FullReads

“Just like a little American boy,” thought Hastings, and a pang of homesickness shot through him.

Presently the nurse captured the boat, and the small boy stood at bay.

“Monsieur Rene, when you decide to come here you may have your boat.”

The boy backed away scowling.

“Give me my boat, I say,” he cried, “and don’t call me Rene, for my name’s Randall and you know it!”

“Hello!” said Hastings,–“Randall?–that’s English.”

“I am American,” announced the boy in perfectly good English, turning to look at Hastings, “and she’s such a fool she calls me Rene because mamma calls me Ranny–“

Here he dodged the exasperated nurse and took up his station behind Hastings, who laughed, and catching him around the waist lifted him into his lap.

“One of my countrymen,” he said to the girl beside him. He smiled while he spoke, but there was a queer feeling in his throat.

“Don’t you see the stars and stripes on my yacht?” demanded Randall. Sure enough, the American colours hung limply under the nurse’s arm.

“Oh,” cried the girl, “he is charming,” and impulsively stooped to kiss him, but the infant Randall wriggled out of Hastings’ arms, and his nurse pounced upon him with an angry glance at the girl.

She reddened and then bit her lips as the nurse, with eyes still fixed on her, dragged the child away and ostentatiously wiped his lips with her handkerchief.

Then she stole a look at Hastings and bit her lip again.

“What an ill-tempered woman!” he said. “In America, most nurses are flattered when people kiss their children.”

For an instant she tipped the parasol to hide her face, then closed it with a snap and looked at him defiantly.

“Do you think it strange that she objected?”

“Why not?” he said in surprise.

Again she looked at him with quick searching eyes.

His eyes were clear and bright, and he smiled back, repeating, “Why not?”

“You are droll,” she murmured, bending her head.

“Why?”

But she made no answer, and sat silent, tracing curves and circles in the dust with her parasol. After a while he said–“I am glad to see that young people have so much liberty here. I understood that the French were not at all like us. You know in America–or at least where I live in Milbrook, girls have every liberty,–go out alone and receive their friends alone, and I was afraid I should miss it here. But I see how it is now, and I am glad I was mistaken.”

She raised her eyes to his and kept them there.

He continued pleasantly–“Since I have sat here I have seen a lot of pretty girls walking alone on the terrace there,–and then you are alone too. Tell me, for I do not know French customs,–do you have the liberty of going to the theatre without a chaperone?”

For a long time she studied his face, and then with a trembling smile said, “Why do you ask me?”

“Because you must know, of course,” he said gaily.

“Yes,” she replied indifferently, “I know.”

He waited for an answer, but getting none, decided that perhaps she had misunderstood him.

“I hope you don’t think I mean to presume on our short acquaintance,” he began,–“in fact it is very odd but I don’t know your name. When Mr. Clifford presented me he only mentioned mine. Is that the custom in France?”

“It is the custom in the Latin Quarter,” she said with a queer light in her eyes. Then suddenly she began talking almost feverishly.

“You must know, Monsieur Hastings, that we are all un peu sans gene here in the Latin Quarter. We are very Bohemian, and etiquette and ceremony are out of place. It was for that Monsieur Clifford presented you to me with small ceremony, and left us together with less,–only for that, and I am his friend, and I have many friends in the Latin Quarter, and we all know each other very well–and I am not studying art, but–but–“

“But what?” he said, bewildered.