Then he bent his head and kissed her; and the nightingale’s song was a pæan, and the music of the trees and the river a serenade.
After a little, Nicholas Van Tuyl joined them.
“Well, lad,” he said to Grey, as he flicked the ashes from his cigar, “what are your plans?”
“I’m taking La Savoie from Havre on Saturday,” the young man answered. “I’d rather lose my right arm than leave Hope now, just as I have found her, but there’s no getting out of it. I must hurry back to New York and square things.”
“You must go so soon, dear?” she questioned, with just a suspicion of a pout.
“I must,” he replied, reluctance in his voice. “I’ll try to rejoin you later; but every duty demands my presence in America now.”
“We’ll have to stop, of course,” Van Tuyl observed; and then he added, with a smile: “my daughter, here, will be very busy, I fancy, for the next few weeks with couturières and marchandes de modes in the rue de la Paix and thereabouts. So don’t exercise yourself unnecessarily, Carey. She’ll hardly have time to miss you. There’s no salve in the world to a woman so effective as that to be found in ordering new finery.”
“Don’t you believe him, dear,” the girl protested, her fingers tightening on Grey’s hand. “I shall think of you every minute I’m awake, and dream of you every minute I’m asleep.”
The two men lounging against the iron railing of the balcony smoked and chatted for a long time after Hope went in. They had much in common, and to each occurred a multiplicity of matters of mutual interest.
Meanwhile the street below grew quiet, the terrace was deserted, the wind in the trees died to a whisper, and the incessant murmur of the hurrying waters accentuated rather than disturbed the silence. But the two great lamps on either side of the hotel’s broad entrance still blazed, throwing a half circle of illumination out across the roadway and in under the lindens of the Quai.