“Now, then, Phil,” she asked, between her smiles, “what hast thou—what have you been doing all this time?”
“Oh!” answered Phil, “many things! And you, Helia?”
“Oh, for me it has been always the same thing, always just as it was before—do you remember?”
Ah, the childish doings of other days! How happy Helia was to take shelter in their sweet memories!
“Do you remember,” said Phil, “the day I saw you first? You know it was at the Fête-Dieu procession. How pretty you were as the little Saint John!”
On that day houses are decorated; the walls are hung with white sheets, on which are pinned flowers and greenery, and the procession passes between these blossoming walls. But the one thing in the procession for Phil had been the little Saint John.
It was Helia who took the rôle. At first they had chosen the daughter of a rich merchant; but fear of drafts and a possible fall of rain—a cold is caught so quickly—led them to change at the last moment; and in haste they took a creature of less importance, whose colds did not count.
“I remember,” said Helia, “they came to get me at the circus. I happened to be in a pink maillot, and they put the sheepskin on my back and the wooden cross in my hand—and ten francs in papa’s hand—and so I became the little Saint John.”
“And what a delightful Saint John you were!” said Phil. “I became a lover and a poet on the spot; I wrote verses—I was wild!”
“And you got wilder still,” said Helia, “when you found out that, instead of a merchant’s daughter, I was the famous Helia—the acrobatic star whom the posters pictured on her trapeze, amid stars and suns!”