“Yes, I did!” she persisted, “and it was in a boat with a swan to it just like this.”
Radnor started. What could the child mean? She was certainly not over six. It was not possible she could remember that Lake Lorimac incident of two years before.
“Where was it?” he asked. “Here in Central Park?”
“Oh no, it was in a picture, and Cousin Olive wouldn’t tell me where the boat was, but she was in it too, all dressed in white and—why, then you must know Cousin Olive. I wonder if you like her as well as I do. Only she was cross—almost, when Flo and I found that picture. It was all wrapped up and—oh dear, she told me never to tell anybody and it would be all right, and now I’ve told you. But you won’t tell, will you?”
Radnor, however, was not compelled to make a promise. The boat at this point reached the landing stage again, and the nurse carried all her charges ashore with small ceremony, the “polite gentleman” seeming scarcely to notice that they were gone.
He sat there perfectly still while the boat made another tour of the lake. He was recalling incidents which he had thought never to recollect again. One of them, that of the photograph Miss Carew took of the swan boat just before they started. So Olive Bellman had kept this secretly as a treasure, not as a forbidden object. Radnor had met Mr. Grant more than once and had been asked why he did not call. What if—well, what if there were two sides to the picture, and money were to stand in the way of the happiness of the one who possessed it because of pride in the other?
How should he, Radnor Hunt, deal with the problem?
This was the question that kept the young artist’s thoughts active as he strode homewards that afternoon. The air was coming on chill as the sun dipped towards the west, and the dead leaves blew up about him spitefully as he walked rapidly along, but somehow it seemed to Radnor, as one struck him in the face now and then, as if they were not the withered remnants of a dead summer, but the hopeful blossoms of a dawning spring.
UNBROKEN.
I.