“Good Lord!” said Boylston, staring with round eyes.
“It will pull them through, anyhow, won’t it?” Campton triumphed.
“Well——” said Boylston. “It will if you’ll endorse it,” he added, smiling. Campton laughed and took up a pen.
A day or two later Campton, returning home one afternoon, overtook a small black-veiled figure with a limp like his own. He guessed at once that it was the lame Davril girl, come to thank him; and his dislike of such ceremonies caused him to glance about for a way of escape. But as he did so the girl turned with a smile that put him to shame. He remembered Adele Anthony’s saying, one day when he had found her in her refugee office patiently undergoing a like ordeal: “We’ve no right to refuse the only coin they can repay us in.”
The Davril girl was a plain likeness of her brother, with the same hungry flame in her eyes. She wore the nondescript black that Campton had remarked at the funeral; and knowing the importance which the French attach to every detail of conventional mourning, he wondered that mother and daughter had not laid out part of his gift in crape. But doubtless the equally strong instinct of thrift had caused Mme. Davril to put away the whole sum.
Mlle. Davril greeted Campton pleasantly, and assured him that she had not found the long way from Villejuif to Montmartre too difficult.
“I would have gone to you,” the painter protested; but she answered that she wanted to see with her own eyes where her brother’s friend lived.
In the studio she looked about her with a quick searching glance, said “Oh, a piano——” as if the fact were connected with the object of her errand—and then, settling herself in an armchair, unclasped her shabby hand-bag.
“Monsieur, there has been a misunderstanding; this money is not ours.” She laid Campton’s cheque on the table.