looked up from her coffee and down towards him where he wavered, lifting his hat, and bowed smiling to him. He had no reason to cross the roadway towards the white stairway which climbed from it to the hotel grounds, but he did so. The father leaned out over the wall, and called down to him: “Won’t you come up and join us, doctor?”
“Why, yes!” Lanfear consented, and in another moment he was shaking hands with the girl, to whom, he noticed, her father named him again. He had in his glad sense of her white morning dress and her hat of green-leafed lace, a feeling that she was somehow meeting him as a friend of indefinite date in an intimacy unconditioned by any past or future time. Her pleasure in his being there was as frank as her father’s, and there was a pretty trust of him in every word and tone which forbade misinterpretation.
“I was just talking about you, doctor,” the father began, “and saying what a pity you hadn’t come to our hotel. It’s a capital place.”
“I’ve been thinking it was a pity I went to mine,” Lanfear returned, “though I’m in San Remo for such a short time it’s scarcely worth while to change.”
“Well, perhaps if you came here, you might stay longer. I guess we’re booked for the winter, Nannie?” He referred the question to his daughter, who asked Lanfear if he would not have some coffee.
“I was going to say I had had my coffee, but I’m not sure it was coffee,” Lanfear began, and he consented, with some demur, banal enough, about the trouble.
“Well, that’s right, then, and no trouble at all,” Mr. Gerald broke in upon him. “Here comes a fellow looking for a chance to bring you some,” and he called to a waiter wandering distractedly about with a “Heigh!” that might have been offensive from a less obviously inoffensive man. “Can you get our friend here a cup and saucer, and some of this good coffee?” he asked, as the waiter approached.
“Yes, certainly, sir,” the man answered in careful English. “Is it not, perhaps, Mr. and Misses Gerald?” he smilingly insinuated, offering some cards.
“Miss Gerald,” the father corrected him as he took the cards. “Why, hello, Nannie! Here are the Bells! Where are they?” he demanded of the waiter. “Bring them here, and a lot more cups and saucers. Or, hold on! I’d better go myself, Nannie, hadn’t I? Of course! You get the crockery, waiter. Where did you say they were?” He bustled up from his chair, without waiting for a distinct reply, and apologized to Lanfear in hurrying away. “You’ll excuse me, doctor! I’ll be back in half a minute. Friends of ours that came over on the same boat. I must see them, of course, but I don’t believe they’ll stay. Nannie, don’t let Dr. Lanfear get away. I want to have some talk with him. You tell him he’d better come to the Sardegna, here.”
Lanfear and Miss Gerald sat a moment in the silence which is apt to follow with young people when they are unexpectedly left to themselves. She kept absently pushing the cards her father had given her up and down on the table between her thumb and forefinger, and Lanfear noted the translucence of her long, thin hand in the sunshine striking across the painted iron surface of the garden movable. The translucence had a pathos for his intelligence which the pensive tilt of her head enhanced. She stopped toying with the cards, and looked at the addresses on them.
“What strange things names are!” she said, as if musing on the fact, with a sigh which he thought disproportioned to the depth of her remark.
“They seem rather irrelevant at times,” he admitted, with a smile. “They’re mere tags, labels, which can be attached to one as well as another; they seem to belong equally to anybody.”
“That is what I always say to myself,” she agreed, with more interest than he found explicable.
“But finally,” he returned, “they’re all that’s left us, if they’re left themselves. They are the only signs to the few who knew us that we ever existed. They stand for our characters, our personality, our mind, our soul.”
She said, “That is very true,” and then she suddenly gave him the cards. “Do you know these people?”
“I? I thought they were friends of yours,” he replied, astonished.
“That is what papa thinks,” Miss Gerald said, and while she sat dreamily absent, a rustle of skirts and a flutter of voices pierced from the surrounding shrubbery, and then a lively matron, of as youthful a temperament as the lively girls she brought in her train, burst upon them, and Miss Gerald was passed from one embrace to another until all four had kissed her. She returned their greeting, and shared, in her quieter way, their raptures at their encounter.
“Such a hunt as we’ve had for you!” the matron shouted. “We’ve been up-stairs and down-stairs and in my lady’s chamber, all over the hotel. Where’s your father? Ah, they did get our cards to you!” and by that token Lanfear knew that these ladies were the Bells. He had stood up in a sort of expectancy, but Miss Gerald did not introduce him, and a shadow of embarrassment passed over the party which she seemed to feel least, though he fancied a sort of entreaty in the glance that she let pass over him.
“I suppose he’s gone to look for us!” Mrs. Bell saved the situation with a protecting laugh. Miss Gerald colored intelligently, and Lanfear could not let Mrs. Bell’s implication pass.
“If it is Mrs. Bell,” he said, “I can answer that he has. I met you at Magnolia some years ago, Mrs. Bell. Dr. Lanfear.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanfear,” Miss Gerald said. “I couldn’t think—”
“Of my tag, my label?” he laughed back. “It isn’t very distinctly lettered.”
Mrs. Bell was not much minding them jointly. She was singling Lanfear out for the expression of her pleasure in seeing him again, and recalling the incidents of her summer at Magnolia before, it seemed, any of her girls were out. She presented them collectively, and the eldest of them charmingly reminded Lanfear that he had once had the magnanimity to dance with her when she sat, in a little girl’s forlorn despair of being danced with, at one of those desolate hops of the good old Osprey House.
“Yes; and now,” her mother followed, “we can’t wait a moment longer, if we’re to get our train for Monte Carlo, girls. We’re not going to play, doctor,” she made time to explain, “but we are going to look on. Will you tell your father, dear,” she said, taking the girl’s hands caressingly in hers, and drawing her to her motherly bosom, “that we found you, and did our best to find him? We can’t wait now—our carriage is champing the bit at the foot of the stairs—but we’re coming back in a week, and then we’ll do our best to look you up again.” She included Lanfear in her good-bye, and all her girls said good-bye in the same way, and with a whisking of skirts and twitter of voices they vanished through the shrubbery, and faded into the general silence and general sound like a bevy of birds which had swept near and passed by.
Miss Gerald sank quietly into her place, and sat as if nothing had happened, except that she looked a little paler to Lanfear, who remained on foot trying to piece together their interrupted tête-à-tête, but not succeeding, when her father reappeared, red and breathless, and wiping his forehead. “Have they been here, Nannie?” he asked. “I’ve been following them all over the place, and the portier told me just now that he had seen a party of ladies coming down this way.”
