“Isn’t this perfectly killing?” she asked in a tone wholly different from that in which she had carried on her share of the colloquy.
He experienced an agreeable thrill as it flashed upon him that this was no child, but a young woman who, knowing the large world, had suddenly awakened to a consciousness that encounters with strange young men by starlight were not to be prolonged forever. In the luminous dusk he noted anew the delicate perfectness of her face, the fine brow about which her hair had tumbled from her late exertions. Her eyes searched his face with honest curiosity—for an instant only.
Then she stepped back, as though to mark a return to her original character, and answered her own question with an air of amused conviction:
“It is perfectly killing!”
His hand fumbled the cap in his pocket.
“Here’s something I found down yonder—your clown’s cap.”
She took it with a murmur of thanks, and darted away toward the bungalow. He heard her light step on the veranda and then a door closed with a sharp bang.
Deering walked back to the inn with his head high and elation throbbing in his pulses. He observed groups of people playing bridge in the inn parlor, and he was filled with righteous contempt for them. The May air had changed his whole nature. He was not the William B. Deering who had meditated killing himself a few hours earlier. A new joy had entered into him; he was only afraid now that he might not live forever!
Hood slept tranquilly, his bed littered with the afternoon’s New York papers which evidently he had been scissoring when he fell asleep. Deering’s attitude toward the strange vagrant had changed since his meeting with Pierrette. Hood might be as mad as the traditional hatter, and yet there was something—indubitably something—about the man that set him apart from the common run of mortals.
Deering lay awake a long time rejoicing in his new life, and when he dreamed it was of balloon-like moons cruising lazily over woods and fields, pursued by innumerable Pierrettes in spotted trousers and pointed caps.