He crossed the asphalt to the park side and made his way toward Fifty-ninth Street. He did not want a cab. A walk to the Astor was just what he needed, he felt. It would help him to straighten out some of the tangles which the experiences of the night had left in his brain.
He looked off to his right upon the expanse of bare trees with their background of tall, still-lighted buildings. To him came the memory, as if from some far-away day, of the alone-ness in the midst of city throngs which had kept him loping his piebald over park bridle paths.
“Strange,” she had called this night’s experience. Yet she could not appreciate how strange was the fact that he was not lonely now. He should never be lonely again. Had he not met her? And did he not recognize her—Jane?
Probably she did not yet recognize him. She had snuffed his offer of service in the finding of that unnamed treasure which she had lost, just as she had snuffed his personal interest in her by her rather rude dismissal of him before the Metropolitan.
But what she did or said or thought was only her side of it—not necessarily his. He stood committed both by word and wish to accept the situation as she presented it, to trust her wholly in return for her refusal to trust him, to help her whether she wished his help or no.
And this because he, Peter, had met her, Jane!
CHAPTER X—THE OLD PARK LADY
Central Park, even with its horde of transitory inhabitants, looked more than ever like home to Peter Pape this late afternoon. Feeling the necessity of a private conclusion or two, he loped Polkadot into what he hoped would prove the less used path. His thoughts, like the pinto’s hoof-beats, were of a rather violent, not to say exclamatory sort.
Three whole days since he had met her, and not once since had he seen her! Considering the emphasis with which he had interpolated himself into her acquaintance that opera evening, the length of the unbroken after-pause seemed incredible. Here was he, lonelier than before receipt of the advices of ’Donis Moore, in that now he knew what earlier he only had suspected he was missing.
He felt as forlorn as looked a bent old woman who stood beneath the trail-side shade, leaning against a tree. Out of date was her nondescript bonnet of the poke persuasion, rusty her black silk dress, ineffectual her attitude. Too primitive for the Society into which he had cantered must be his Far-West methods, since rusted over were his hopes and resultless his to-day.