"I lost one somewhere," she acknowledged; then as she colored divinely she demanded, "You didn't find it, did you? You didn't read those fool things?"
"It wasn't foolishness," I quoted. "There was destiny in it." And then I made full confession.
"I'm glad you wrote it," I added. "I owe that diary something and I want all my debt to be to you."
For a moment she was silent, then she looked up again and confronted me once more with a charge of stupidity.
"And you read that, and knew what football game it was, and yet you never recognized yourself! What are your brains made of, anyway?"
How could a man reply to such a sublime absurdity as that? I groaned.
"In the diary you wrote of an apotheosis," I confessed. "How in the name of all that is logical could I connect myself with this admirable, impossible superman? You failed to give the name."
"Of course," I demurred, "it's great to see you treading the clouds, with ideals for your playmates. Moreover, it's appropriate; but I'm down here, you know, earthbound and extremely mortal. If we are to walk together you must come down and join me."
"I'll take you up with me," she hospitably asserted, and though since then she must have discovered many times that she had draped her cloth of gold upon a lay figure and had made a plumed and mailed knight of a failure and an inconsequent, yet she has, with gallant stubbornness, refused to admit it.
"Dearest," I said very humbly, "I have been inconceivably boorish, and worse. How could you bring yourself to forgive it?"
"Because," she answered, "I'm a woman--and inquisitive. I knew how you felt, and I wanted to find out why you acted so horridly at Lexington."
"I was trying very hard not to tell you how I felt," I admitted.
"You didn't have to tell me--in words," she laughed. "You told me in a hundred other ways, that were just as plain."
"Then the only part of my story," I said, a little crest-fallen, "which is new to you is the information that you were a goddess and I a high priest, out there in the South Seas?"
"Oh, that wasn't new at all," she ruthlessly enlightened, "I knew that, too."
"Is there anything you don't know?" I inquired. "What gift of prophetic vision--"
"There wasn't any vision about it," she interrupted. "I got a letter from Mrs. Keller the day before you reached Kentucky. I guess when you get back to New York you'll find one from the captain. His wife wrote to tell me you were coming. That was why I got a headache and stayed at home that night."