A thing that Rose hadn’t counted on was the effect produced on both of them just by walking along like this together, side by side, in step.  Just the rhythm of it established a sort of communion—­and it was a communion fortified by many associations.  Practically the whole of their courtship, from the day when he dropped off the street-car with her in the rain and walked her over to the elevated and kept her note-books, down to the day on the bridge over the Drainage Canal in the swirl of that March blizzard, when she’d felt his first embrace, had been on foot like this, tramping along side by side; miles and miles and miles, as she’d told her mother.  And there had been other walks since.  Do you remember the last time they had walked together?  It was from the stage door of the Globe theater to her little room on North Clark Street.  Rose remembered it and she felt sure that he did.  The same singing wire of memories and associations that had vibrated between them then was vibrating between them now and drawing up palpably tighter with every half-mile they walked.  Their pace quickened a little.

Straight down Fifth Avenue they walked to the corner of Thirteenth Street, and then west.  And when they stopped and faced each other in the entrance to the gray brick building where Rose’s apartment was, it was at the end of a mile or more of absolutely unbroken silence.  And facing each other there, all that was said between them was her: 

“You’ll come in, won’t you?” and his, “Yes.”

But the gravity with which she’d uttered the invitation and the tenseness of his acceptance of it, the square look that passed between them, marked an end of something and the beginning of something new.

She left him in her sitting-room while she went through into her bedroom to take off her hat and jacket and take a glance into her mirror.  When she came back, she found him standing at her window looking out.  He didn’t turn when she came in, but almost immediately he began speaking.  She went rather limp at the sound of his voice and dropped down on a cushioned ottoman in front of the fireplace, and squeezed her hands together between her knees.

“I don’t know how much you will have understood,” he began, “probably a good deal.  You told me in Dubuque—­as you were quite right to tell me—­that I mustn’t come back to you.  And now I’ve disobeyed you and come.  What I hope you will have guessed is that I wouldn’t have come except that I’d something to tell you—­something different from the—­idiocies I tormented you with in Dubuque;—­something I felt you were entitled to be told.  But I felt—­this is what you won’t have understood—­I felt that I hadn’t any right to speak to you at all, about anything vital, about anything that concerned us, until I’d given you some sort of guarantee—­until I’d shown you that I was a person it was possible to deal reasonably with.”

She smiled, then pressed her hands suddenly to her eyes.