The cool air from the river revived me, or I should have fallen, the atmosphere grew so thick and the room so black as I saw myself a young girl, under the maple tree, giving a lock of my hair to Nicol Patoff, who had seemed so eager to get it, and who had cared so little for it as to leave it with strangers when the house was sold.
“You do look spotted and queer, and it is awful hot in here,” Mary said, fanning me with her hat; then, turning to the gendarme, she continued: “A lock of hair, a greenback, a fifty-cent piece and a flag! There is a romance hidden in this desk. What is the color of the hair?”
She looked at my heavy braids, but her countenance fell when the gendarme replied: “Black as night!”
I knew he lied, but blessed him for it, feeling sure that he guessed on whose head the hair once grew, and wished to spare me from Mary’s badinage.
She was very young and irrepressible, and went on: “Funny he should have left them, unless he had to run away. Can we see them?”
“Certainly not,” he replied. “It was wrong in me to speak of them, perhaps, and it would be a greater wrong to show them.”
“I guess you are right,” Mary said, while I made a move toward the door.
The sight of Nicol’s picture, and the mystery attending him, had affected me strangely, making me faint and sick, and I longed to be in the fresh air outside.
“You will stay for a cup of tea? Ludovic will prepare it at once, and we have some rare old china,” the gendarme said, but I declined the tea, and hurried from the room. As we emerged from the gloomy vestibule into the summer sunshine, the gendarme said to me, in a tone too low for even Mary to hear: “You have seen Nicol Patoff’s old home. Could you ever have lived here with him?”
He had no right to ask me such a question, and I felt my face grow red and my hair prickle at the roots, as I answered, promptly: “Never with him, nor anyone else!”