_

Dinky-Dunk left Friday night and got back early this morning before I
was up. This naturally surprised me. But what surprised me more was
the way he looked. He was white and shaken and drawn about the eyes.
He seemed so wretched that I couldn't help feeling sorry for him.

"_She wouldn't see me!_" was all he said as I stopped him on the way
to his room.

But he rather startled me, fifteen minutes later, by calling up the
Greene and asking for Peter. And before half an hour had dragged past
Peter appeared in person. He ignored the children, and apparently
avoided me, and went straight out to the pergola, where he and
Dinky-Dunk fell to pacing slowly up and down, with the shadows
dappling their white-clad shoulders like leopards as they walked up
and down, up and down, as serious and solemn as two ministers of state
in a national crisis. And something, I scarcely knew what, kept me
from going out and joining them.

It was Peter himself who finally came in to me. He surprised me, in
the first place, by shaking hands. He did it with that wistful
wandering-picador smile of his on his rather Zuloagaish face.

"I've got to say good-by," I found him saying to me.

"Peter!" I called out in startled protest, trying to draw back so I
could see him better. But he kept my hand.

"I'm going east to-night," he quite casually announced. "But above all
things I want you and your Dinky-Dunk to hang on here as long as you
can. _He_ needs it. I'm stepping out. No, I don't mean that, exactly,
for I'd never stepped in. But it's a fine thing, in this world, for
men and women to be real friends. And I know, until we shuffle off,
that we're going to be that!"

"Peter!" I cried again, trying not to choke up with the sudden sense
of deprivation that was battering my heart to pieces. And the light in
faithful old Peter's eyes didn't make it any easier.

But he dropped my hand, of a sudden, and went stumbling rather
awkwardly over the Spanish tiling as he passed out to the waiting car.
I watched him as he climbed into it, stiffly yet with a show of
careless bravado, for all the world like the lean-jowled knight of the
vanished fete mounting his bony old Rosinante.

It was nearly half an hour later that Dinky-Dunk came into the
cool-shadowed living-room where I was making a pretense of being busy
at cutting down some of Dinkie's rompers for Pee-Wee, who most
assuredly must soon bid farewell to skirts.

"Will you sit down, please?"