Some pictures fade quick, some never. The picture of Mary Riley in that doorway, with his rose in her hair—that hasn't faded yet.
They had been talking before I reached them, but as I passed on I could feel the silence between them. For many steps after I passed on I could feel that silence and their eyes following me up the street.
Next day there was an outdoor bazaar for the benefit of some flood sufferers. There was an athletic programme and I was the star of the meet, with my picture on the bill-boards.
I went. Surrounding the athletic field and track were tables for the sale of this thing and that, and behind the tables were women and girls using every female guile to coax money from men's pockets.
There were big tables and little tables. At one of the little tables was Mary Riley. Sidewise out of my eyes I saw her, standing atop of a chair behind the table to look out on the games. When the games were over and I was dressed up in my street clothes again, I walked over to her table. My three first-prize cups in their three chamois bags were carried behind me by a multi-millionaire's son named Twinney. He was an athletic rooter, with an ambition to be known as the friend of some prize-ring or football or sprinting champion. In my coat pocket were two gold prize watches.
Mary Riley was standing behind her table. The young chief petty officer was there, too—in front of the table. They were auctioning the last of the things off. With a smile and a word of thanks Mary would hand over the things as they were bought. But she wasn't taking in too much money. She was the daughter of a man of no great importance in the community, and she didn't have the grand articles that the women at the other tables had. Her little stock was made up of things that she had begged or made herself.
The auctioneer was a whiskered old man with a great flow of gab. He holds up a piece of lace—to put on a bureau or a dresser it was—made, as he put it, by beautiful Miss Riley herself. And she was beautiful! Violet eyes and blue-black hair, and—I've seen Chinese ivory since that her face was the color of, only no Chinese ivory that ever would take on the warmer waves of color as I looked at it.
"How much for this lovely lace cover?" the auctioneer was asking, and "Two dollars," some one said. And right away the chief petty officer said "Five!"
I looked at him then—for the first time fairly. He was one of those quiet-looking, thoughtful kind—of good height, well made and well set up—maybe twenty-two years old.
There was another chief petty officer with him; and this one began telling a bystander how that young fellow who'd just bid was Jack Meagher the gun-captain—the same Meagher, yes, that the papers had been talking about—who'd dropped from his turret to his handling-room and in through a fire and shut himself up in a magazine and maybe saved the ship and the whole crew from being blown up. He'd got burnt, pretty bad—yes, but was all right now.