“That dreadful river!  How did you cross it!”

Dickie smiled.

“It would have taken more than a river to stop me,” he said in his old, half-demure, half-ironical fashion.  And that was all Sheila ever heard of that brief epic of his journey.  He drew away from her now and went over to the fire.

“Dickie”—­she followed him—­“tell me how you came here.  How you knew where I was.  Wait—­I’ll get you some of Cosme’s clothes—­and a cup of tea.”

This time, exhausted as he was, Dickie did not fail to stand up to take the cup she brought him.  He shook his head at the dry clothes.  He didn’t want Hilliard’s things, thank you; he was drying out nicely by the fire.  He wasn’t a bit cold.  He sat and drank the tea, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees.  He was, after all, just the same, she decided—­only more so.  His Dickie-ness had increased a hundredfold.  There was still that quaint look of having come in from the fairy doings of a midsummer night.  Only, now that his color had come back and the light of her lamp shone on him, he had a firmer and more vital look.  His sickly pallor had gone, and the blue marks under his eyes—­the eyes were fuller, deeper, more brilliant.  He was steadier, firmer.  He had definitely shed the pitifulness of his childhood.  And Sheila did not remember that his mouth had so sweet a firm line from sensitive end to end of the lips.

Her impatience was driving her heart faster at every beat.

“You must, please, tell me everything now, Dickie,” she pleaded, sitting on the arm of Hilliard’s second chair.  Her cheeks burned; her hair, grown to an awkward length, had come loose from a ribbon and fallen about her face and shoulders.  She had made herself a frock of orange-colored cotton stuff—­something that Hilliard had bought for curtains.  It was a startling color enough, but it could not dim her gypsy beauty of wild dark hair and browned skin with which the misty and spiritual eyes and the slightly straightened and saddened lips made exquisite disharmony.

Dickie looked up at her a minute.  He put down his cup and got to his feet.  He went to stand by the shelf, half-turned from her.

“Tell me, at least,” she begged in a cracked key of suspense, “do you know anything about—­Hilliard?”

At that Dickie was vividly a victim of remorse.

“Oh—­Sheila—­damn!  I am a beast.  Of course—­he’s all right.  Only, you see, he’s been hurt and is in the hospital.  That’s why I came.”

“You?—­Hilliard?—­Dickie.  I can’t really understand.”  She pushed back her hair with the same gesture she had used in the studio when Sylvester Hudson’s offer of “a job” had set her brain whirling.

“No, of course.  You wouldn’t.”  Dickie spoke slowly again, looking at the rug.  “I went East—­”

“But—­Hilliard?”

He looked up at her and flashed a queer, pained sort of smile.  “I am coming to him, Sheila.  I’ve got to tell you some about myself before I get around to him or else you wouldn’t savvy—­”