Until now, no words had passed between them except their brief salutation at meeting, and Joyce’s patter had sent even that into eclipse. He felt he should be saying something to her. He despised dull commonplaces, but the silence must not be permitted to grow any longer.
Of a sudden, he had become audacious.
“I led you this way, once, through a very dark lane,” he heard himself saying.
“Oh—was it?” she laughed. “I thought we went hand in hand. I felt like a little girl being led to her first day in the kindergarten.”
“So—you do remember!”
“Rather! I don’t know what I should have done that night without you.” And she had looked up into his face and smiled. He wondered if she could feel the pounding of his heart … They were entering the dining-room … Joyce waved a hand from a table halfway the length of the room.
“Tell me something, while we’re thinking about that,” continued Helen, confidentially. “Why didn’t you let me drive you home, that night, or at least put you down as we passed your gate?”
“Because I preferred you shouldn’t know me. I thought that if you knew, you might—” He had broken off, lamely, groping for a word.
“That was a very appropriate way to begin a friendship like ours,” she said crisply, “seeing it was destined to be full of little deceits and riddles.”
“I am sorry,” he said. He must have appeared appallingly so.
“Well—don’t be, then!” she commanded hotly, with a savage little tug at his arm. “You look like Hamlet! Grin, I tell you! Your Nancy Ashford knows well enough we have been quarrelling! I saw it in her face this afternoon. I’m not going to do this farce all by myself!”
He had looked down into her big blue eyes, amazed at this outburst so startlingly out of keeping with her serene expression, and laughed aloud. As he reviewed it, now, he laughed again. It had been absurd … beyond belief!
“What’s the joke?” demanded Joyce, as the waiters drew their chairs.
“Long story,” said Helen briefly, “and the good man laughed at it once. I can’t have him hearing it over again.”
Nancy looked puzzled. He was secretly pleased over her bewilderment, and amused to see that the little episode had put a crimp in her omniscience.
“Your curriculum is all prescribed,” Joyce was saying, as the waiters hurried away, “all but the dessert. That’s an elective. Otherwise, you take what the institution thinks will be good for you. No, darling,” she added, turning to Helen, “it isn’t veal. I remembered that you had already worked off your credits, majoring in veal.”
“Do tell us some of your other experiences abroad!” Nancy had begged. “I’m hoping to go over, for a summer, presently, and I’m awfully keen on travel tales.”
How graciously she had complied! And how charmingly she talked of her impressions. Most of the larger cities he knew almost as he knew his own, but she had seen things that he had missed—intimate glimpses up narrow streets and into quaint shops where, it seems, she had frequently made the acquaintance of a whole family … How tenderly she talked about little children! …
“In Assisi, I once made some wonderful friends that way, in a little shop,” she was saying. “I’m afraid I began visiting the Bordinis, at first, to improve my colloquial Italian. Of course, I always bought some trifle to pay for my tuition, or brought along something for the children; but after a while, I found myself going there because I liked them and really needed their friendship. And, one day, little Maria, about three, took dreadfully ill. For three weeks, she just hung on to the mere edge of life. They were all so terribly worried. And, not having anything very important to do, I was in and out, frequently, through those days—”
She interrupted her story to unfasten from within the neck of her gown a little silver cross.
“Maria’s mother insisted on giving me this when I left Assisi.”
The trinket was passed around the table. When it came to him, he had inspected it, with a feeling of reverence. It was holy—for many excellent reasons.
“I did not want to take it,” pursued Helen, “for I am sure it was the most treasured thing she owned. It had been blessed by the Holy Father himself, when, as a young girl, in nineteen hundred, she had accompanied a pilgrimage to Rome.”
“So that’s why you’re wearing that cheap little cross!” exclaimed Joyce. “Does it bring you good luck?”
Helen smiled.
“Perhaps,” she answered. “At least, I like it better than any other jewellery I have.”
“Very naturally,” commented Nancy understandingly.
Joyce was quite attentive.
“You must have been the family’s main prop, during their trouble, to earn their enchanted cross. Let’s have the rest of the story. What all did you do for them while Maria was sick? Help keep store? Were you the nurse? Go on, darling! Tell us all about it!”
At that point, he had been unable to restrain himself. Quite to his own amazement, he had held up a protecting hand.
“No, no, Joyce! We really daren’t ask Mrs. Hudson to tell us that!” Instantly he had felt embarrassed by his own remark.
“How funny! Why shouldn’t she tell us?”
He had turned to Helen, at that, and asked soberly, “Did you ever tell anybody that story?”
“No! Now that you ask—I don’t believe I ever did.”
“Then I wouldn’t, if I were you. This is a very valuable little keepsake, and its chief charm is in the fact that nobody knows but you what you did to earn it.”
“How perfectly ridiculous, Bobby!” shouted Joyce. “Did you know he was so superstitious, Nancy?”
“I had suspected it—a time or two.”
Helen was regarding him with perplexed, wide eyes as he put the little fetish into her palm with a gesture that had
