Helmar stood smiling down at her, thinking that unconsciously she made a very pretty picture with the spaniel’s head pressed against her cheek. She was a dainty little fairy, slender and graceful, dressed in an airy frock of white muslin, with a broad sash of blue ribbon, her straw hat dangling neglected down her back, her big, serious dark eyes gazing solemnly up into his. He nodded in answer. “Yes, he belongs to me,” he said, “but do you suppose you could look after him while I go in to see your uncle?”
The little girl nodded in eager assent. “Oh, yes, indeed,” she cried. “I’ll take care of him. I’ll give him my buttercup wreath. Come now, you darling, come with me,” and with the spaniel still in her arms, she walked back toward the shelter of the big elm.
At Helmar’s nearer approach, the child’s nurse, too, had risen, laying aside her book, and as he passed, naturally enough their glances met—for an instant only—and then Helmar again strode along upon his way, carrying with him the impression of a charming face, and a most alluring smile.
What was there, he wondered, about the girl, that was so vaguely disquieting? She was dressed quietly enough in simple black, with a little snugly-fitting white apron, reaching, by mere chance, just to the height of her bosom, and held in place by smart little shoulder-straps, about it all a daintily vague impression of ribbon and lace. Her figure, indeed, was perfect; deliciously rounded; and the closely-fitting dress seemed to bring out, with significant emphasis, all the beauty of her form. Her face, moreover, was more striking still; her pretty blonde hair appeared to curl so naturally as utterly to defy the mode of convention; her big blue eyes drooped modestly as soon as she had become conscious of his gaze, just long enough to show the heavy fringed eyelashes above, and then almost as quickly glanced up again; there had been a flush of rose in her cheeks, and a deeper scarlet on the lips that had smiled at him. Perhaps it was in the smile itself—slow, langourous, inviting—that the whole woman had seemed suddenly to lie revealed; and scarcely able as yet to define it, Helmar felt that the girl’s seeming simplicity was the dangerous charm of the highest art, and that he had gazed on the guile of the serpent, and not on the innocence of the dove.
Puzzling a little as he walked along, he cast back in his mind to chance words that from time to time had fallen haphazard from Jack Carleton’s lips, and finally, in one sudden flash of memory, he came upon the clue. “Jeanne,” he said to himself, half aloud, “of course; that’s who it is; Jeanne.” Then, falling back unconsciously into the slang of college days, he added, “and she is a peach, too; Jack told the truth for once; no wonder he had his little affair.” And finally, as he mounted the steps of the broad piazza, he spoke again. “But pretty risky fun,” he muttered, “playing with fire, all right; there are some women in the world that a man wants to steer clear of, and I should put that girl down for one of them.”
He rang the bell, and almost immediately there appeared in answer a butler, thin, pale, and of uncertain age, but even to Helmar’s unpractised eye superlatively autocratic, hopelessly correct. He seemed, indeed, to be not so much a human being as the living embodiment of all known rules of social etiquette, condensed, as it were, into the final perfect expression of a type, before whom and whose vast store of knowledge one could only bow, humbly praying that the mistakes of honest ignorance might graciously be forgiven. Helmar, following in his wake, felt properly sensible of the honor done him, as he was ushered up the broad, winding staircase to the entrance of the big square room at the front of the house, where his guide stopped, and most decorously knocked. In answer a great voice called lustily, “Come in!” and the butler promptly stepped to one side. “Mr. Carleton, sir,” he observed, “left orders that you were to be admitted at once,” and thereupon, opening the door, he stood respectfully back, and as Helmar entered, closed it softly behind him.
Edward Carleton, attired in an old-fashioned quilted dressing-gown, was sitting up, reading, in his huge, high, square bed, his back propped with pillows innumerable. Well upward of seventy, he looked strong and active still; gaunt, with a wrinkled, weather-beaten face, a great bushy square-cut gray beard, and fiercely tufted eyebrows, while in the eyes beneath them, as he slowly took off his horn-rimmed spectacles and glanced up at his visitor, Helmar caught an expression of lurking, humorous kindliness that put him at once in mind of Jack Carleton himself.
As Helmar advanced, the old man reached out a gnarled and sinewy hand. “Good morning, sir,” he said pleasantly, “I take it that you’re Doctor Morrison’s young man.”
Helmar, as he took the proffered hand, smiled to himself at the old-fashioned quaintness of the phrase. “Yes, sir,” he answered, “that’s my professional title. In private life I’m Franz Helmar, and in either capacity very much at your service.”
Edward Carleton nodded. “Thank you,” he answered courteously, and then, more abruptly, “you think you’ve come out here to see a sick man, Doctor, but you haven’t. Just a bit of a chill—I managed to let myself get caught in that shower yesterday afternoon—and maybe a little fever with it. But I’m not sick. It’s all Henry’s nonsense. Just because he’s twenty years younger than I am, he has to look after me as if I were a baby.”