Chapter 6

"And as for something for you to think about the seventh day and night," she gasped hurriedly. Already the door had opened to her hand and her little figure stood silhouetted darkly against the bright, yellow-lighted hallway, "here's something for you to think about for _twenty_-seven days and nights!" Wildly her little hands went clutching at the woodwork. "I didn't know you were engaged to be married," she cried out passionately, "and I _loved_ you--_loved_ you--_loved_ you!"

Then in a flash she was gone.

IX

With absolute finality the big door banged behind her. A minute later the street door, four flights down, rang out in jarring reverberation. A minute after that it seemed as though every door in every house on the street slammed shrilly. Then the charred fire-log sagged down into the ashes with a sad, puffing sigh. Then a whole row of books on a loosely packed shelf toppled over on each other with soft jocose slaps.

Crawling back into his Morris chair with every bone in his body aching like a magnetized wire-skeleton charged with pain, Stanton collapsed again into his pillows and sat staring--staring into the dying fire. Nine o'clock rang out dully from the nearest church spire; ten o'clock, eleven o'clock followed in turn with monotonous, chiming insistency. Gradually the relaxing steam-radiators began to grunt and grumble into a chill quietude. Gradually along the bare, bleak stretches of unrugged floor little cold draughts of air came creeping exploringly to his feet.

And still he sat staring--staring into the fast graying ashes.

"Oh, Glory! Glory!" he said. "Think what it would mean if all that wonderful imagination were turned loose upon just one fellow! Even if she didn't love you, think how she'd play the game! And if she did love you--Oh, lordy; Lordy! LORDY!"

Towards midnight, to ease the melancholy smell of the dying lamp, he drew reluctantly forth from his deepest blanket-wrapper pocket the little knotted handkerchief that encased the still-treasured handful of fragrant fir-balsam, and bending groaningly forward in his chair sifted the brittle, pungent needles into the face of the one glowing ember that survived. Instantly in a single dazzling flash of flame the tangible forest symbol vanished in intangible fragrance. But along the hollow of his hand,--across the edge of his sleeve,--up from the ragged pile of books and papers,--out from the farthest, remotest corners of the room, lurked the unutterable, undestroyable sweetness of all forests since the world was made.

Almost with a sob in his throat Stanton turned again to the box of letters on his table.

By dawn the feverish, excited sleeplessness in his brain had driven him on and on to one last, supremely fantastic impulse. Writing to Cornelia he told her bluntly, frankly,

"DEAR CORNELIA:

"When I asked you to marry me, you made me promise very solemnly at the time that if I ever changed my mind regarding you I would surely tell you. And I laughed at you. Do you remember? But you were right, it seems, and I was wrong. For I believe that I have changed my mind. That is:--I don't know how to express it exactly, but it has been made very, very plain to me lately that I do not by any manner of means love you as little as you need to be loved.

"In all sincerity,

"CARL."

To which surprising communication Cornelia answered immediately; but the 'immediately' involved a week's almost maddening interim,

"DEAR CARL:

"Neither mother nor I can make any sense whatsoever out of your note. By any possible chance was it meant to be a joke? You say you do not love me 'as little' as I need to be loved. You mean 'as much', don't you? Carl, what do you mean?"

Laboriously, with the full prospect of yet another week's agonizing strain and suspense, Stanton wrote again to Cornelia.

"DEAR CORNELIA:

"No, I meant 'as little' as you need to be loved. I have no adequate explanation to make. I have no adequate apology to offer. I don't think anything. I don't hope anything. All I know is that I suddenly believe positively that our engagement is a mistake. Certainly I am neither giving you all that I am capable of giving you, nor yet receiving from you all that I am capable of receiving. Just this fact should decide the matter I think.

"CARL."

Cornelia did not wait to write an answer to this. She telegraphed instead. The message even in the telegraph operator's handwriting looked a little nervous.

"Do you mean that you are tired of it?" she asked quite boldly.

With miserable perplexity Stanton wired back. "No, I couldn't exactly say that I was tired of it."

Cornelia's answer to that was fluttering in his hands within twelve hours.

"Do you mean that there is someone else?" The words fairly ticked themselves off the yellow page.

It was twenty-four hours before Stanton made up his mind just what to reply. Then, "No, I couldn't exactly say there is anybody else," he confessed wretchedly.

Cornelia's mother answered this time. The telegram fairly rustled with sarcasm. "You don't seem to be very sure about anything," said Cornelia's mother.

Somehow these words brought the first cheerful smile to his lips.

"No, you're quite right. I'm not at all sure about anything," he wired almost gleefully in return, wiping his pen with delicious joy on the edge of the clean white bed-spread.

Then because it is really very dangerous for over-wrought people to try to make any noise like laughter, a great choking, bitter sob caught him up suddenly, and sent his face burrowing down like a night-scared child into the safe, soft, feathery depths of his pillow--where, with his knuckles ground so hard into his eyes that all his tears were turned to stars, there came to him very, very slowly, so slowly in fact that it did not alarm him at all, the strange, electrifying vision of the one fact on earth that he _was_ sure of: a little keen, luminous, brown-eyed face with a look in it, and a look for him only--so help him God!--such as he had never seen on the face of any other woman since the world was made. Was it possible?--was it really possible? Suddenly his whole heart seemed to irradiate light and color and music and sweet smelling things.

"Oh, Molly, Molly, Molly!" he shouted. "I want _you_! I want _you_!"

In the strange, lonesome days that followed, neither burly flesh-and-blood Doctor nor slim paper sweetheart tramped noisily over the threshold or slid thuddingly through the letter-slide.

No one apparently was ever coming to see Stanton again unless actually compelled to do so. Even the laundryman seemed to have skipped his usual day; and twice in succession the morning paper had most annoyingly failed to appear. Certainly neither the boldest private inquiry nor the most delicately worded public advertisement had proved able to discover the whereabouts of "Molly Make-Believe," much less succeeded in bringing her back. But the Doctor, at least, could be summoned by ordinary telephone, and Cornelia and her mother would surely be moving North eventually, whether Stanton's last message hastened their movements or not.

In subsequent experience it seemed to take two telephone messages to produce the Doctor. A trifle coolly, a trifle distantly, more than a trifle disapprovingly, he appeared at last and stared dully at Stanton's astonishing booted-and-coated progress towards health.

"Always glad to serve you--professionally," murmured the Doctor with an undeniably definite accent on the word 'professionally'.

"Oh, cut it out!" quoted Stanton emphatically. "What in creation are you so stuffy about?"

"Well, really," growled the Doctor, "considering the deception you practised on me--"

"Considering nothing!" shouted Stanton. "On my word of honor, I tell you I never consciously, in all my life before, ever--ever--set eyes upon that wonderful little girl, until that evening! I never knew that she even existed! I never knew! I tell you I never knew--_anything_!"

As limply as any stout man could sink into a chair, the Doctor sank into the seat nearest him.

"Tell me instantly all about it," he gasped.

"There are only two things to tell," said Stanton quite blithely. "And the first thing is what I've already stated, on my honor, that the evening we speak of was actually and positively the first time I ever saw the girl; and the second thing is, that equally upon my honor, I do not intend to let it remain--the last time!"

"But Cornelia?" cried the Doctor. "What about Cornelia?"

Almost half the sparkle faded from Stanton's eyes.

"Cornelia and I have annulled our engagement," he said very quietly. Then with more vehemence, "Oh, you old dry-bones, don't you worry about Cornelia! I'll look out for Cornelia. Cornelia isn't going to get hurt. I tell you I've figured and reasoned it all out very, very carefully; and I can see now, quite plainly, that Cornelia never really loved me at all--else she wouldn't have dropped me so accidentally through her fingers. Why, there never was even the ghost of a clutch in Cornelia's fingers."

"But you loved _her_," persisted the Doctor scowlingly.

It was hard, just that second, for Stanton to lift his troubled eyes to the Doctor's face. But he did lift them and he lifted them very squarely and steadily.

"Yes, I think I did--love Cornelia," he acknowledged frankly. "The very first time that I saw her I said to myself. 'Here is the end of my journey,' but I seem to have found out suddenly that the mere fact of loving a woman does not necessarily prove her that much coveted 'journey's end.' I don't know exactly how to express it, indeed I feel beastly clumsy about expressing it, but somehow it seems as though it were Cornelia herself who had proved herself, perfectly amiably, no 'journey's end' after all, but only a way station not equipped to receive my particular kind of a permanent guest. It isn't that I wanted any grand fixings. Oh, can't you understand that I'm not finding any fault with Cornelia. There never was any slightest pretence about Cornelia. She never, never even in the first place, made any possible effort to attract me. Can't you see that Cornelia _looks_ to me to-day exactly the way that she looked to me in the first place; very, amazingly, beautiful. But a traveler, you know, cannot dally indefinitely to feed his eyes on even the most wonderful view while all his precious lifelong companions,--his whims, his hobbies, his cravings, his yearnings,--are crouching starved and unwelcome outside the door.

"And I can't even flatter myself," he added wryly; "I can't even flatter myself that my--going is going to inconvenience Cornelia in the slightest; because I can't see that my coming has made even the remotest perceptible difference in her daily routine. Anyway--" he finished more lightly, "when you come right down to 'mating', or 'homing', or 'belonging', or whatever you choose to call it, it seems to be written in the stars that plans or no plans, preferences or no preferences, initiatives or no initiatives, we belong to those--and to those only, hang it all!--who happen to love _us_ most!"

Fairly jumping from his chair the Doctor snatched hold of Stanton's shoulder.

"Who happen to love _us_ most?" he repeated wildly. "Love _us_? _us_? For heaven's sake, who's loving you _now_?"

Utterly irrelevantly, Stanton brushed him aside, and began to rummage anxiously among the books on his table.

"Do you know much about Vermont?" he asked suddenly. "It's funny, but almost nobody seems to know anything about Vermont. It's a darned good state, too, and I can't imagine why all the geographies neglect it so." Idly his finger seemed to catch in a half open pamphlet, and he bent down casually to straighten out the page. "Area in square miles--9,565," he read aloud musingly. "Principal products--hay, oats, maple-sugar--" Suddenly he threw down the pamphlet and flung himself into the nearest chair and began to laugh. "Maple-sugar?" he ejaculated. "Maple-sugar? Oh, glory! And I suppose there are some people who think that maple-sugar is the sweetest thing that ever came out of Vermont!"

The Doctor started to give him some fresh advice--but left him a bromide instead.

X

Though the ensuing interview with Cornelia and her mother began quite as coolly as the interview with the Doctor, it did not happen to end even in hysterical laughter.

It was just two days after the Doctor's hurried exit that Stanton received a formal, starchy little note from Cornelia's mother notifying him of their return.

Except for an experimental, somewhat wobbly-kneed journey or two to the edge of the Public Garden he had made no attempts as yet to resume any outdoor life, yet for sundry personal reasons of his own he did not feel over-anxious to postpone the necessary meeting. In the immediate emergency at hand strong courage was infinitely more of an asset than strong knees. Filling his suitcase at once with all the explanatory evidence that he could carry, he proceeded on cab-wheels to Cornelia's grimly dignified residence. The street lamps were just beginning to be lighted when he arrived.

As the butler ushered him gravely into the beautiful drawing room he realized with a horrid sinking of the heart that Cornelia and her mother were already sitting there waiting for him with a dreadful tight lipped expression on their faces which seemed to suggest that though he was already fifteen minutes ahead of his appointment they had been waiting for him there since early dawn.

The drawing room itself was deliciously familiar to him; crimson-curtained, green carpeted, shining with heavy gilt picture frames and prismatic chandeliers. Often with posies and candies and theater-tickets he had strutted across that erstwhile magic threshold and fairly lolled in the big deep-upholstered chairs while waiting for the silk-rustling advent of the ladies. But now, with his suitcase clutched in his hand, no Armenian peddler of laces and ointments could have felt more grotesquely out of his element.

Indolently Cornelia's mother lifted her lorgnette and gazed at him skeptically from the spot just behind his left ear where the barber had clipped him too short, to the edge of his right heel that the bootblack had neglected to polish. Apparently she did not even see the suitcase but,

"Oh, are you leaving town?" she asked icily.

Only by the utmost tact on his part did he finally succeed in establishing tête-à-tête relations with Cornelia herself; and even then if the house had been a tower ten stories high, Cornelia's mother, rustling up the stairs, could not have swished her skirts any more definitely like a hissing snake.

In absolute dumbness Stanton and Cornelia sat listening until the horrid sound died away. Then, and then only, did Cornelia cross the room to Stanton's side and proffer him her hand. The hand was very cold, and the manner of offering it was very cold, but Stanton was quite man enough to realize that this special temperature was purely a matter of physical nervousness rather than of mental intention.

Slipping naturally into the most conventional groove either of word or deed, Cornelia eyed the suitcase inquisitively.

"What are you doing?" she asked thoughtlessly. "Returning my presents?"

"You never gave me any presents!" said Stanton cheerfully.

"Why, didn't I?" murmured Cornelia slowly. Around her strained mouth a smile began to flicker faintly. "Is that why you broke it off?" she asked flippantly.

"Yes, partly," laughed Stanton.

Then Cornelia laughed a little bit, too.

After this Stanton lost no possible time in getting down to facts.

Stooping over from his chair exactly after the manner of peddlers whom he had seen in other people's houses, he unbuckled the straps of his suitcase, and turned the cover backward on the floor.

Cornelia followed every movement of his hand with vaguely perplexed blue eyes.

"Surely," said Stanton, "this is the weirdest combination of circumstances that ever happened to a man and a girl--or rather, I should say, to a man and two girls." Quite accustomed as he now was to the general effect on himself of the whole unique adventure with the Serial-Letter Co. his heart could not help giving a little extra jump on this, the verge of the astonishing revelation that he was about to make to Cornelia. "Here," he stammered, a tiny bit out of breath, "here is the small, thin, tissue-paper circular that you sent me from the Serial-Letter Co. with your advice to subscribe, and there--" pointing earnestly to the teeming suitcase,--"there are the minor results of--having taken your advice."

In Cornelia's face the well-groomed expression showed sudden signs of immediate disorganization.

Snatching the circular out of his hand she read it hurriedly, once, twice, three times. Then kneeling cautiously down on the floor with all the dignity that characterized every movement of her body, she began to poke here and there into the contents of the suitcase.

"The 'minor results'?" she asked soberly.

"Why yes," said Stanton. "There were several things I didn't have room to bring. There was a blanket-wrapper. And there was a--girl, and there was a--"

Cornelia's blonde eyebrows lifted perceptibly. "A girl--whom you didn't know at all--sent you a blanket-wrapper?" she whispered.

"Yes!" smiled Stanton. "You see no girl whom I knew--very well--seemed to care a hang whether I froze to death or not."

"O--h," said Cornelia very, very slowly, "O--h." Her eyes had a strange, new puzzled expression in them like the expression of a person who was trying to look outward and think inward at the same time.

"But you mustn't be so critical and haughty about it all," protested Stanton, "when I'm really trying so hard to explain everything perfectly honestly to you--so that you'll understand exactly how it happened."

"I should like very much to be able to understand exactly how it happened," mused Cornelia.

Gingerly she approached in succession the roll of sample wall-paper, the maps, the time-tables, the books, the little silver porringer, the intimate-looking scrap of unfinished fancy-work. One by one Stanton explained them to her, visualizing by eager phrase or whimsical gesture the particularly lonesome and susceptible conditions under which each gift had happened to arrive.

At the great pile of letters Cornelia's hand faltered a trifle.

"How many did I write you?" she asked with real curiosity.

"Five thin ones, and a postal-card," said Stanton almost apologetically.

Choosing the fattest looking letter that she could find, Cornelia toyed with the envelope for a second. "Would it be all right for me to read one?" she asked doubtfully.

"Why, yes," said Stanton. "I think you might read one."

After a few minutes she laid down the letter without any comment.

"Would it be all right for me to read another?" she questioned.

"Why, yes," cried Stanton. "Let's read them all. Let's read them together. Only, of course, we must read them in order."

Almost tenderly he picked them up and sorted them out according to their dates. "Of course," he explained very earnestly, "of course I wouldn't think of showing these letters to any one ordinarily; but after all, these particular letters represent only a mere business proposition, and certainly this particular situation must justify one in making extraordinary exceptions."

One by one he perused the letters hastily and handed them over to Cornelia for her more careful inspection. No single associate detail of time or circumstance seemed to have eluded his astonishing memory. Letter by letter, page by page he annotated: "That was the week you didn't write at all," or "This was the stormy, agonizing, God-forsaken night when I didn't care whether I lived or died," or "It was just about that time, you know, that you snubbed me for being scared about your swimming stunt."

Breathless in the midst of her reading Cornelia looked up and faced him squarely. "How could any girl--write all that nonsense?" she gasped.

It wasn't so much what Stanton answered, as the expression in his eyes that really startled Cornelia.

"Nonsense?" he quoted deliberatingly. "But I like it," he said. "It's exactly what I like."

"But I couldn't possibly have given you anything like--that," stammered Cornelia.

"No, I know you couldn't," said Stanton very gently.

For an instant Cornelia turned and stared a bit resentfully into his face. Then suddenly the very gentleness of his smile ignited a little answering smile on her lips.

"Oh, you mean," she asked with unmistakable relief; "oh, you mean that really after all it wasn't your letter that jilted me, but my temperament that jilted you?"

"Exactly," said Stanton.

Cornelia's whole somber face flamed suddenly into unmistakable radiance.

"Oh, that puts an entirely different light upon the matter," she exclaimed. "Oh, now it doesn't hurt at all!"

Rustling to her feet, she began to smooth the scowly-looking wrinkles out of her skirt with long even strokes of her bright-jeweled hands.

"I think I'm really beginning to understand," she said pleasantly. "And truly, absurd as it sounds to say it, I honestly believe that I care more for you this moment than I ever cared before, but--" glancing with acute dismay at the cluttered suitcase on the floor, "but I wouldn't marry you now, if we could live in the finest asylum in the land!"

Shrugging his shoulders with mirthful appreciation Stanton proceeded then and there to re-pack his treasures and end the interview.

Just at the edge of the threshold Cornelia's voice called him back.

"Carl," she protested, "you are looking rather sick. I hope you are going straight home."

"No, I'm not going straight home," said Stanton bluntly. "But here's hoping that the 'longest way round' will prove even yet the very shortest possible route to the particular home that, as yet, doesn't even exist. I'm going hunting, Cornelia, hunting for Molly Make-Believe; and what's more, I'm going to find her if it takes me all the rest of my natural life!"

XI

Driving downtown again with every thought in his head, every plan, every purpose, hurtling around and around in absolute chaos, his roving eyes lit casually upon the huge sign of a detective bureau that loomed across the street. White as a sheet with the sudden new determination that came to him, and trembling miserably with the very strength of the determination warring against the weakness and fatigue of his body, he dismissed his cab and went climbing up the first narrow, dingy stairway that seemed most liable to connect with the brain behind the sign-board.

It was almost bed-time before he came down the stairs again, yet, "I think her name is Meredith, and I think she's gone to Vermont, and she has the most wonderful head of mahogany-colored hair that I ever saw in my life," were the only definite clues that he had been able to contribute to the cause.

In the slow, lagging week that followed, Stanton did not find himself at all pleased with the particular steps which he had apparently been obliged to take in order to ferret out Molly's real name and her real city address, but the actual audacity of the situation did not actually reach its climax until the gentle little quarry had been literally tracked to Vermont with detectives fairly baying on her trail like the melodramatic bloodhounds that pursue "Eliza" across the ice.

"Red-headed party found at Woodstock," the valiant sleuth had wired with unusual delicacy and caution.

"Denies acquaintance, Boston, everything, positively refuses interview, temper very bad, sure it's the party," the second message had come.