“Georgie! My pet!”
One lives and learns. George found that he had been all wrong, and that his preconceived ideas about dreams and what could and could not happen in them must be revised. For, so far from vanishing when touched, his wraith appeared to be growing more substantial every moment.
He shut his eyes and kissed her tentatively. He opened his eyes. She was still there.
“Is it really you?” said George.
“Yes, really me.”
“But how … what … ?”
It was borne in upon George—for he was a young man of good average intelligence—that he was spoiling a golden moment with unseasonable chatter. This was no time for talk. He talked, accordingly, no more; and there was silence on the roof. The moon looked down, well pleased. There is not much of interest for a moon to look at in a large city, and this was the sort of thing it liked best—the only sort of thing, if you came right down to it, that made it worth a moon’s while to shine at all.
George clung to Molly, and Molly clung to George, like two shipwrecked survivors who have come together on a wave-swept beach. And the world moved on, forgotten.
But the world will never allow itself to be forgotten for long. Suddenly George broke away with an exclamation. He ran to the wall and looked over.
“What’s the matter?”
George returned, reassured. His concern had been groundless.
“I thought I saw someone on the fire-escape, darling.”
“On the fire-escape? Why, who could it be?”
“I thought it might be the man who has the apartment on the floor below. A ghastly, sneaking, snooping fellow named Lancelot Biffen. I’ve known him to climb up before. He’s the editor of Town Gossip, the last person we want to have watching us.”
Molly uttered a cry of alarm.
“You’re sure he wasn’t there?”
“Quite sure.”
“It would be awful if anyone saw me here.”
George silently cursed the too vivid imagination which had led him to suppose that he had seen a dark form outlined against the summer sky. He had spoiled the golden moment, and it could not be recaptured.
“Don’t be afraid, dear,” he said. “Even if he had seen you, he would never have guessed who you were.”
“You mean he would naturally expect to find you up here kissing some girl?”
George was in the state of mind when a man cannot be quite sure what his words mean, if anything: but so positive was he that he did not mean this that he got his tongue tied in a knot trying to say so in three different ways simultaneously.
“Well, after what happened this afternoon …” said Molly.
She drew away. She was not normally an unkind girl, but the impulse of the female of the species to torture the man it loves is well-known. Woman may be a ministering angel when pain and anguish rack the brow: but, if at other times she sees a chance to prod the loved one and watch him squirm, she hates to miss it.
George’s tongue appeared to him to be now in the sort of condition a ball of wool is in after a kitten has been playing with it. With a supreme effort he contrived to straighten out a few of the major kinks, just sufficient to render speech possible.
“I swear to you,” began George, going so far in his emotion as to raise a passionate fist towards the moon.
Molly gurgled delightedly. She loved this young man most when he looked funny: and he had seldom looked funnier than now.
“I swear to you on my solemn oath that I had never seen that infernal girl before in my life.”
“She seemed to know you so well.”
“She was a perfect, complete, total, utter and absolute stranger.”
“Are you sure? Perhaps you had simply forgotten all about her.”
“I swear it,” said George, and only just stopped himself from adding “by yonder moon.” “If you want to know what I think. …”
“Oh, I do.”
“I believe she was mad. Stark, staring mad.”
Molly decided that the anguish had lasted long enough. A girl has to judge these things to a nicety. Sufficient agony is good for a man, stimulating his mind and keeping him bright and alert: but too much is too much.
“Poor old Georgie!” she said soothingly. “You don’t really suppose for a moment that I believe a word of what she said, do you?”
“What! You didn’t?”
“Of course I didn’t.”
“Molly,” said George, weighing his words, “you are without exception the dearest, sweetest, loveliest, most perfect and angelic thing that ever lived.”
“I know. Aren’t you lucky?”
“You saw at once that the girl was mad, didn’t you? You realised immediately that she was suffering from some sort of obsession, poor soul, which made her. …”
“No, I didn’t. I couldn’t think what it was all about at first, and then father came in and said that my pearl necklace had disappeared, and I understood.”
“Your pearl necklace? Disappeared?”
“She stole it. She was a thief. Don’t you see? It was really awfully clever. She couldn’t have got it any other way. But when she burst in and said all those things about you, naturally she took everybody’s attention off the wedding-presents. And then she pretended to faint on the table, and just snapped the necklace up and rushed out, and nobody guessed what had happened.”
George drew in a whistling breath. His fists clenched. He stared coldly at one of the potted shrubs as if it had done him a personal injury.
“If ever I meet that girl. …”
Molly laughed.
“Mother still insists that you had known her before and that the story she told was true and that she only took the necklace as an afterthought. Isn’t she funny!”
“Funny,” said George heavily, “is not the word. She is one long scream from the rise of the curtain, and ought to be beaten over the head with a blackjack. If
