“And no bird sings in Arcady;
The little fauns have left the hill;
Even the tired daffodil
Has closed its gilded doors, and still—”
“Don't!” said the Little Red Doctor hoarsely. “I used to know that song.” He lifted haggard eyes to me. “You've seen her?”
“Yes.”
“How did she look?”
I meditated. “Like a child that doesn't understand why it isn't happy,” I said at length.
I saw the Little Red Doctor's sensitive mouth quiver; but the jaw set hard and firm and ended that struggle.
“I won't ask you where,” he said.
“It would be no use. I couldn't tell you.”
“No.” He accepted that. “Then why, in the name of Heaven,” he cried, looking at the rose, “should she—Oh, well, never mind that.” He sat thoughtfully for a time. “Dominie,” he said, “I'm going to tell you. It will do me good, I think. And then I'll forget it again.”
It was not altogether a pretty story. Four years before, it began, when the brown-and-gold fairy must have been little more than a child. At a fashionable cottage place which is merely a glowing, newspaper-glorified name to Our Square, the Little Red Doctor, who had come down for a tennis tournament, had jumped off a pier after a small boy who had fallen in. He referred to it and to the brown-and-gold fairy's romantic view of it with tolerant contempt. “The hee-ro business,” he said with the medical man's disdain of the more obvious forms of physical peril. “I run more real risks every day of my life.” However, a well-meaning but blundersome launch had broken his foot with its wheel, and the girl, who had seen the whole adventure, carried him off in her motor-car. Followed the usual discovery of friends in common, and by the time the crutches were discarded, the victim was hopelessly enslaved. Whether they were ever actually engaged or not did not clearly appear. The Little Red Doctor was carefully and gallantly defensive of her course. Nevertheless, knowing the Little Red Doctor as I do, I was resentfully sure that she had treated him shamefully. Finally there was an issue of principle between them. He alluded to it vaguely. “She didn't really care, of course,” he said. “Why should she? So I went away and knocked about the world for a bit. Then I came here because in Our Square there wouldn't be much chance of meeting her, you see. There's just one thing to do. Forget her. So I've forgotten her.” And the Little Red Doctor, taking the rose from the table where I had tossed it, held it cherishingly in his hands as if it were a human, beating heart.