“Now about the other secret.”
“Well”—even the daring Bella caught her breath and paused. “No, not to-day. I’ll keep the tremendousest one for another time. But do get out the silver locket, dear Hildegarde, and let’s look at it.”
Ultimately she prevailed. The next time Bella came she found a delightful surprise. The low table was cleared of everything but bowls of roses; and against the white wall great ferns printed plain their tall and splendid plumes—leaving free a little space in the middle where, on a gilt nail, hung the open locket.
Bella was delighted with the whole scheme. “It only wants one thing to make it perfect. No, I won’t tell you what it is. I’ll bring it next Saturday.”
“It” proved to be a paper of Chinese joss-sticks, and a little bronze perforated holder. “We must each burn one to him every week,” she said, setting up her contribution below the dangling locket.
“I don’t quite know if we ought,” Hildegarde said. “Joss-sticks are prayers you know—at least the Chinese think so.”
“Well, of course they’re prayers. That’s why I brought them.”
While the two joss-sticks sent up into the rose-perfumed air faint spirals of an alien fragrance, the two girls sat in front of the confident young face looking out of the silver locket, and talked endlessly about the owner.
Hildegarde found it subtly intoxicating to have so keen an auditor—a sharer even (to the humble extent possible for extreme youth) in the great pivotal romance of existence.
And then Bella had such wonderful inspirations. It was she who saw the larger fitness in Mr. Mar’s habit of going fishing on Saturday afternoons. What was that but an arrangement of the gods that he should be so effectually out of the way, that Hildegarde might with safety borrow from his desk the Galbraith letters. Sitting close together on a square of Japanese matting, in front of the rose table, an anxious ear listening for Mrs. Mar’s return from the missionary meeting, the dark head leaned against the fair, while the two girls read and re-read those precious documents, in an atmosphere charged with incense and a palpitating joy. One day, arrived regretfully at the end of the letter they liked best, Bella bent and kissed the signature. Hildegarde’s heart gave a great jump. The daring of that deed was well-nigh impious. Hildegarde, when all by herself, had done the same, but that was different.