“What makes you so sure?”
“One can tell. It isn’t a thing one can put into words. You know by a
kind of intuition.”
“Know what?”
“That a certain kind of person can never have had any but a certain kind
of standard.” She gave me another of those quietly mischievous glances.
“I’ll tell you what she said to me one day not long ago. She said she’d
only known one man in her life—known him well, that is—of whom she was
sure that he was a thoroughbred to the core.”
“But you admitted at the beginning that that kind of conviction is a
danger.”
“It would be a danger if her friends couldn’t bear her out in believing
it to be justified.”
Unable to face any more of this subtle flattery, I was obliged to let the
subject drop.
The lunch was like any other lunch. As an unimportant person at a
gathering where every one knew every one else more or less intimately, I
was to some extent at liberty to follow my own thoughts, which were not
altogether happy ones. For telling what I had to tell, the necessity had
grown urgent. What was lacking, what had always seemed to be lacking, was
the positive opportunity. This I resolved to seek; but suddenly I found
it before me.
This was toward the middle of the afternoon, when the party had broken
up. It had broken up imperceptibly by dissolving into groups that
strolled about the lawns and descended the long flights of steps leading
to the beach below. As I had not been seated near Miss Barry at table,
it was no more than civil for me to approach her when the party was on
the veranda and the lawn. Our right to privacy was recognized at once by
a withdrawal of the rest of the company. It was probably assumed that I
was to be the fourth in the series of experiments of which Jim Hunter
and Stephen Cantyre had been the second and the third; and, though my
fellow-guests might be sorry for me, they would not intervene to protect
me.
Considering it sufficient to make their adieux to Mrs. Barry, they left
us undisturbed in a nook of one of the verandas. Here we were out of
sight of any of the avenues and pathways to the house, and Mrs. Barry was
sufficiently in sympathy with our desire to be alone not to send any one
in search of us. On the lawn robins were hopping, and along the edge of
shorn grass the last foxgloves made upright lines of color against the
olive-green scrub-oak. Far down through the trees one caught the silvery
glinting of water.
The sounds of voices and motor wheels having died away, Miss Barry said,
languidly: “I think they must be all gone. They’ll say I’m terribly rude
to keep myself out of sight. But it’s lovely here, isn’t it? And this is
such a cozy spot in which to smoke and have coffee. I read here, too,
and— Oh, dear, what’s happening?”
It was then that the little accident which was to play so large a part
in my life occurred. She had leaned forward from her wicker chair to
set her empty coffee-cup on the table. As she did so the string of
pearls which she wore at the opening of her simple white dress loosened
itself and slipped like a tiny snake to the floor of the veranda. From
a corresponding chair on the other side of the table I sprang up and
stooped. When I raised myself with the pearls in my right hand I slipped
them into my pocket.
Between the fingers of my left hand I held a lighted cigar. Bareheaded,
I was wearing white flannels and tennis shoes. Now that the moment had
come, I felt extraordinarily cool—as cool as on the night when I had
slipped this string of pearls into my pocket before. I looked down and
smiled at her. Leaning back in her chair, she looked up and smiled at me.
I shall always see her like that—in white with a slash of silk of the red
of her lips somewhere about her waist, and a ribbon of the same round her
dashing Panama hat. Her feet in little brown shoes were crossed. With
an elbow on the arm of her chair, she held a small red fan out from her
person, though she wasn’t actively using it.
“What does that mean?” she asked, idly, at last.
[Illustration: “Didn’t you ever see any one put these pearls into his
pocket before?”]
“Doesn’t it remind you of anything?”
“No—of nothing.”
“Didn’t you ever see any one put these pearls into his pocket before?”
“Why, no!” She added, as if an idea had begun to dawn in the back of her
memory, “Not in that way.”
“Oh, I remember. You didn’t see him put them in at all. You only saw him
take them out.”
The smile remained on her features, but something puzzled gave it faint
new curves.
“Why—”
“It was like this, wasn’t it?”