Von Gerhard stared a moment, a curious look on his face. Then he laughed one of those rare laughs of his, and I joined him because I was strangely young, light, and happy to be alive.
“You walk and enjoy walking, yes?” asked Von Gerhard, scanning my face. “Your cheeks they are like—well, as unlike the cheeks of the German girls as Diana’s are unlike a dairy maid’s. And the nerfs? They no longer jump, eh?”
“Oh, they jump, but not with weariness. They jump to get into action again. From a life of too much excitement I have gone to the other extreme. I shall be dead of ennui in another six months.”
“Ennui?” mused he, “and you are—how is it?—twenty-eight years, yes? H’m!”
There was a world of exasperation in the last exclamation.
“I am a thousand years old,” it made me exclaim, “a million!”
“I will prove to you that you are sixteen,” declared Von Gerhard, calmly.
We had come to a fork in the road. At the right the narrower road ran between two rows of great maples that made an arch of golden splendor. The frost had kissed them into a gorgeous radiance.
“Sunshine Avenue,” announced Von Gerhard. “It beckons us away from home, and supper and salad dressing and duty, but who knows what we shall find at the end of it!”
“Let’s explore,” I suggested. “It is splendidly golden enough to be enchanted.”