have been here longer than you have. In fact, I left France the day I last saw you.”
“The same day?”
“I started that very same day – shortly after sunrise. I crossed the Belgian frontier that night, and I sailed for New York the morning after. I landed here a week later, and I’ve been here ever since. That, monsieur, is my history.”
“You’ve been here in New York for two years!” he repeated in astonishment. “Have you really left the stage then? I supposed you had just arrived to fill an engagement here.”
“They gave me a try-out this afternoon.”
“You? A try-out!” he exclaimed, amazed.
She carelessly transfixed a berry with her fork:
“If I secure an engagement I shall be very glad to fill it … and my stomach, also. If I don’t secure one – well – charity or starvation confronts me.”
He smiled at her with easy incredulity.
“I had not heard that you were here!” he repeated. “I’ve read nothing at all about you in the papers – ”
“No … I am here incognito… I have taken my sister’s name. After all, your American public does not know me.”
“But – ”
“Wait! I don’t wish it to know me!”
“But if you – ”
The girl’s slight gesture checked him, although her smile became humorous and friendly:
“Please! We need not discuss my future. Only the past!” She laughed: “How it all comes back to me now, as you speak – that crazy evening of ours together! What children we were – two years ago!”
Smilingly she clasped her hands together on the table’s edge, regarding him with that winning directness which was a celebrated part of her celebrated personality; and happened to be natural to her.
“Why did I not recognise you immediately?” she demanded of herself, frowning in self-reproof. “I am stupid! Also I have, now and then, thought about you – ” She shrugged her shoulders, and again her face faltered subtly:
“Much has happened to distract my memories,” she 48 added carelessly, impaling a strawberry, “ – since you and I took the key to the fields and the road to the moon – like the pair of irresponsibles we were that night in June.”
“Have you really had trouble?”
Her slim figure straightened as at a challenge, then became adorably supple again; and she rested her elbows on the table’s edge and took her cheeks between her hands.
“Trouble?” she repeated, studying his face. “I don’t know that word, trouble. I don’t admit such a word to the honour of my happy vocabulary.”
They both laughed a little.
She said, still looking at him, and at first speaking as though to herself:
“Of course, you are that same, delightful Garry! My youthful American accomplice!.. Quite unspoiled, still, but very, very irresponsible … like all painters – like all students. And the mischief which is in me recognised the mischief in you, I suppose… I did surprise you that night, didn’t I?.. And what a night! What a moon! And how we danced there on the wet lawn until my skirts and slippers and stockings were drenched with dew!.. And how we laughed! Oh, that full-hearted, full-throated laughter of ours! How wonderful that we have lived to laugh like that! It is something to remember after death. Just think of it! – you and I, absolute strangers, dancing every dance there in the drenched grass to the music that came through the open windows… And do you remember how we hid in the flowering bushes when my sister and the others came out to look for me? How they called, ‘Nihla! Nihla! Little devil, where are you?’ Oh, it was funny – funny! And to see him come out on the lawn – do you remember? He looked so fat and 49 stupid and anxious and bad-tempered! And you and I expiring with stifled laughter! And he, with his sash, his decorations and his academic palms! He’d have shot us both, you know…”
They were laughing unrestrainedly now at the memory of that impossible night a year ago; and the girl seemed suddenly transformed into an irresponsible gamine of eighteen. Her eyes grew brighter with mischief and laughter – laughter, the greatest magician and doctor emeritus of them all! The immortal restorer of youth and beauty.
Bluish shadows had gone from under her lower lashes; her eyes were starry as a child’s.
“Oh, Garry,” she gasped, laying one slim hand across his on the table-cloth, “it was one of those encounters – one of those heavenly accidents that reconcile one to living… I think the moon had made me a perfect lunatic… Because you don’t yet know what I risked… Garry!.. It ruined me – ruined me utterly – our night together under the June moon!”
“What!” he exclaimed, incredulously.
But she only laughed her gay, undaunted little laugh:
“It was worth it! Such moments are worth anything we pay for them! I laughed; I pay. What of it?”
“But if I am partly responsible I wish to know – ”
“You shall know nothing about it! As for me, I care nothing about it. I’d do it again to-night! That is living – to go forward, laugh, and accept what comes – to have heart enough, gaiety enough, brains enough to seize the few rare dispensations that the niggardly gods fling across this calvary which we call life! Tenez, that alone is living; the rest is making the endless stations on bleeding knees.”
“Yet, if I thought – ” he began, perplexed and troubled, “ – if I thought that through my folly – ”
“Folly! Non pas! Wisdom! Oh, my blessed accomplice! And do you remember the canoe? Were we indeed quite mad to embark for Paris on the moonlit Seine, you and I? – I in evening gown, soaked with dew to the knees! – you with your sketching block and easel! Quelle déménagement en famille! Oh, Garry, my friend of gayer days, was that really folly! No, no, no, it was infinite wisdom; and its memory is helping me to live through this very moment!”
She leaned there on her elbows and laughed across the cloth at him. The mockery began to dance again and glimmer in her eyes:
“After all I’ve told you,” she added, “you are no wiser, are you? You don’t know why I never went to the Fountain of Marie de Médicis – whether I forgot to go – whether I remembered but decided that I had had quite enough of you. You don’t know, do you?”
He shook his head, smiling. The girl’s face grew gradually serious:
“And you never heard anything more about me?” she demanded.
“No. Your name simply disappeared from the billboards, kiosques, and newspapers.”
“And you heard no malicious gossip? None about my sister, either?”
“None.”
She nodded:
“Europe is a senile creature which forgets overnight. Tant mieux… You know, I shall sing and dance under
