“I’m about crazy with their old chalk. I’ll do it after a while.”
“Please do it now. I don’t want anyone to see it. Is—is Mr. K. upstairs?”
But when she learned that K. was upstairs, oddly enough, she did not go up at once. She stood in the lower hall and listened. Yes, he was there. She could hear him moving about. Her lips parted slightly as she listened.
Christine, looking in from her balcony, saw her there, and, seeing something in her face that she had never suspected, put her hand to her throat.
“Sidney!”
“Oh—hello, Chris.”
“Won’t you come and sit with me?”
“I haven’t much time—that is, I want to speak to K.”
“You can see him when he comes down.”
Sidney came slowly through the parlor. It occurred to her, all at once, that Christine must see a lot of K., especially now. No doubt he was in and out of the house often. And how pretty Christine was! She was unhappy, too. All that seemed to be necessary to win K.‘s attention was to be unhappy enough. Well, surely, in that case—
“How is Max?”
“Still better.”
Sidney sat down on the edge of the railing; but she was careful, Christine saw, to face the staircase. There was silence on the balcony. Christine sewed; Sidney sat and swung her feet idly.
“Dr. Ed says Max wants you to give up your training and marry him now.”
“I’m not going to marry him at all, Chris.”
Upstairs, K.‘s door slammed. It was one of his failings that he always slammed doors. Harriet used to be quite disagreeable about it.
Sidney slid from the railing.
“There he is now.”
Perhaps, in all her frivolous, selfish life, Christine had never had a bigger moment than the one that followed. She could have said nothing, and, in the queer way that life goes, K. might have gone away from the Street as empty of heart as he had come to it.
“Be very good to him, Sidney,” she said unsteadily. “He cares so much.”
CHAPTER XXX
K. was being very dense. For so long had he considered Sidney as unattainable that now his masculine mind, a little weary with much wretchedness, refused to move from its old attitude.
“It was glamour, that was all, K.,” said Sidney bravely.
“But, perhaps,” said K., “it’s just because of that miserable incident with Carlotta. That wasn’t the right thing, of course, but Max has told me the story. It was really quite innocent. She fainted in the yard, and—”
Sidney was exasperated.
“Do you want me to marry him, K.?”
K. looked straight ahead.
“I want you to be happy, dear.”
They were on the terrace of the White Springs Hotel again. K. had ordered dinner, making a great to-do about getting the dishes they both liked. But now that it was there, they were not eating. K. had placed his chair so that his profile was turned toward her. He had worn the duster religiously until nightfall, and then had discarded it. It hung limp and dejected on the back of his chair. Past K.‘s profile Sidney could see the magnolia tree shaped like a heart.
“It seems to me,” said Sidney suddenly, “that you are kind to every one but me, K.”
He fairly stammered his astonishment:—
“Why, what on earth have I done?”
“You are trying to make me marry Max, aren’t you?”
She was very properly ashamed of that, and, when he failed of reply out of sheer inability to think of one that would not say too much, she went hastily to something else:
“It is hard for me to realize that you—that you lived a life of your own, a busy life, doing useful things, before you came to us. I wish you would tell me something about yourself. If we’re to be friends when you go away,”—she had to stop there, for the lump in her throat—“I’ll want to know how to think of you,—who your friends are,—all that.”
He made an effort. He was thinking, of course, that he would be visualizing her, in the hospital, in the little house on its side street, as she looked just then, her eyes like stars, her lips just parted, her hands folded before her on the table.
“I shall be working,” he said at last. “So will you.”
“Does that mean you won’t have time to think of me?”
“I’m afraid I’m stupider than usual tonight. You can think of me as never forgetting you or the Street, working
