“I’m awfully sorry,” said Mr. Donovan, gently. “No, we won’t walk back to the house just yet. And don’t say you haven’t no friends in this city, Miss Conway. I’m awful sorry, and I want you to believe I’m your friend, and that I’m awful sorry.”
“I’ve got his picture here in my locket,” said Miss Conway, after wiping her eyes with her handkerchief. “I never showed it to anybody; but I will to you, Mr. Donovan, because I believe you to be a true friend.”
Mr. Donovan gazed long and with much interest at the photograph in the locket that Miss Conway opened for him. The face of Count Mazzini was one to command interest. It was a smooth, intelligent, bright, almost a handsome face—the face of a strong, cheerful man who might well be a leader among his fellows.
“I have a larger one, framed, in my room,” said Miss Conway. “When we return I will show you that. They are all I have to remind me of Fernando. But he ever will be present in my heart, that’s a sure thing.”
A subtle task confronted Mr. Donovan,—that of supplanting the unfortunate Count in the heart of Miss Conway. This his admiration for her determined him to do. But the magnitude of the undertaking did not seem to weigh upon his spirits. The sympathetic but cheerful friend was the rôle he essayed; and he played it so successfully that the next half-hour found them conversing pensively across two plates of ice-cream, though yet there was no diminution of the sadness in Miss Conway’s large gray eyes.
Before they parted in the hall that evening she ran upstairs and brought down the framed photograph wrapped lovingly in a white silk scarf. Mr. Donovan surveyed it with inscrutable eyes.
“He gave me this the night he left for Italy,” said Miss Conway. “I had the one for the locket made from this.”
“A fine-looking man,” said Mr. Donovan, heartily. “How would it suit you, Miss Conway, to give me the pleasure of your company to Coney next Sunday afternoon?”
A month later they announced their engagement to Mrs. Scott and the other boarders. Miss Conway continued to wear black.
A week after the announcement the two sat on the same bench in the downtown park, while the fluttering leaves of the trees made a dim kinetoscopic picture of them in the moonlight. But Donovan had worn a look of abstracted gloom all day. He was so silent to-night that love’s lips could not keep back any longer the questions that love’s heart propounded.