Part 11

She threw up her hands with the shrug of old days--the sharp little shrug his sisters used to imitate and that she hadn’t had to go to Europe for. The only thing was that he blessed her for bringing it back.

“Ah, the ideas of people now----!”

“Yes, their ideas are certainly not about us” But he ruefully faced it. “We’ve none the less, however, to live with them.”

“With their ideas--?” Cornelia questioned.

“With them--these modern wonders; such as they are!” Then he went on: “It must have been to help me you’ve come back.”

She said nothing for an instant about that, only nodding instead at his photograph. “What has become of yours? I mean of her.”

This time it made him turn pale. “You remember I have one?”

She kept her eyes on him. “In a ‘pork-pie’ hat, with her hair in a long net. That was so ‘smart’ then; especially with one’s skirt looped up, over one’s hooped magenta petticoat, in little festoons, and a row of very big onyx beads over one’s braided velveteen sack--braided quite plain and very broad, don’t you know?”

He smiled for her extraordinary possession of these things--she was as prompt as if she had had them before her. “Oh, rather--‘don’t I know?’ You wore brown velveteen, and, on those remarkably small hands, funny gauntlets--like mine.”

“Oh, do you remember? But like yours?” she wondered.

“I mean like hers in my photograph.” But he came back to the present picture. “This is better, however, for really showing her lovely head.”

“Mary’s head was a perfection!” Cornelia testified.

“Yes--it was better than her heart.”

“Ah, don’t say that!” she pleaded. “You weren’t fair.”

“Don’t you think I was fair?” It interested him immensely--and the more that he indeed mightn’t have been; which he seemed somehow almost to hope.

“She didn’t think so--to the very end.”

“She didn’t?”--ah the right things Cornelia said to him! But before she could answer he was studying again closely the small faded face. “No, she doesn’t, she doesn’t. Oh, her charming sad eyes and the way they say that, across the years, straight into mine! But I don’t know, I don’t know!” White-Mason quite comfortably sighed.

His companion appeared to appreciate this effect. “That’s just the way you used to flirt with her, poor thing. Wouldn’t you like to have it?” she asked.

“This--for my very own?” He looked up delighted. “I really may?”

“Well, if you’ll give me yours. We’ll exchange.”

“That’s a charming idea. We’ll exchange. But you must come and get it at my rooms--where you’ll see my things.”

For a little she made no answer--as if for some feeling. Then she said: “You asked me just now why I’ve come back.”

He stared as for the connection; after which with a smile: “Not to do that----?”

She waited briefly again, but with a queer little look. “I can do those things now; and--yes!--that’s in a manner why. I came,” she then said, “because I knew of a sudden one day--knew as never before--that I was old.”

“I see. I see.” He quite understood--she had notes that so struck him. “And how did you like it?”

She hesitated--she decided. “Well, if I liked it, it was on the principle perhaps on which some people like high game!”

“High game--that’s good!” he laughed. “Ah, my dear, we’re ‘high’!”

She shook her head. “No, not you--yet. I at any rate didn’t want any more adventures,” Cornelia said.