"You do make me seem a blackguard," he said, "and yet--on my honor--if you think I have any--I didn't think I was. I didn't mean anybody any harm. Damn it all, I was just trying to find a little fun." He looked at me. And all at once, I knew how he must have looked when he was a little boy. I could see the little boy's round eyes and full red cheeks, and the way he must have answered when he'd done something wrong. And it didn't seem to me that he'd ever grown any older. I understood him. I understood most men of his type. And I believed him. He was just blundering along in the world's horrible, mistaken idea of fun--that means death to the other one. Before I knew it, my eyes brimmed full of tears. He saw that, and sat staring at me. CHAPTER XIV I had gone wondering how I should see him at last, and what we should say to each other. It never once occurred to me that we might not meet again, or that when we did meet it would mean merely the casual renewing of a casual occasion. As for me everything moved from the time when I had met John Ember, so everything moved toward the time when I should see him again. I pictured meeting him on the street, at Mrs. Carney's house, about the university. I pictured him walking into a class room to give one of the afternoon lectures--older, his hair a little grayed, and yet so wonderfully the same as when he had spoken to me there on the country road. And I could imagine that if I said my name to him he would have to stop and hunt through his mind for any remembrance of that breakfast and that walk which were, so far, the principal things that had ever happened to me. Then I used to dream that he did remember. "Mr. Ember, I'm Cosma Wakely. You won't remember--but I just wanted to say 'thank you' for what you did." And: "Remember. My dear child, I've been looking for you ever since. Sit down--I want to talk with you." Once I saw his picture in a magazine, looking so grave and serious, and I liked to know that there was that Katytown morning, and that I knew him in a way that none of the rest did; that I'd been with him on that lonely, early road and had heard him talk to me--no matter how stupid I'd acted--and that we'd sat together over breakfast in the yard of the Dew Drop Inn. Just in that I had one of the joys of a woman who loves a great man, and understands him as all those who sit and look up to him can never understand him. I felt as if something of me belonged to John Ember. And when I did see him, it was as if he had never been away. I had been twice to see Lena, and found her in the stale-smelling rooms of her aunt, each time at work upon some tawdry finery of her own. One day I thought about begging her to go with me to a gallery that I had found where hung a picture which it seemed to me must speak to her.