"Do you remember when Anne-Marie had the measles?" sobbed Aldo. "And she would only eat the food I cooked?... And she would only go to sleep if she held my finger and I sang, 'Celeste Aïda!' to her?... Will you remember that, and will you promise?"
Nancy remembered that. And she promised.
They sat waiting for Anne-Marie to come back from her walk. Neither spoke; but Aldo took a little picture-postcard of Anne-Marie with her violin that lay on the table, and held it in his hand, gazing at it with his elbow on his knee. Then his head drooped, and he sat with his forehead pressed against the little picture.
The unconscious Arbiter of Destinies came running along the hotel passage with a balloon from the Bon Marché tied to her wrist. It was a large red balloon with the words "Bon Marché" in gold letters on it, and it had caused Fräulein intense mortification as she had walked beside it down the Boulevard des Italiens to the hotel.
"People will recognize you," she had said to Anne-Marie in the street, "and they will not take you and your music seriously any more. It is not for a great artist to walk about with a stupid balloon."
"It is not stupider than any other balloon," said Anne-Marie, slapping its red inflated head, and watching it ascend slowly to the length of its string. Then she pulled it down again, and a slight puff of wind made it knock lightly against Fräulein's cheek.
Fräulein was exceedingly vexed. "I cannot imagine how any one who plays the Beethoven Sonata—"
"Which Sonata?" asked Anne-Marie, who was an adept at changing the conversation. "The Kreutzer or the Frühling? I prefer the Kreutzer."
Then she forcibly inserted her fingers under Fräulein's hard and resisting arm, and trotted gaily beside her. The balloon bumped lightly against Fräulein's hat, but Fräulein did not mind; she merely said that she would have preferred if "Louvre" had been written on it instead of "Bon Marché," which looked so cheap.
Anne-Marie now entered the sitting-room, balloon in hand. Fräulein, seeing a visitor there, withdrew to her room.