Love, The Fiddler | Page 3

her
wistfully.
"I suppose it would, Frank," she said.
"Oh, Florence!" he exclaimed, and could not go on lest his voice should
betray him.
"And we should have lived in a poky little house," she said, "and you
would have been to sea three-quarters of the time, leaving me to eat my
heart out as mother did for father--and it would have been a horrible,
dreadful, irrevocable mistake."
"I didn't have to go to sea," he said, snatching at this crumb of hope.
"There are other jobs than ships. Why, only last trip I was offered a

refrigerating plant in Chicago!"
He did not tell her it bore a salary of four hundred dollars a month and
that he had meant to lay it at her feet that morning. In the light of her
millions that sum, so considerable an hour before, had suddenly shrunk
to nothing. How puny and pitiful it seemed in the contrast. He had a
sense that everything had shrunk to nothing--his life, his hopes, his
future.
"I know you think I am cruel," she said, in the same calm, considerate
tone she had used throughout. "But I never gave you any
encouragement, Frank--not in the way you wanted or expected. You
were the only person I knew who was the least bit cultivated and nice
and travelled and out of the commonplace. I can't tell you how much
you brightened my life here, or how glad I was when you came or how
sorry I was when you went away--but it wasn't love, Frank--not the
love you wished for or the love I feel I have the power to give."
"Why did you let me go on then?" he broke out, "I getting deeper and
deeper into it and you knowing all the time it never could come to
anything? Just because no words were said, did that make you blind? If
you were such a friend of mine as you said you were, wouldn't it have
been kinder to have shown me the door and tell me straight out it was
hopeless and impossible? Oh, Florence, you took my love when you
wanted it, like a person getting warm at a fire, and now when you don't
need it any longer you tell me quite unconcernedly that it is all over
between us!"
"It would sound so heartless to tell you the real truth, Frank," she said.
"Oh, let me hear it!" he said. "I'm desperate enough for anything --even
for that, I suppose."
"I knew it would end the way you wanted it, Frank," she said. "You
were getting to mean more and more to me. I did not love you exactly
and I did not worry a particle when you were away, but I sort of
acquiesced in what seemed to be the inevitable. I know I am horribly to
blame, but I took it for granted we'd drift on and on--and this time, if
you had asked me, I had made up my mind to say 'yes.'"
She said this last word in almost a whisper, frightened at the sight of
Frank's pale face. She ran over to him, and throwing her arms around
his neck kissed him again and again.
"We'll always be friends, Frank," she said. "Always, always!"

He made no movement to return her caresses. Her kisses humiliated
him to the quick. He pushed her away from him, and when he spoke it
was with dignity and gentleness.
"I was wrong to reproach you," he said. "I can appreciate what a
difference all this money makes to you. It has lifted you into another
world--a world where I cannot hope to follow you, but I can be man
enough to say that I understand--that I acquiesce-- without bitterness."
"I never liked you so well as I do now, Frank," she said.
"We will say nothing more about it," he said. "I couldn't blame you
because you don't love me, could I? I ought rather instead to thank
you--thank you for so much you have given me these two years past,
your friendship, your intimacy, your trust. That it all came to nothing
was neither your fault nor mine. It was your uncle's for dying and
leaving you sky-scrapers!"
They both laughed at this, and Frank, now apparently quite himself
again, brought forth his presents: a large box of candy, a beautifully
bound little volume of Pierre Loti, and a lace collar he had picked up at
Buenos Ayres. This last seemed a trifling piece of finery in the midst of
all those dresses, though he had paid sixteen dollars for it and had
counted it cheap at the price. Florence received it with exaggerated
gratitude, genuine enough in one way, for she was touched; but, in spite
of herself, her