For once in his life Mr. G. W. Tarbox, as he walked with Marguerite in advance of Claude and her mother, was at a loss what to say. The drollness of the situation was in danger of overcoming him again. Behind him was Claude, his mind tossed on a wild sea of doubts and suspicions.
“I told him,” thought Tarbox, while the girl on his arm talked on in pretty, broken English and sprightly haste about something he had lost the drift of—“I told him I was courting Josephine. But I never proved it to him. And now just look at this! Look at the whole sweet mess! Something has got to be done.” He did not mean something direct and openhanded; that would never have occurred to him. He stopped, and with Marguerite faced the other pair. One glance into Claude’s face, darkened with perplexity, anger, and a distressful effort to look amiable and comfortable, was one too many; Tarbox burst into a laugh.
“Pardon!” he exclaimed, checking himself until he was red; “I just happened to think of something very funny that happened last week in Arkansas—Madame Beausoleil, I know it must look odd,”—his voice still trembled a little, but he kept a sober face—“and yet I must take just a moment for business. Claude, can I see you?”
They went a step aside. Mr. Tarbox put on a business frown, and said to Claude in a low voice,—
“Hi! diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon the little dog laughed to see the sport and the dish ran away with the spoon you understand I’m simply talking for talk’s sake as we resume our walk we’ll inadvertently change partners—a kind of Women’s Exchange as it were old Mother Hubbard she went to the cupboard to get her poor dog a bone but when she got there the cupboard—don’t smile so broadly—was bare and so the poor dog had none will that be satisfactory?”
Claude nodded, and as they turned again to their companions the exchange was made with the grace, silence, and calm unconsciousness of pure oversight,—or of general complicity. Very soon it suited Zoséphine and Tarbox to sit down upon a little bench beside a bed of heart’s-ease and listen to the orchestra. But Marguerite preferred to walk in and out among the leafy shadows of the electric lamps.
And so, side by side, as he had once seen Bonaventure and Sidonie go, they went, Claude and Marguerite, away from all windings of disappointment, all shadows of doubt, all shoals of misapprehension, out upon the open sea of mutual love. Not that the great word of words—affirmative or interrogative—was spoken then or there. They came no nearer to it than this,—
“I wish,” murmured Claude,—they had gone over all the delicious “And-I-thought-that-you’s” and the sweetly reproachful “Did-you-think-that-I’s,” and had covered the past down to the meeting on the bridge,—“I wish,” he murmured, dropping into the old Acadian French, which he had never spoken to her before,—“I wish”—
“What?” she replied, softly and in the same tongue.
“I wish,” he responded, “that this path might never end.” He wondered at his courage, and feared that now he had ruined all; for she made no answer. But when he looked down upon her she looked up and smiled. A little farther on she dropped her fan. He stooped and picked it up, and, in restoring it, somehow their hands touched,—touched and lingered; and then—and then—through one brief unspeakable moment, a maiden’s hand, for the first time in his life, lay willingly in his. Then, as glad as she was frightened, Marguerite said she must go back to her mother, and they went.