“Quite, quite,” replied the Japanese girl, backing off from Nance and slipping the photograph into a book.
Not for many a day did Nance find out that it was a portrait of that youth himself, taken at the age of eight in Scotch kilties and a little black velvet hat with two streamers down the back.
Suddenly Otoyo became very voluble. She changed the subject and talked in rapid, smooth English. Could she not see the new rooms of her friends? She understood everybody was coming down on the four-ten train. It would be very crowded. She had found a new laundress whom she could highly recommend.
Nance looked at her curiously as they strolled back to the other rooms. Something was changed about the little Japanese girl. She seemed older and much less timid.
It was Miss Sen who found the man to move the trunks, and who helped Nance unpack her things and lay them in half the chest of drawers; and it was Otoyo, also, who, with the skill of an artisan, removed all the nails from the express box tops so that they might be unpacked immediately by their owners. At lunch time she led Nance into the great dining hall of the Quadrangle where more than a hundred girls ate their meals three times a day. There was no attention she did not show to Nance, and all because her conscience was heavy within her on account of the one dishonorable act of her life. How could she know that among the scores of photographs taken of young Andy from his babyhood to his present age, Mrs. McLean would never miss one small, faded picture out of the pile thrust into a cabinet drawer?
At last it came time to meet the four-ten, and Nance, looking spic and span in fresh white duck and white shoes and stockings, was rather surprised to find Otoyo also attired in a pretty white dress, her face shaded with a Leghorn hat trimmed with pink roses.
“Why, Miss Sen,” she exclaimed, “how did you learn so soon to dress yourself in this charming American style?”
“At a garden party at Mrs. McLean’s I learned a very many things,” said Otoyo, “and by the purchasing agent I have obtained dresses of summer, of duckling, lining and musling; also this hat and two others very pretty.”
Nance laughed.
“You mean duck, linen and muslin, child,” she said.