Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/120

 "Not city-broke yet," he told himself ruefully, and went on.

And then he found that the Dowlings were in the country. He was suddenly very tired and depressed. His big shoulders sagged under the tight blue coat, the hat which was too small sat at a less rakish angle. But he had come too far to go back now, and the excitement of being near to Kay upheld him. He set his teeth, went back again to the railroad station, spent more of his small hoard for a ticket and got on another train. This was different, however. All around him were prosperous men reading newspapers, casually getting up at their stops and later climbing into cars with cap-touching chauffeurs; well-dressed women and girls, mincing along the aisles in high-heeled slippers; glimpses here and there of big houses, with carefully shaved lawns under trees beginning to turn with the early frosts.

And he had planned no campaign. The chances were, if he went to the house, that they would not let him see Kay. They might not even admit him.

"Not if they see me first!" he told himself grimly. "I'd be as welcome as a rattler in a prairie dog hole."

He decided to telephone and ask her to meet him some place. So careful had he become of money—he who had never considered money in his life before—that he reluctantly paid for a call, but the information he received was by way of being a relief.

She was not at home. She was at the country club.

When he found that a station hack would cost him a dollar he decided to walk, and weary and lame as he was, the four miles seemed endless. But a sense of exaltation carried him on. It was journey's end. He forgot the big houses, forgot weariness and the loneliness, and the homesickness for the back country where he belonged.

There beyond those gates was Kay, and journey's end.