to her ring, said that he
would call her up in the morning at her office.

She puzzled a little during the intermittent processes of undressing,
over why she had let him go like that. She found it easy to name some of
the things that were _not_ the reason. It was not--oh, a thousand times
it was not!--that she wasn't quite sure of him. There was no expressing
the completeness of her certainty that, with a look, a sudden holding
out of the hands to him, the release of one little love-cry from her
lips, a half-articulate, "Come and take me, Roddy! That's all I want!"
she could have shattered, annihilated, that brittle restraint of his;
released the full tempest of his passion; found herself--lost
herself--in his embrace.

Certainly it was no doubt of that that had held her back. And, no more
than doubt, was it pride or modesty. The one thing her whole being was
crying out for was a complete surrender to him.

But the real reason seemed rather absurd, when she tried to state it to
herself. She had felt that it would be a _brutal_ thing to do. Really,
her feeling toward him was that of a mother toward a child who, having,
he thinks, merited her displeasure, offers her, by way of atonement,
some dearly prized possession; an iron fire-engine, a woolly sheep. What
mother wouldn't accept an offering like that gravely!

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