A slow smile was dawning in the acrobat's eyes. Business must have been better than he had feared. It is difficult to estimate the number of an ever-shifting crowd. He had placed himself under this restriction that he might have the less strain to preserve his calmness of mind before his leap for life.
Suddenly there issued from the door of the hotel the two young men who had accompanied the ladies from the New Helvetia Springs. They had lighted their cigars, having been debarred that luxury, possibly, on the drive. They drew up two of the many vacant chairs that stood on the verandah and seated themselves near the railing.
"I like nothing better than an old-fashioned el Principe," the elder was saying. "It gives a good clean mild smoke. You ought to smoke nothing, though, at your age; your training will go hard with you this fall if you saturate your system with strong tobacco,—then have to leave off suddenly."
It was less the obvious truism than the professional word "training" that caught the showmen's attention. They looked with keen interest at the newcomers. One was much the younger—a tall, blond youth, well-built and muscular, twenty years of age perhaps, fresh, alert, perfectly groomed, glowing with health and bright-eyed vigour. The other had an air of much distinction. He was fully thirty-five, with clear-cut, delicate features, an intellectual face; but with a languid eye; he was tall, exceedingly thin, and very elaborately and precisely dressed in the height of the fashion of the day. Both wore suits of light wool, so nearly white that the faint flecking of brown in one and the broken "shadow check" in the other scarcely impinged on the cream effect. Even their shoes were white. The younger had a straw hat of a natty sailor shape, while the elder wore a Panama hat, and as he lifted it, laying it on the broad rail of the banisters, baring his brow to the refreshing breeze, it became evident that his short brown hair was growing sparse at the temples and a tiny thin space on the top of his well-shaped head threatened a baldness within the next few years. Both were of fair complexion and clean-shaven, and that feature the most expressive of character in a man's face, the mouth, showed without reserve; it was of firm lines in the elder, with a suggestion of uttering not too many nor too lightly considered words, the mouth of a man who was capable of self-control, and had had more occasion for this quality than seemed consonant with the sybaritic conditions of his apparent estate in life. The lips of the youth had joyous intimations—red, elastic, smiling, now widening in a grin of most exuberant mockery as—to be rid perchance of the nicotian lecture—he caught up one of the handbills of the Carnival, which were flying about the town, and his eye fell on an item which titillated his sense of humour.
"Oh, say, Jardine, ain't this rich?" and he read chucklingly, "'Captain Ollory of the Royal Navy, the greatest high-dive artist in the world, will give a free exhibition of his wonderful performance daily.'"
The other smiled with languid amusement. "'The Royal Navy?'—let's see," and sticking his cigar between his teeth he held out his hand for the flimsy sheet. Lloyd felt the blood flare into his face as he watched the eyes of this pampered worldling travel, illumined with lazy laughter, along the lines of the bill which he had written with such eager hope and thoughtful care, and of which he had been so proud until this moment of subtle disillusionment.
"Doesn't say what Royal Navy," Jardine suggested languidly.
"Nor how Captain Ollory—isn't that a delicious name?—happens to cease to sail the seas to dive on dry land for the admiration of the denizens of Colbury and the purlieus of Kildeer County. Isn't it great?" and once more the mobile lips of the youth distended with a grimace of delighted mockery.
A sudden rustle within the hall and the three ladies, fortified by a delicate lunch of a sandwich and a cup of tea after their early morning drive in the mountains, enough to refresh them, but nicely calculated not to take off the edge of their appetite for the one o'clock dinner, issued forth to witness the wonders of the Street Fair, laughing at themselves and at each other that idleness and vacuity in the dreary interval of waiting in the mountains for frost could reduce them to such a kill-time expedient as this.
The younger gentleman could not forbear his gibes. "I have got to recoup myself for not having been in Paris with you and Sister in June," he said to one of the young ladies. "But I should really think you would have had enough of sight-seeing for one season."