“But now,” he added as a shadow passed over his interesting face, “their prosperity is threatened once more.”
Then, as if he had been about to divulge a forbidden secret, he sprang to his feet. “I must be going. We leave at eight. That right?”
“It is quite right,” agreed Petite Jeanne.
Rosemary Sample went to her rest that night with a strange sense of futile longing gnawing at her heart. What was its cause? She could not tell. Had she become truly interested in that strange young man, Danby Force, who talked so beautifully of God’s unseen power, who spoke of doing good to thousands, and yet who might have—. She would not say it even to herself, yet she could not avoid thinking. Could she become seriously interested in such a young man? She could not be sure.
“That charming little French girl is carrying him away in the morning,” she assured herself. “I may never see him again.
“He is going back to the hunting lodge. I wonder—”
She tried to picture in her mind the bit of life’s drama that would be enacted by Danby Force and the little French girl after they had landed and gone down the narrow trail to the lodge. In the midst of this rather vain imagining she fell asleep.
She awoke next morning prepared for one more journey through the air, one more group of passengers. “Wonder if there will be any interesting ones?” she whispered. “Wonder if that dark-faced woman will return with me?” She shuddered. “She’s like a raven, Poe’s raven. Wonder if she’s filed a complaint about her missing bag. And if she has, what will come of it?”
After oatmeal, coffee and rolls eaten at a counter with the capable and ever friendly Mark Morris at her side, she felt well fortified for the day’s adventures, come what might.
We advertise our occupation in life by the posture we assume. The barber has his way of standing that marks him as a barber. The clerk of a department store puts on a mask in the morning and takes it off at night. The posture of an airplane stewardess is one suggesting the jaunty joy of life pictured by a blue bird on the tiptop of a tree, seventy feet in air.