Just before they left the restaurant he asked her if she would dine with him some night and go to a show afterward, and when she said she would he asked what night would be convenient to her.

Her inflection was perfectly demure and even casual, but nothing could keep the sudden “richening” that Jimmy Wallace had tried to describe out of her voice, and the light of mischief danced openly in her eyes when she said: 

“Why, to-night’s all right for me.”  She added, “If that’s not too soon for you.”

He flushed and dropped his hands from the edge of the table where they’d been resting, but he answered evenly enough: 

“No, it’s not too soon for me.”

And then force of habit betrayed Rose into a stupid blunder that almost precipitated a small quarrel.

“Tell me what you’d like to see,” she said, “and I’ll telephone for the seats.”

Then, at his horrified stare, she gasped out an explanation.  “Roddy, I didn’t mean buy the seats!  I don’t have to buy seats at any theater.  And at this time of year they’re so glad to have somebody to give them to that it seems sort of—­wicked to pay real money.”

“It’s my mistake,” he said.  “Naturally, going to the theater wouldn’t be much of a—­treat to you.  I’d forgotten that.”

“Going with you would be a treat to me,” she said earnestly.  “That’s why I didn’t think about the other part of it.  But I needn’t have been so stupid as that.  Will you forget I said it, please?”

He smiled now at himself, the first smile of genuine amusement she had seen on his lips for—­how long?

“And I needn’t have been quite so horrified,” he admitted.  “All the same, I hope I may manage to hit on a restaurant up-town somewhere, where the waiter won’t hand you the check.”

It was on this note that he parted from her at Dane & Company’s doorway.

But the ice didn’t melt so fast as she had expected it would, and she went to bed that night, after he’d brought her home in a taxi and, having told the chauffeur to wait, formally escorted her to her elevator, in a state of mind not quite so serenely happy as that of the night before.  She had held her breath a good many times during the dinner, and even in the theater, where certain old memories and associations sprang at them both, as it were, from ambush.  But always, at the breaking point, he managed to summon up unexpected reserves for resistance, intrenched himself in the manner of his first call.

Rose both smiled and wept over her review of this evening, and was a long while getting off to sleep.  She felt she couldn’t stand this state of things much longer.

But it was not required of her.  With the last of the next day’s light, the ice broke up and the floods came.