“After he went maybe I didn’t turn cart-wheels around the apartment till the people underneath rapped on their ceiling with a broomstick, as they had nothing to do around that time but sleep, and when people get that way their mind runs on one track and you have to humour ’em. So I turned in and thought till it was time to get up. You can always tell when it’s time to get up—you’re just ready for a real sleep by then. I felt I had done a good night’s work. By a trick shake of the dice he had landed with me—and getting interested in my ‘case,’ as I had reeled it off to him, had pulled him out of a pocket. “I quit Hanley’s after that. I needed the evenings for getting those books down. No matter what way I figured, there wasn’t any other time to do it. He hadn’t supposed I did anything but sing, in which case I would have had lots of time for his books. Every day of that two weeks was just another day until he should come again, and when he did——He looked so much better already that you couldn’t believe it was the same man. First thing he did was to apologize again for the way he’d been the other night. Said he’d never been so limp before and never would be again, thanks to me. Then we slung a line of chatter about the books I had surrounded, and he asked me was I getting along any better with that man. I said no, I didn’t see much progress—which was the truth. He said, well, he’d give me some Mid-Victorian stuff to dive into for next time, and one book would do me. It was Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’—and believe me, Joy, it let in a whole new flood of light. I’d never heard anything like it. When I got to the end of Guinevere I was sobbing as I hadn’t since I was a kid and had had my bunch of papers pinched from me. Joy, that book simply burst on me like dynamite. I’d never heard of ideas like those before. If you read that when you’re in love, it’ll either make you fall out with a thump or fall in harder than ever. I fell in harder than ever. Could I wait until he came again? To talk over the ‘Idylls of the King’ with _him_?” Jerry spread out her hands, then looked at them and laughed suddenly. “The action sags from now on, Joy. Because _he never turned up again_.” “What?” cried Joy. “He never showed up. I never have seen him since. I waited that evening—God, Joy, I hope you don’t know what it is to wait like that for a man who doesn’t come—when you’ve been waiting for days for that evening—and then he doesn’t come—even when it gets too late, hoping——And then the waiting afterwards—to hear some explanation—some reason—watching the mail, jumping at the phone—oh, I can’t go over it all again!” “Perhaps he sailed for France,” Joy said.