She moved in his embrace and her arms tightened about his neck.
“You are the nearest thing to absolute perfection that ever came into this imperfect world,” he continued. “Just to think of a girl of your sheer beauty, your ability, your charm, your all-round perfection, being engaged to a thing like me, makes me dizzy—but I sure do love you, little girl of mine. I will love you as long as we live, and afterward, my soul will love your soul throughout eternity. You know that, sweetheart girl.”
“Oh, Dick!” she whispered, her soul shaken with response to his love. “I never dreamed it possible for a woman to love as I love you. ‘Whither thou goest.…’”
Her voice failed in the tempest of her emotion, and they clung together in silence.
They were finally interrupted by Dorothy’s stately and gracious mother, who came in to greet Seaton and invite him to have dinner with them.
“I knew that Dot would forget such an unimportant matter,” she said, with a glint of Dorothy’s own mischief in her eyes.
* * * *
As they went into the dining-room Dorothy was amazed to see the changes that six days had wrought in Seaton. His face looked thin, almost haggard. Fine lines had made their appearance at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth, and faint but unmistakable blue rings encircled his eyes.
“You have been working too hard, boy,” she reproved him gravely.
“Oh, no,” he rejoined lightly. “I’m all right, I never felt better. Why, I could whip a rattlesnake right now, and give him the first bite!”
She laughed at his reply, but the look of concern did not leave her face. As soon as they were seated at the table she turned to her father, a clean-cut, gray-haired man of fifty, known as one of the shrewdest attorneys in the city.
“Daddy,” she demanded, “what do you mean by being elected director in the Seaton-Crane Company and not telling me anything about it?”
“Daughter,” he replied in the same tone, “what do you mean by asking such a question as that? Don’t you know that it is a lawyer’s business to get information, and to give it out only to paying clients? However, I can tell you all I know about the Seaton-Crane Company without adding to your store of knowledge at all. I was present at one meeting, gravely voted ‘aye’ once, and that is all.”
“Didn’t you draw up the articles of incorporation?”
“I am doing it, yes; but they don’t mean anything. They merely empower the Company to do anything it wants to, the same as other large companies do.” Then, after a quick but searching glance at Seaton’s worn face and a warning glance at his daughter, he remarked:
“I read in the Star this evening that Enright and Stanwix will probably make the Australian Davis Cup team, and that the Hawaiian with the unpronounceable name has broken three or four more world’s records. What do you think of our tennis chances this year, Dick?”
Dorothy flushed, and the conversation, steered by the lawyer into the safer channels, turned to tennis, swimming, and other sports. Seaton, whose plate was unobtrusively kept full by Mr. Vaneman, ate such a dinner as he had not eaten in weeks. After the meal was over they all went into the spacious living-room, where the men ensconced themselves in comfortable Morris chairs with long, black cigars between their teeth, and all four engaged in a spirited discussion of various topics of the day. After a time, the older couple left the room, the lawyer going into his study to work, as he always did in the evening.
“Well, Dicky, how’s everything?” Dorothy asked, unthinkingly.
The result of this innocent question was astonishing. Seaton leaped to his feet. The problem, dormant for two hours, was again in complete possession of his mind.
“Rotten!” he snapped, striding back and forth and brandishing his half-smoked cigar. “My head is so thick that it takes a thousand years for an idea to filter into it. I should have the whole thing clear by this time, but I haven’t. There’s something, some little factor, that I can’t get. I’ve almost had it a dozen times, but it always gets away from me. I know that the force is there and I can liberate it, but I can’t work out a system of control until I can understand exactly why it acts the way it does.” Then, more slowly, thinking aloud rather than addressing the girl:
“The force is attraction toward all matter, generated by the vibrations of all the constituent electrons in parallel planes. It is directed along a line perpendicular to the plane of vibration at its center, and approaches infinity as the angle theta approaches the limit of Pi divided by two. Therefore, by shifting the axis of rotation or the plane of vibration thus making theta vary between the limits of zero and Pi divided by two.…”
He was interrupted by Dorothy, who, mortified by her thoughtlessness in getting him started, had sprung up and seized him by the arm.
“Sit down, Dicky!” she implored. “Sit down, you’re rocking the boat! Save your mathematics for Martin. Don’t you know that I could never find out why ‘x’ was equal to ‘y’ or to anything else in algebra?”
She led him back to his chair, where he drew her down to a seat on the arm beside him.
“Whom do you love?” she whispered gayly in his ear.
After a time she freed herself.
* * * *
“I haven’t practised today. Don’t you want me to play for you a little?”
“Fine business, Dottie. When you play a violin, it talks.”
She took down her violin and played; first his favorites, crashing selections from operas and solos by the great masters, abounding in harmonies on two strings. Then she changed to reveries and soft, plaintive melodies. Seaton listened with profound enjoyment. Under the spell of the music he relaxed, pushed out the footrest of the chair, and lay back at ease, smoking dreamily. The cigar finished and his hands at rest, his eyes closed of themselves. The music, now a crooning lullaby, grew softer and slower, until his deep and regular breathing showed that he was sound asleep. She stopped playing and sat watching him intently, her violin in readiness to play again, if he should show the least sign of waking, but there was no such sign. Freed from the tyranny of the mighty brain which had been driving it so unmercifully, his body was making up for many hours of lost sleep.
Assured that he was really asleep, Dorothy tip-toed to her father’s study and quietly went in.
“Daddy, Dick is asleep out there in the chair. What shall we do with him?”
“Good work, Dottie Dimple. I heard you playing him to sleep—you almost put me to sleep as well. I’ll get a blanket and we’ll put him to bed right where he is.”
“Dear old Dad,” she said softly, sitting on the arm of his chair and rubbing her cheek against his. “You always did understand, didn’t you?”
“I try to, Kitten,” he answered, pulling her ear. “Seaton is too good a man to see go to pieces when it can be prevented. That is why I signalled you to keep the talk off the company and his work. One of the best lawyers I ever knew, a real genius, went to pieces that same way. He was on a big, almost an impossible, case. He couldn’t think of anything else, didn’t eat or sleep much for months. He won the case, but it broke him. But he wasn’t in love with a big, red-headed beauty of a girl, and so didn’t have her to fiddle him to sleep.
“Well, I’ll go get the blanket,” he concluded, with a sudden change in his tone.
In a few moments he returned and they went