She was fifteen years old before she saw him again. His strap-watch

was still on her wrist; his memory, unfaded, still enshrined in her

heart of a child, for she was as yet no more than that at fifteen. And

the moment she saw him she recognised him.

It was on the Sixth Avenue Elevated Station at Twenty-third Street one

sunny day in April; he stood waiting for the downtown train which she

stepped out of when it stopped.

He did not notice her, so she went over to him and called him by name;

and the tall, good-looking, fashionably dressed young fellow turned to

her without recognition.

Advertisement..

But the next instant his smooth, youthful face lighted up, and off

came his hat with the gay college band adorning it: "Athalie Greensleeve!" he exclaimed, showing his pleasure

unmistakably.

"C. Bailey, Junior," she rejoined as steadily as she could, for her

heart was beating wildly with the excitement of meeting him and her

emotions were not under full control.

"You have grown so," he said with the easy, boyish cordiality of his

caste, "I didn't recognise you for a moment. Tell me, do you still

live down--er--down there?"

She said: "I knew you as soon as I set eyes on you. You are very much taller,

too.... No, we went away from Spring Pond the year after my father

died."

"I see," he said sympathetically. And back into his memory flashed

that scene with her by the stove in the dusky bar. And then he

remembered her as she stood in her red hood and cloak staring at the

closed door of the room where her dead father lay. And he remembered

touching her frosty little hand, and the incident of the watch.

"I never went back there," he mused, half to himself, looking

curiously at the girl before him. "I wanted to go--but I never did."

"No, you never came back," she said slowly.

"I couldn't. I was only a kid, you see. My mother wouldn't let me go

there that summer. And father and I joined a club down South so we did

not go back for the duck-shooting. That is how it happened."

She nodded, gravely, but said nothing to him about her faith in his

return, how confidently, how patiently she had waited through that

long, long summer for the boy who never returned.

"I did think of you often," he volunteered, smiling at her.

"I thought of you, too. I hoped you would come and let me teach you to

sail a boat."




Most Popular