d
long about the renewed companionship of Ruth and Phil. He was sure
that he, the stranger, had been a fool to imagine that he could ever
displace Phil. On the third afternoon, suddenly, apparently without
cause, he bolted from the office, and at a public telephone-booth he
called Ruth. It was she who answered the telephone.

"May I come up to-night?" he said, urgently.

"Yes," she said. That was all.

When he saw her, she hesitated, smiled shamefacedly, and confessed
that she had wanted to telephone to him.

Together, like a stage chorus, they contested:

"I was grouchy----"

"I was beastly----"

"I'm honestly sorry----"

"'ll you forgive----"

"What was it all about?"

"Really, I do--not--know!"

"I agree with lots of the things you----"

"No, I agree with you, but just at the time--you know."

Her lively, defensive eyes were tender. He put his arm lightly about
her shoulders--lightly, but his finger-tips were sensitive to every
thread of her thin bodice that seemed tissue as warmly living as the
smooth shoulder beneath. She pressed her eyes against his coat, her
coiled dark hair beneath his chin. A longing to cry like a boy, and to
care for her like a man, made him reverent. The fear of Phil vanished.
Intensely conscious though he was of her hair and its individual
scent, he did not kiss it. She was sacred.

She sprang from him, and at the piano hammered out a rattling waltz.
It changed to gentler music, and under the shaded piano-lamp they were
silent, happy. He merely touched her hand, when he went, but he sang
his way home, wanting to nod to every policeman.

"I've found her again; it isn't merely play, now!" he kept repeating.
"And I've learned something. I don't really know what it is, but it's
as though I'd learned a new language. Gee! I'm happy!"

CHAPTER XXXV

On an April Saturday morning Carl rose with a feeling of spring. He
wanted to be off in the Connecticut hills, among the silvery-gray
worm-fences, with larks rising on the breeze and pools a-ripple and
yellow crocus-blossoms afire by the road, where towns white and sleepy
woke to find the elms misted with young green. Would there be any
crocuses out as yet? That was the only question worth solving in the
world, save the riddle of Ruth's heart. The staid brownstone houses of
the New York streets displayed few crocuses and fewer larks, yet over
them to-day was the bloom of romance. Carl walked down to the
automobile distric