“Permit me to offer you these notes to the value of six thousand francs,” he said. “I hope the extra thousand will recompense you for the temporary inconvenience to which I was unfortunately compelled to put you. Pray accept my deepest apologies, but at the same time let me suggest greater discretion in future. Yet we are all human, are we not, monsieur?” he added, turning to the fat gentleman next to Sylvia. “Will you be very much surprised when I tell you that I have never traveled from Amsterdam but I have found some indiscreet fellow-traveler that has been of permanent service to me at temporary inconvenience to himself. This time I thought I was going to be unlucky, for this was the last compartment left; fortunately that young lady set a bad example.”
He smiled at Sylvia.
This story, when she told it at home, seemed to make a great impression upon her father, who maintained that the stranger was a fool ever to return to the carriage.
“Some people seem to think money’s made to throw into the gutter,” he grumbled.
Sylvia was sorry about his point of view, but when she argued with him he told her to shut up; later on that same evening he had a dispute with his wife about going out.
“I want to win it back,” he protested. “I’ve had a run of bad luck lately. I feel to-night it’s going to change. Did I tell you I saw the new moon over my right shoulder, as I came in?”
“So did I,” said his wife. “But I don’t rush off and gamble away other people’s money for the sake of the moon.”
“You saw it, too, did you?” said Henry, eagerly. “Well, there you are!”
The funny thing was that Henry was right; he did have a run of good luck, and the house became more cheerful again. Sylvia went on with her English studies; but nowadays even during lessons her father never stopped playing cards. She asked him once if he were telling his fortune, and he replied that he was trying to make it. “See if you can pick out the queen,” he would say. And Sylvia never could, which made her father chuckle to himself with pleasure. About this time, too, he developed a habit of playing with a ten-centime piece. Whenever he or any one else was talking, he used to fidget with this coin; in the middle of something important or interesting it used to jingle down on the floor, and everybody had to go on hands and knees to search for it. This habit became so much the intrinsic Henry Snow that Sylvia could never think of him without that ten-centime piece sliding over his long mobile hands, in and out of his prehensile fingers: and though with the progress of time he ceased to drop the coin very often, the restless motion always irritated her. When Sylvia was eleven her uncle Edouard came to Lille with his caravan and brought the news of the death of her grandfather. She was not much impressed by this, but the caravan and the booth delighted her; and when her uncle asked if he might not take her away with him on a long tour through the south of France, she begged to be allowed to go. Her mother had so often held her spellbound by tales of her own wandering life that, when she seemed inclined to withhold her permission, Sylvia blamed her as the real origin of this longing to taste the joys of vagrancy, pleading so earnestly that at last her mother gave way and let her go.
Uncle Edouard and Aunt Elise, who sat in the box outside the booth and took the money, were both very kind to Sylvia, and since they had no children of their own, she was much spoilt. Indeed, there was not a dull moment throughout the tour; for even when she went to bed, which was always delightfully late, bed was really a pleasure in a caravan.