Three weeks passed. Trying weeks they were to the little French girl; weeks in which her faith and courage were severely tested.
As proof of her faith in the beautiful thing Angelo and Swen had created, she kept up her dancing. Sometimes in Angelo’s studio, sometimes in her own small room, sometimes humming snatches of the score, sometimes with Swen beating the battered piano, she danced tirelessly on. There were times, too, when those hardy souls who went to walk in the park on these bleak days saw a golden haired sprite dancing in the sun. This, too, was Jeanne.
But when winter came sweeping down, when on one memorable November day she awoke and found the window ledge piled high with snow and heard the shriek of a wind that, whirling and eddying outside, seemed never to pause, she despaired a little.
“This American winter,” she murmured. “It is terrible.”
And how could it seem otherwise to her? In her beloved France it snowed a little. But the snow was soon gone. No drifts three feet high, no blocked traffic, no terrible thermometer dropping to twenty below. Besides, when winter came in France, the gypsies, “folding their tents like the Arabs,” drifted away toward the south where it was always summer.
By drawing the covers up over her head she was able to shut out from her eyes the sight of the drifting snow and from her ears the sound of the shrieking wind. But she could not hide from her alert mind the fact that her money was gone, that the rent was overdue, nor that Florence’s pitiful salary, if such it might be called, sufficed only to supply them with the plainest of food.
In these last days she had gone less seldom to Angelo’s studio. Matters were no better there. And, though for her sake Angelo and his companions kept up a continuous chatter about future successes and good times just around the corner, she knew in her heart that they, too, were discouraged.
“There are the traveling bags,” she told herself now, as she threw back the covers and sat up. “Those three pigskin traveling bags down there in Angelo’s studio. I have fifteen dollars invested in them. Kay King has always said: ‘You may have the money back any time.’
“Perhaps,” she thought soberly, “it is wrong of me to keep them. But to sell them seems like betraying a friend. To cast all those beautiful treasures, bestowed upon my good friend by those who loved him best, before the eyes of curious, grasping and often stupid people, and to say ‘Come, buy these,’ certainly does seem like the betrayal of a friend.
“And he was so kind to me!” She closed her eyes and saw it all again. “I was so young. The ship, the sea, all the people were so strange. And America. It, at first, was even worse. But he, big-hearted man that he was, treated me as his own daughter. He made everything seem so simple, so joyous, so much like a lark. How can I? Oh, how can I?” She wrung her slender hands in agony. “How can I permit them to be sold?