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Page 38
There was a quick parting in the crowd. A man he had once known shoved
two of the policemen to one side, and he heard a girl's voice speaking
his name, like a sob; and She came running out across the open space
and fell on her knees beside the stretcher, and bent down over him,
and he was clasped in two young, firm arms.
"Of course it is not real, of course it is not She," he assured
himself. "Because She would not do such a thing. Before all these
people She would not do it."
But he trembled and his heart throbbed so cruelly that he could not
bear the pain.
She was pretending to cry.
"They wired us you had started for Tampa on the hospital ship," She
was saying, "and Aunt and I went all the way there before we heard you
had been sent North. We have been on the cars a week. That is why I
missed you. Do you understand? It was not my fault. I tried to come.
Indeed, I tried to come."
She turned her head and looked up fearfully at the young Doctor.
"Tell me, why does he look at me like that?" she asked. "He doesn't
know me. Is he very ill? Tell me the truth." She drew in her breath
quickly. "Of course you will tell me the truth."
When she asked the question he felt her arms draw tight about his
shoulders. It was as though she was holding him to herself, and from
some one who had reached out for him. In his trouble he turned to his
old friend and keeper. His voice was hoarse and very low.
"Is this the same young lady who was on the transport--the one you
used to drive away?"
In his embarrassment, the hospital steward blushed under his tan, and
stammered.
"Of course it's the same young lady," the Doctor answered, briskly.
"And I won't let them drive her away." He turned to her, smiling
gravely. "I think his condition has ceased to be dangerous, madam," he
said.
People who in a former existence had been his friends, and Her
brother, gathered about his stretcher and bore him through the crowd
and lifted him into a carriage filled with cushions, among which he
sank lower and lower. Then She sat beside him, and he heard Her
brother say to the coachman, "Home, and drive slowly and keep on the
asphalt."
The carriage moved forward, and She put her arm about him, and his
head fell on her shoulder, and neither of them spoke. The vision had
lasted so long now that he was torn with the joy that after all it
might be real. But he could not bear the awakening if it were not, so
he raised his head fearfully and looked up into the beautiful eyes
above him. His brows were knit, and he struggled with a great doubt
and an awful joy.
"Dearest," he said, "is it real?"
"Is it real?" she repeated.
Even as a dream, it was so wonderfully beautiful that he was satisfied
if it could only continue so, if but for a little while.
"Do you think," he begged again, trembling, "that it is going to last
much longer?"
She smiled, and, bending her head slowly, kissed him.
"It is going to last--always," she said.
THE LION AND THE UNICORN
Prentiss had a long lease on the house, and because it stood in Jermyn
Street the upper floors were, as a matter of course, turned into
lodgings for single gentlemen; and because Prentiss was a Florist to
the Queen, he placed a lion and unicorn over his flower-shop, just in
front of the middle window on the first floor. By stretching a little,
each of them could see into the window just beyond him, and could hear
all that was said inside; and such things as they saw and heard during
the reign of Captain Carrington, who moved in at the same time they
did! By day the table in the centre of the room was covered with maps,
and the Captain sat with a box of pins, with different-colored flags
wrapped around them, and amused himself by sticking them in the maps
and measuring the spaces in between, swearing meanwhile to himself. It
was a selfish amusement, but it appeared to be the Captain's only
intellectual pursuit, for at night the maps were rolled up, and a
green cloth was spread across the table, and there was much company
and popping of soda-bottles, and little heaps of gold and silver were
moved this way and that across the cloth. The smoke drifted out of the
open windows, and the laughter of the Captain's guests rang out loudly
in the empty street, so that the policeman halted and raised his eyes
reprovingly to the lighted windows, and cabmen drew up beneath them
and lay in wait, dozing on their folded arms, for the Captain's guests
to depart. The Lion and the Unicorn were rather ashamed of the scandal
of it, and they were glad when, one day, the Captain went away with
his tin boxes and gun-cases piled high on a four-wheeler.
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