Penelope divined my thoughts. "And it is equally hard for me to believe that this tall man is the boy I pulled out of the water." Half turning, she addressed her companion. "This is David Malcolm, Mrs. Bannister—an old, old friend of mine."
Mrs. Bannister probably had her own ideas of Penelope's old, old friends, but she was fair enough to examine me from head to foot before she condemned me with the mass of them, and then finding that, to the eyes at least, I presented no glaring crudities, she accepted me on sufferance, inclining her head and parting her lips.
"But tell me, David," said Penelope eagerly, "where have you been all these years and how do you happen to be here?"
Had I told Penelope the truth I should have replied that I happened to be there because for four long months I had been looking for her, whenever I could, walking the streets with eyes alert, even on midsummer days when I had as well searched the Sahara as the deserted town. Perhaps in thus surrendering to the hope that, after all, I should find her, I had laid myself open to a self-accusation of disloyalty to Gladys Todd; but she was far away in those months, and the daily letter had become a weekly and then a semimonthly budget, and though their tone was none the less ardent I had begun to suspect that Europe was a more attractive abiding-place than the little flat with the easel by the window. In one letter she spoke of her longing to be home; she knew that there would be music in every beat of the ship's propeller which carried her nearer me. In her next she announced her parents' decision to prolong their stay abroad on Judge Bundy's account and her regret that she could not leave them. There was something contradictory in these statements, and yet I accepted them complacently. Then postcards supplanted the semimonthly budget, and only by them was I able to follow the movements of the travellers all that autumn. One letter did come in October. It covered many sheets, but said little more than that it had been simply impossible to write oftener, but she would soon be following her heart homeward. Enclosed was a photograph of the party posed on camels with the pyramids in the background, and I noticed with a twinge of jealousy that Judge Bundy's camel had posted himself beside the beast on which Gladys was enthroned, while Doctor and Mrs. Todd had less conspicuous positions to the left and rear. Studying the judge, I laughed at my twinge of jealousy, for knowing him I could not doubt that Doctor and Mrs. Todd kept always to the left and rear, which was but right considering the generosity with which he treated them; but he looked so little the dashing Bedouin in his great derby and his frock-coat, so hot and uncomfortable that even the burning sands, the pyramids, and the curious beast which he straddled could not make of him a romantic figure.
Young Tom Marshall, who honored Miss Minion's with his presence, studying the photograph on my bureau one evening, asked me who was "the beauty with the pugree." And when I replied with pride that she was my fiancée he slapped my back in congratulation.
"And Julius Caesar," he went on—"Caesar visiting his African dominions is, I suppose, her father, and the little fellow in the top-hat his favorite American slave, and——"
With great dignity I explained to young Marshall the relations of the members of this Oriental group. At his suggestion that I had best take the first steamer for Egypt I laughed. The implication was so absurd that I even told Gladys Todd about it in my next letter to her, for I still sat down every Saturday night and wrote to her voluminously of all that I had been doing. Yet I was growing conscious of a sense of her unreality. I seemed to be corresponding with the inhabitant of another planet, and when I looked at the girl on the camel, with the strange pugree flowing from her hat, and the pyramids in the background, it seemed that she could not be the same simple girl who had painted tulips on black plaques.
Penelope Blight was a much more concrete figure. At any moment as I walked the Avenue she might come around the corner, or step from a brougham, or be looking at me from the windows of a brown-stone mansion. Was it a wonder that my eyes were always alert? One morning three lines in a newspaper convinced me at last that the girl with the blue feathers was Penelope Blight. They announced that Rufus Blight, the Pittsburgh steel magnate, had bought a house on Fifth Avenue and would thereafter make New York his home. That night the city seemed more my own home than ever before and the future to hold for me more than the past had promised. The drawn curtains of this house might be hiding Penelope from me; she might be in the dark corner of that smart carriage flying northward; even the slender figure coming toward me through the yellow gloom, with her muff pressed against her face to guard it from the November wind, might be she. And when on the next afternoon—by chance, it seemed, as by chance it seems all our lives are ordered—when at last by the same modiste's shop the same smart brougham drew up at the curb, the same haughty footman opened the door, and I saw the very same blue wings, I knew that I had found Penelope at last and I spoke without fear.
She asked me what I had been doing all these years. I laughed joyfully, but I did not tell her. For all these years I had been working for this moment!
"What have I been doing?" I said. "Why, Penelope, it would take me forever to tell you."