"Nothing at all," sighed Harlan, "except that we can't afford it." The
whole bitter truth was out, now, and he turned away wretchedly, ashamed to
meet her eyes.
It seemed ages before she spoke. Then she said, in smooth, icy tones:
"What was your object in offering to get it for me?"
"I spoke impulsively," explained Harlan, forgetting that he had never
suggested buying a typewriter. "I didn't stop to think. I'm sorry," he
concluded, lamely.
"I suppose you spoke impulsively," snapped Dorothy, "when you asked me to
marry you. You're sorry for that, too, aren't you?"
"Dorothy!"
"You're not the only one who's sorry," she rejoined, her cheeks flushed
and her eyes blazing. "I had no idea what an expense I was going to be!"
"Dorothy!" cried Harlan, angrily; "you didn't think I was a millionaire,
did you? Were you under the impression that I was an active branch of the
United States Mint?"
"No," she answered, huskily; "I merely thought I was marrying a gentleman
instead of a loafer, and I beg your pardon for the mistake!" She slammed
the door on the last word, and he heard her light feet pattering swiftly
down the hall, little guessing that she was trying to gain the shelter of
her own room before giving way to a tempest of sobs.
Happy are they who can drown all pain, sorrow, and disappointment in a
copious flood of tears. In an hour, at the most, Dorothy would be her
sunny self again, penitent, and wholly ashamed of her undignified
outburst. By to-morrow she would have forgotten it, but Harlan, made of
sterner clay, would remember it for days.
"Loafer!" The cruel word seemed written accusingly on every wall of the
room. In a sudden flash of insight he perceived the truth of it--and it
hurt.
"Two months," bethought; "two months of besotted idleness. And I used to
chase news from the Battery to the Bronx every day from eight to six!
Murders, smallpox, East Side scraps, and Tammany Hall. Why in the
hereafter can't they have a fire at the sanitarium, or something that I
can wire in?"
"The Temple of Healing," as Dorothy had christened it in a happier moment,
stood on a distant hill, all but hidden now by trees and shrubbery. A
column of smoke curled lazily upward against the blue, but there was no
immediate prospect of a fire of the "news" variety.
Harlan stood at the window for a long time, deeply troubled. The call of
the city dinned relentlessly into his ears. Oh, for an hour in the midst
of it, with the rumble and roar and clatter of ceaseless traffic, the
hurrying, heedless throng rushing in every direction, the glare of the sun
on the many-windowed cliffs, the fever of the struggle in his veins!
And yet--was two months so long, when a fellow was just married, and
hadn't had more than a day at a time off for six years? Since the "cub
reporter" was first "licked into shape" in the office of _The Thunderer_,
there had been plenty of work for him, year in and year out.
"I wonder," he mused, "if the old man would take me back on my job?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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