The doctor’s eyes brightened, as he looked at her merry face.
“Wait,” he advised her. “Even now, the miracle may not be complete.”
She ran after him and caught him by the lapels of his collar.
“Oh, don’t talk in riddles,” she protested. “And, anyway, promise me you won’t tell any tales to Mr. Barth.”
“My dear child, I have something to do, besides forcing my acquaintance upon stray young Englishmen who don’t care for it.”
She kissed him impetuously.
“Spoken like your daughter’s own father!” she said approvingly. “Now, if you really won’t go out to play with me, I’m going to the library to read the new magazines.”
An hour later, Nancy was sitting by a window, Harper’s in her lap and her eyes fixed on the dark blue Laurentides to the northward. The girl spent many a leisure hour in the grim old building, once a prison, but now the home of a little library whose walls breathed a mingled atmosphere of mustiness and learning. Ancient folios were not lacking; but Kipling was on the upper shelves and one of the tables was littered with rows of the latest magazines.
To-day, however, Nancy’s mind was not upon her story, nor yet upon the Laurentides beneath her thoughtful gaze. The episode of the previous night had left a strong impression upon her. It was the first time she had seen the three men together; she had watched them with shrewd, impartial eyes. Britisher, Canadian, and Frenchman, Catholic and Protestant: three more distinct types could scarcely have been gathered into the narrow limits of an impromptu theatre party. Beyond the simple attributes of manliness and breeding, they possessed scarcely a trait in common. In two of them, Nancy saw little to deplore; in all three, she saw a good deal to like.
Barth she dismissed with a brief shake of her head. He was undeniably plucky, far more plucky than at first she had supposed. To her energetic, healthy mind, there had been nothing so very bad about a sprained ankle. A little pain, a short captivity, and that was the end of it. Once or twice it had seemed to her that Barth had been needlessly depressed by the situation, needlessly unresponsive to her efforts to arouse him. It was only during the past few days that she had seen what it really meant: the physical pain and weariness to be borne as best it might, in a strange city and cut off from any friendly companionship. It even occurred dimly to her mind that Barth was not wholly responsible for his chilly inability to make new friends, that it was just possible he regretted the fact as keenly as any one else. Moreover, Nancy was just. She admitted, as she looked back over those ten days at Sainte Anne-de-Beaupré, that Barth had been singularly free from fault-finding and complaint. She also admitted that his ignoring of their past relations was no mere matter of social snobbery. Mr. Cecil Barth was totally ignorant of the identity of his former nurse. Having exonerated him from the charge of certain sins, Nancy dismissed him with a shake of her head.