“Not the left but the right, monsieur;” and she emitted a little laugh with the unrestraint of a child.
He did as he was bidden, and felt a peculiar intimacy as the girl bent down to help him slip on the new shoe. As she bent forward his eyes rested on her lustrous black hair—wavy without being curly—combed back from her low forehead.
He was thinking of Miriam, the girl of Gnesen. There was a striking resemblance between the two, except that the girl before him had somnolent black eyes while the iris in Miriam’s eyes were of a deep dark-blue. There was the same lack of artifice in her speech, the same touch of tenderness in her voice. Likewise was her face a book with blank pages.
He lingered in the little shop even after he had made his purchase. Was the woman who had spoken through the doorway her mother? No, she was an aunt, for whom she was working. Her mother lived in the country, in a little village near Nantes, and her mother had sent her to Paris to earn her living. Was her mother poor? Yes, very, very poor.
“Where do you come from?” she presently questioned him with equal candor, and looked up into his face without the least embarrassment.
“Where do you think?”
The deep corners of his large mouth drooped and there was a faint smile on his oval face.
She straightened up, her hands now behind her, her eyes resting on his light-brown hair, on his thoughtful face.
“From—from Normandy—all the men in Normandy are blond and have bluish eyes——”
He laughed with frank amusement, the amusement a child’s talk provokes, and told her his eyes only seemed blue but they were greenish.