Dangerous Days

"It's a bit of luck I hadn't expected, Audrey," he said, at last,

unsteadily.

She turned about quite simply, and faced in the direction he was going.

"I shall walk with you," she said, with a flash of her old impertinence.

"You have not asked me to, but I shall, anyhow. Only don't call this

luck. It isn't at all. I walk here every Sunday, and every Sunday I say

to myself--he will think he needs exercise. Then he will walk, and the

likeliest place for him to go is the park. Good reasoning, isn't it?"

She glanced up at him, but his face was set and unsmiling. "Don't pay

any attention to me, Clay. I'm a little mad, probably. You see"--she

hesitated--"I need my friends just now. And when the very best of them

all hides away from me?"

"Don't say that. I stayed away, because--" He hesitated.

"I'm almost through. Don't worry! But I was walking along before I met

Clare--I'll tell you about her presently--and I was saying to myself

that I thought God owed me something. I didn't know just what.

Happiness, maybe. I've been careless and all that, but I've never been

wicked. And yet I can look back, and count the really happy days of my

life on five fingers."

She held out one hand.

"Five fingers!" she repeated, "and I am twenty-eight. The percentage is

pretty low, you know."

"Perhaps you and I ask too much?"

He was conscious of her quick, searching glance.

"Oh! You feel that way, too? I mean--as I do, that it's all hardly worth

while? But you seem to have everything, Clay."

"You have one thing I lack. Youth."

"Youth! At twenty-eight!"

"You can still mold your life, Audrey dear. You have had a bad time,

but--with all reverence to Chris's memory--his going out of it, under

the circumstances, is a grief. But it doesn't spell shipwreck."

"Do you mean that I will marry again?" she asked, in a low tone.

"Don't you think you will, some time? Some nice young chap who will

worship you all the days of his life? That--well, that is what I expect

for you. It's at least possible, you know."

"Is it what you want for me?"

"Good God!" he burst out, his restraint suddenly gone. "What do you want

me to say? What can I say, except that I want you to be happy? Don't you

think I've gone over it all, over and over again? I'd give my life for

the right to tell you the things I think, but--I haven't that right.

Even this little time together is wrong, the way things are. It is all

wrong."