Quin consulted his watch and his conscience at the same time.
"It"s only five-thirty," he said eagerly.
"I wonder if you"d do something for me?"
"You bet I will."
"I want to go out to the hospital. I can get out there and back in my machine in thirty minutes. Would you be willing to go with me?"
Would he be willing? Two hours before he had sworn that no power on earth could induce him to return to those prison walls, and now he felt that nothing could keep him away. Forty minutes of bliss in that snug little runabout with Miss Bartlett, and the destination might be Hades for all he cared.
It took but a few minutes to get to the garage and into the machine, and then they were speeding out the avenue at a pace that would surely have landed them in the police station had the traffic officer been on his job.
Quin, doubled up like a jack-knife beside her, was drunk with ecstasy.
His expression when he looked at her resembled that of a particularly maudlin Airedale. Having her all to himself, with n.o.body to interfere, was an almost overwhelming joy. He longed to pour out his soul in grat.i.tude for all that she had done for him at the hospital; he burned to tell her that she was the most beautiful and holy thing that had ever come into his life; but instead he only got his foot tangled in the steering gear, and muttered something about her "not driving a car bad for a girl"!
But Eleanor was not concerned with her companion or his silent transports. She evidently had something of importance on her mind.
"What time is the officers" mess?" she asked.
"About six. Why?"
"I want to catch Captain Phipps before he leaves the hospital."
Quin"s glowing bubble burst at the word. She _was_ Captain Phipps" girl, after all! She had simply pressed him into service in order to get a last interview with the one officer in the battalion for whom he had no respect.
The guard challenged them as they swung into the hospital area, but, seeing Quin"s uniform, allowed them to enter. Past the long line of contagious wards, past the bleak two-story convalescent barracks, and up to the officers" quarters they swept.
"You are not going in yourself?" Quin protested, as she started to get out of the car.
"Why not? Haven"t I been coming out here all the time?"
"Not at night--not like this."
"Nonsense. What"s the harm? I"ll only be a minute?"
But Quin had already got out, and was holding the door with a large, firm hand.
"No," he said humbly but positively; "I"ll go and bring him out here."
The unexpected note of authority in his voice nettled her instantly.
"I shall go myself," she insisted petulantly. "Let me out."
For a moment their eyes clashed in frank combat, hers angry and defiant, his adoring but determined.
"Listen here, Miss Bartlett," he urged. "The men wouldn"t understand your coming out like this, at night, without your uniform. I told Ca.s.s I"d take care of you, and I"m going to do it."
"You mean that you will dare to stop me from getting out of my own car?
Take your hand off that door instantly!"
She actually seized his big, strong fingers with her small gloved ones and tried to pull them away from the door. But Quin began to laugh, and in spite of herself she laughed back; and, while the two were childishly struggling for the possession of the door-handle, Captain Phipps all unnoticed pa.s.sed out of the mess-hall, gave a few instructions to his waiting orderly, and disappeared in the darkness.
CHAPTER 7
By the time they were on their way home, the moon, no longer dodging behind chimneys, had swaggered into the open. It was a hardened old highwayman of a moon, red in the face and very full, and it declared with every flashing beam that it was no respecter of persons, and that it intended doing all the mischief possible down there in the little world of men.
Miss Eleanor Bartlett was its first victim. In the white twilight she forgot the social gap that lay between her and the youth beside her. She ceased to observe the size and roughness of his hands, but noted instead the fine breadth of his shoulders. She concerned herself no longer with his verbal lapses, but responded instead to his glowing confidence that everybody was as sincere and well intentioned as himself. She discovered what the more sophisticated Rose had perceived at once--that Quinby Graham "had a way with him," a beguiling, sympathetic way that made one tell him things that one really didn"t mean to tell any one. Of course, it was partly due to the fact that he asked such outrageously direct questions, questions that no one in her most intimate circle of friends would dare to ask. And the queer part of it was that she was answering them.
Before she realized it she was launched on a full recital of her woes, her thwarted ambition to go on the stage, her grandmother"s tyranny, the indignity of being sent back to a school from which she had run away six months before. She flattered herself that she was stating her case for the sole purpose of getting an unprejudiced outsider"s unbiased opinion; but from the inflection of her voice and the expressive play of eyes and lips it was evident that she was deriving some pleasure from the mere act of thus dramatizing her woes before that wholly sympathetic audience of one.
It was not until they reached the Eastern Parkway and were speeding toward the twinkling lights of the city that their little bubble of intimacy, blown in the moonlight, was shattered by a word.
"Say, Miss Eleanor," Quin blurted out unexpectedly, "do you like me?"
The question, together with the fact that he had dared used her first name, brought her up with a start.
"Like you?" she repeated in her most conventional tone, "Why, of course.
Whatever made you think I didn"t?"
"I didn"t think that. But--do you like me enough to let me come to see you when you come back?"
Now, a romantically wounded hero receiving favors in a hospital is one thing, and an unknown discharged soldier asking them is quite another.
The very thought of Quinby Graham presenting himself as a caller, and the comments that would follow made Eleanor shy away from the subject in alarm.
"Oh, you"ll be on the other side of the world by the time I get back,"
she said lightly.
"Not me. Not if there"s a chance of seeing you again."
A momentary diversion followed, during which Eleanor fancied there was something wrong with the radiator and expatiated at length on her preference for air-cooled cars.
Quin listened patiently. A gentleman more versed in social subtleties would have accepted the hint and said no more. But he was still laboring under the error that language was invented to reveal rather than to conceal thought.
"You didn"t answer my question," he said, when Eleanor paused for breath.
"What question?"
"About my coming to see you."
She took shelter in a subterfuge.
"I told you that the family was horrid to everybody that came to see me.
To tell you the truth, I don"t think you would be comfortable."