While the ink was drying he tenderly kissed the child’s forehead and then rested his chin on her bright hair. He could hear the clack of balls and mallets and the creak of a lazy swing down below on the so-called lawn, and a hum of voices arose from the veranda. He looked through the open window and saw, as in a dream, blue peaks set against a shining rim of sky with a wisp of vultures slowly wheeling about in a filmy, sheeny space.
“Mama said I muthn’t stay,” apologized the child, slipping down from his knee, which she had found uncomfortably short.
He pulled himself together from a diffused state of revery and beamed upon her again with his cheerful smile.
She turned near the door and dropped another comical little courtesy, bobbing her curly head till her hair twinkled like a tangle of starbeams on a brook-ripple, then she darted away, book in hand.
Little Mrs. Philpot snatched the album from May, as she ran to her, and greedily rustled the leaves in search of the new record, finding which she gazed at it while her face irradiated every shade of expression between sudden delight and utter perplexity. In fact she could not decipher the autograph, although the handwriting surely was not bad. Loath as she naturally was to sharing her secret with her friends, curiosity at length prevailed and she sought help. Everybody in turn tried to make out the two short words, all in vain till Crane, by the poet’s subtle vision, cleared up the mystery, at least to his own satisfaction.
“Gaspard Dufour is the name,” he asserted, with considerable show of conscious superiority. “A Canadian, I think. In fact I imperfectly recall meeting him once at a dinner given by the Governor General to Lord Rosenthal at Quebec. He writes plays.”
“Another romance out of the whole cloth by the Bourbon æsthete!” whispered the critic. “There’s no such a Canadian as Gaspard Dufour, and besides the man’s a Westerner rather over-Bostonized. I can tell by his voice and his mixed manners.”
“But Mrs. Hope would know him,” suggested the person addressed. “She meets all the Hub literati, you know.”
“Literati!” snarled the critic, putting an end to further discussion.