“I’m through,” he said,—“you can run the rest of the show, on your own, Miss Carter. There’s the list, and you know what a girl her age ought to have. Get her shoes big enough and buy her everything she needs. Then I want you to take her somewhere and put her into the pink outfit—whole business; I’ll be out in front when you get through.”
An hour later, as he sat on a nail-keg in front of the hardware store next door, a vision appeared to him—a vision in pink—a vision of youth incarnate, all smiles and blushes, and tremulous hope, and heart-clutching fear.
Slowly, she turned round before him, once—twice. Then she stood still and looked at him anxiously from under the rose-wreathed new hat.
“Do you like me?” she asked, her voice high and wobbly from excitement.
“Ye gods!” he murmured feebly. “Is this the young person who is seeing to me?”
“Yes, sir,” she assured him hastily. “She’s got work clothes too, but she’s adventuring to-day.”
“My dear,” said Archibald, half seriously, “in a few years, it will be a very perilous adventure to look as pretty as all that.”
They went in to pay the bill and to thank Miss Carter, who tried in vain to look as though she had not been watching them through the window and as though she were not consumed by curiosity about them. Then they strolled away down Main Street and once more the little brown hand slipped into the big brown one.
“I don’t feel so skippy,” Pegeen explained, “but my throat’s funny and I’ve got to squeeze something. I wish I had the Johnston twins here. They are so fat and soft and nice to hug.”
At the hotel where the two lunched, they apparently created a ripple in the summer crowd’s sea of dullness. Even the dowagers and spinsters knitting on the long verandas looked interested and dropped a stitch or two as the apparition in pink lilted past them; and when Pegeen, seated at a table in the big dining-room smiled shyly, radiantly, confidingly, at the world from under the brim of the rose-wreathed hat, the world smiled back at her without reservation. It was as though the spirit of eternal youth had passed that way and set even the most scarred world-worn hearts beating to forgotten tunes.