“A real king, but they don’t say king; they say ‘l’empereur.’”
William looked stern. “I don’t know what you mean,” he returned; “where did you see any king?”
The grave eyes were not one bit abashed. “In Paris, where we lived,” said the little girl. “There was a boy named Tommy watching at the hotel window, too, and he said, ‘Vive le roi,’ and Marie, my bonne, she said, ‘Sh—h: l’empereur!’”
The effect of this was unexpected, for the boy, descending from the gate, turned a keenly irradiated countenance upon her. “Do you mean Paris, my father’s Paris, Paris in France?”
“Why,” said the little girl, regarding him with some surprise, “yes.” For he was taking her by the hand in a masterful fashion.
“Come in,” he commanded. “I want you to tell father; that’s father there.”
But Alexina, friendly soul, went willingly enough with him through the gate and up the wide pavement between bordering beds of unflourishing perennials.
“Listen, father,” William Leroy was calling to the gentleman at the foot of the steps; “she’s been in Paris, your Paris.”
The gentleman’s ivory-tinted fingers removed the cigar from his lips. As he turned the western light fell on his lean, clean-shaven face, thin-flanked beneath high cheek-bones. From between grey brows thick as a finger rose a Louis Philippe nose, its Roman prominence accentuated by the hollowness of the cheeks. The iron-grey hair, thrown back off the face, fell, square-cut, to the coat collar behind.
Never a word spoke the gentleman, only, cigar in hand, waited, eagle-countenanced, sphinx-like. Yet straight Alexina came to his side, and her baby eyes, quick to dilate, now confidingly calm, met the ones looking out piercingly from their retreat beneath the heavy brows, and quite as a matter of course a little hand rested on his knee as she stood there, and equally as naturally, his face impassive, did the fingers of the gentleman close upon it.