“You’ve come--you’ve come--” he said, stretching his hands to her; and all at once she had him in her breast as in a shelter.
“You wanted me?” she whispered as she held him.
He looked up at her, tired, breathless, with the white radiance of the runner near the goal.
“I _had_ you, dear!” he said, smiling strangely on her; and her heart gave a great leap of understanding.
Her arms had slipped from his neck, and she stood leaning on him, deep-suffused in the shyness of her discovery. For it might still be that he did not wish her to know what she had done for him.
But he put his arm about her, boyishly, and drew her toward one of the hard seats between the tables; and there, on the bare floor, he knelt before her, and hid his face in her lap. She sat motionless, feeling the dear warmth of his head against her knees, letting her hands stray in faint caresses through his hair.
Neither spoke for awhile; then he raised his head and looked at her. “I suppose you know what has been happening to me,” he said.
She shrank from seeming to press into his life a hair’s-breadth farther than he was prepared to have her go. Her eyes turned from him toward the scattered drawings on the table.
“You have given up the competition?” she said.
“Yes--and a lot more.” He stood up, the wave of emotion ebbing, yet leaving him nearer, in his recovered calmness, than in the shock of their first moment.
“I didn’t know, at first, how much you guessed,” he went on quietly. “I was sorry I’d shown you Darrow’s letter; but it didn’t worry me much because I didn’t suppose you’d think it possible that I should--take advantage of it. It’s only lately that I’ve understood that you knew everything.” He looked at her with a smile. “I don’t know yet how I found it out, for you’re wonderful about keeping things to yourself, and you never made a sign. I simply felt it in a kind of nearness--as if I couldn’t get away from you.--Oh, there were times when I should have preferred not having you about--when I tried to turn my back on you, to see things from other people’s standpoint. But you were always there--you wouldn’t be discouraged. And I got tired of trying to explain things to you, of trying to bring you round to my way of thinking. You wouldn’t go away and you wouldn’t come any nearer--you just stood there and watched everything that I was doing.”