“There ain’t any last name,” said Dolly.  “He seems to think I’ll know him by the first one.”  It pleased Dolly to make a parade of frankness about this note.  She couldn’t be sure Rose had been as oblivious as she seemed, to those the chorus-man had been sending her.  This, to her rudimentary mind, seemed a good opportunity to allay Dane’s suspicions.  “See if you can make anything out of it,” she said, and handed it over to Rose.

Rose got up off the bed and carried the note to the window.  She stood there with it a long time.

“What’s the matter?” said Dolly.  “Can’t you read his writing?”

“Yes,” said Rose.  “I know who he is.  It’s meant for me.”

The tone, though barely audible, was automatic.  It brushed Dolly away as if she had been a buzzing fly, and she felt distinctly aggrieved by it.  That Dane, with all her loftily assumed indifference to men, even to a star like Max Webber, should get a note like that, and should have the nerve to betray no confusion over having her pretense thus confounded!  Dolly had read the note thoroughly, and it had struck her as cryptic and suggestive in the extreme.

“I want to sec you very much,” it said, “and shall wait in the lobby unless you say impossible.  I’ll submit to any conditions you wish to make.  No bad news.”

It sounded like a code to Dolly.

Rose stood there a long time.  When she turned around, Dolly saw she was pale.  She’d crumpled the note tight in one palm, and her hands were trembling.  Then, with great swiftness, she began to dress.  But though her haste was evident, she didn’t ask Dolly to help her; didn’t seem to know, indeed, that she was in the room.  It was no way for a friend to act!

The thing that had moved Rose to an extent that terrified her was that last phrase.  The desire it showed to play fair with her; the unwillingness to take advantage of a fear his coming like that might have inspired her with.  And then the way he had made it possible for her, with a single word, to send him away!  And the restraint of that “I want to see you very much!” It wasn’t like any Rodney she knew, to be humble like that.  His humility stripped her of her armor.  If he’d been imperious, exigeant, she could have gone down to meet him with her head up.  Suppose she found him broken, aged, with a dumb need for her crying out in his eyes, what would she do?  What could she trust herself not to do?  But just in human mercy to him she mustn’t let him see she was wavering.

The Rose he was waiting for, there in the lobby, the only Rose he had been able to picture to himself for more than a fortnight of distressful days, was the Rose he’d last seen in that North Clark Street room; the Rose with a look of dumb frozen agony in her face.  The one idea he’d clung to since starting for Dubuque, had been that he mustn’t frighten her.  She must see, with her first glance at him, that she had nothing to fear from a repetition of his former behavior.  She must see that the brute in him—­that was the way he put it to himself—­was completely tamed.