FullReads

She was wearing a girdle of blue with her clear, crisp white, and her fairness was charming. She had, indeed, the look which belongs to young Catholic girls dedicated to the Virgin who wear her colors.

It was not, however, until Anthony had been home for a week that he saw the blue cloak. We were all on the beach–Mimi Sears and Bob Needham and the Drakes, myself and Anthony. Nancy was late, having a foursome to finish on the golf grounds. She came at last, threading her way gayly through the crowd of bathers. She was without her cap, and her hair was wound in a thick braid about her head. I saw people turning to look at her as they had never turned to look when she had worn her shadowy gray.

“Great guns!” said a man back of me. “What a beauty!”

A deep flush stained Anthony’s face, and I knew at once that he did not like it. It was as if, having attuned his taste to the refinement of a Japanese print, he had been called upon to admire a Fra Angelico. He hated the obvious, and Nancy’s loveliness at this moment was as definite as the loveliness of the sky, the sea, the moon, the stars. Later I was to learn that Anthony’s taste was for a sophisticated Nancy, a mocking Nancy, a slim, mysterious creature, with charms which were caviar to the mob.

But Bob Needham spoke from the depths of his honest and undiscriminating soul. “Heavens! Nancy. Where did you get it?”

“Get what?”

“That cloak.”

“Do you like it?”

“Like it–! I wish Tony would run away while I tell you.”

Anthony, forcing a smile, asked, “Where did you get it, Nan?”

“It was given to me.” She sat down on the sand and smiled at him.

Mrs. Drake, feeling the thickness and softness, exclaiming over the embroidery, said finally: “It is a splendid thing. Like a queen’s robe.”

“You haven’t told us yet,” Anthony persisted, “where you got it.”

“No? Well, Elizabeth will tell you. It’s rather a long story. I am going into the water. Come on, Bob.”

She left the cloak with me. Anthony followed her and the others. I sat alone under a great orange umbrella and wondered if Anthony would ask me about the cloak.

He did not, and when Nancy came back finally with her hair down and blowing in the wind to dry, Anthony was with her. The cloud was gone from his face, in the battle with the wares he had forgotten his vexation.

But he remembered when he saw the cloak. “Tell me about it, Nancy.”

“I got it from Elizabeth’s viking.”

That was the calm way in which she put it.

“He isn’t my viking,” I told her.

“Well, you were responsible for him.”

“Do you mean to say,” Anthony demanded, “that you accepted a gift like that from a man you didn’t know?”

Nancy, hugging herself in the cloak, said, “I felt that I knew him very well.”

“How long was he here?”

“Three days. I saw him twice.”

“I don’t think I quite like the–idea–” Anthony began, then broke off. “Of course you have a right to do as you please.”

“Of course,” said Nancy, with a flame in her cheek.

“But it would please me very much if you would send it back to him.”

“If I wanted to,” she told him, “I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Can you mail parcel post packages to the–Flying Dutchman? Or express things to–to Odin?”

“I don’t in the least know what you are talking about, Nancy.”

“Well, he sailed in and he sailed out. He didn’t leave any address. He left the cloak–and a rather intriguing memory, Anthony.”

That was all the satisfaction she would give him. And I am not sure that he deserved more at her hands. The agreement between them had been–absolute freedom.

I am convinced that if it had not been for the garden party I should never have shown Olaf’s letter to Nancy. The garden party is an annual event. We always hold it in August, when the “off-islanders” crowd the hotels, and when money is more plentiful than at any other time during the year.