"And that nice, amusing old colored woman who kept house for you—what became of her?"
"Emma? Oh, she wouldn't stay behind, so she came along with me. And she couldn't leave the cat, so he came along, too," said Peter, casually.
Mrs. Hemingway laughed as his uncle had laughed.
"There's an odd turn to your processes, Peter," she commented. "One sees that you'll never be molded into a human bread pill! I'm glad we've met again. I think you're going to need me. So I'm going to look after you."
"I have needed you every day since you left," he told her.
He didn't as yet know what deep cause he had to feel grateful for Mrs. John Hemingway's promise to look after him; he didn't as yet know what an important person she was in the American colony in Paris, as well as in certain very high circles of French society itself. And what was true of her in Paris was also true of her in London. Mrs. John Hemingway's promise to look after a young man hall-marked him. She was more beautiful and no less kind than of old, and absence had not had the power to change his feelings for her. As simply and whole-heartedly as he had loved her then, he loved her now. So he looked at her with shining eyes. Reticence was ingrained in Peter, but the knowledge that she liked and understood him had the effect of sunlight upon him.
"He's as simple as the Four Gospels," she thought, "and as elemental as the coast country itself. One couldn't spoil him any more than one could spoil the tide-water.
"Yes, indeed! I'm going to look after you," she repeated.
He discovered, from what she herself chose to tell him, that there had been some unpleasant years for her too. But that had all ended when she married John Hemingway, then with a New York firm and later sent abroad to represent the interests of the company of which he was now a member. His chief office was in Paris, though he had to spend considerable time in London. When she spoke of John Hemingway his wife's face glowed with quiet radiance. The one drop of bitterness in her cup was that there were no children.
"I hope you marry young, Peter, and that there'll be a houseful of little Champneys," she said, and sighed a bit enviously.