” And then I made full confession.

”I'm glad you wrote it,” I added. ”I owe that diary something and I want all my debt to be to you.”

For a moment she was silent, then she looked up again and confronted me once more with a charge of stupidity.

”And you read that, and knew what football game it was, and yet you never recognized yourself! What are your brains made of, anyway?”

How could a man reply to such a sublime absurdity as that? I groaned.

”In the diary you wrote of an apotheosis,” I confessed. ”How in the name of all that is logical could I connect myself with this admirable, impossible superman? You failed to give the name.”

She looked at me and laughed.

”The man is also modest,” she observed.

”Of course,” I demurred, ”it's great to see you treading the clouds, with ideals for your playmates. Moreover, it's appropriate; but I'm down here, you know, earthbound and extremely mortal. If we are to walk together you must come down and join me.”

”I'll take you up with me,” she hospitably a.s.serted, and though since then she must have discovered many times that she had draped her cloth of gold upon a lay figure and had made a plumed and mailed knight of a failure and an inconsequent, yet she has, with gallant stubbornness, refused to admit it.

”Dearest,” I said very humbly, ”I have been inconceivably boorish, and worse. How could you bring yourself to forgive it?”

”Because,” she answered, ”I'm a woman--and inquisitive. I knew how you felt, and I wanted to find out why you acted so horridly at Lexington.”

”I was trying very hard not to tell you how I felt,” I admitted.

”You didn't have to tell me--in words,” she laughed. ”You told me in a hundred other ways, that were just as plain.”

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