“Sure.”
They were out beyond the stately decay of the up-town drive, with its crumbling mansions and the disheveled lawns surrounding them, beyond the view of the most picturesque river in the world, though, comparatively speaking, the least regarded, covering the prosaic stretch of dusty road between Van Courtland Park and the town of Yonkers.
“I like the Bois better,” Sheila said, “but I like Central Park better than the Champs Elyseés. In Paris the children are not so gay as 191 the grown-up people. Here it is the grown-up people who are without smiles on the streets.”
“Why is that, Dick?” Nancy asked.
“That’s always true of the maturer races, the gaiety of the French is appreciative enthusiasm,—if I may invent a phrase. The children haven’t developed it.”
“I would like to have my hand held, Monsieur Dick,” Sheila announced. “I always feel homesick when I think about Paris. I was so contente and so malheureuse there.”
“Why were you unhappy, sweetest?” Nancy asked.
“My father says I am never to speak of those things, and so I don’t—even to Miss Dear, my bien aimée.”
Dick lifted Sheila into his lap, he took the hand that still clung to Nancy’s in his warm palm, and held them both there caressingly.
“My bien aimée,” he said softly.