Rose's face changed. "Oh, is it that girl? I am glad! Virtue is its own reward. I shall love to have an excuse to make her acquaintance."
Dick, who had faced round in the window but was still standing, came and sat down by his cousin.
"What do you know about her?" he asked.
"I'll tell you. It's a sort of story," she answered thoughtfully; "a story about a picture."
XIII
"You know the two beggars who stand by the bridge, just over the Monegasque frontier as you go toward Cabbé-Roquebrune and Mentone?" Rose said, her eyes no longer on Carleton, but fixed upon something she alone could see. "Of course you know they keep off Monaco territory by half an inch or so, because begging is forbidden in the principality. There's an old white-haired man with rather a sinister face. I'm not sure if he's deformed in any way, or if he just produces on the mind an odd effect of some obscure deformity. He's one of the beggars; and the other's a little humpbacked elf of a creature, hardly human to look at, with his big head and ragged red eyelids; but he's always smiling and gay, bowing and beckoning. It's his métier to be merry, just as it's the other's pose to be overwhelmed with gloom."
"I know them both," said Dick. "I can't resist throwing the little humpback a fifty-centime piece now and then, from Jim's automobile, though Jim scolds me for it in a superior way—the way people have who take a firm moral stand against beggars. Jim's on the firm moral stand about a lot of things. He's a strong man, body and soul and mind, but I have a whole brood of pet weaknesses running about that I hate to destroy. The other day when I was going over to Nice to try my luck with the Flying Fish for the first time, I'm ashamed to say I chucked that little red-eyed, grinning imp five francs for luck—my luck, not his?"
"It's a wonder you didn't get out and rub his hump, as a lot of gamblers do. They say he's quite a rich man, owing to that sort of silly superstition, but I can't resist him, either. And I feel it quite a feather in my cap of fascination that I've made the other one—the gloomy beggar—smile, though I've never given him a sou. He has quite a sense of humour, when you get to know him—and when he's realized that he can't fool you. I often walk to the bridge and back, just for a chat with the two beggars, instead of everlastingly promenading up and down the Terrace, bowing to every one I know, when I want exercise. I thought I was the only person original enough or brave enough or depraved enough to visit the beggars socially; but the other morning I was on my way to pay them a call, when I saw that somebody else was ahead of me. It was quite a picture. You remember the blazing hot day we had last week?"
"Wednesday. The best we had at Nice. Not a breath of wind. The day Rongier tried the Della Robbia parachute the second time and made his sensational descent."