When our dreams had all come true!”
The lines brought the tropic skies close. Nat’s heart sang in rhythm with the swash of the water and beat of the screw. Who was the one with whom he had built castles—Bernie? Carol? Mildred? Who?
“Your face glows plain in an evening star,
Ere the moon rides high and cold,
And memories tune with the summer night
On a chord that’s rare and old——”
A face in a star! Whose face? He thought for a time he could almost discern. Fancy led him to invent a face which should approximate his ideal. What was his ideal woman’s face? If he were a great painter and would put on canvas the features of his Dream Girl, what manner and type of face would he paint?
The boat swayed on in the starlit dark. Above it, lights of God looked down their mighty passwords over the waters. Stygian smoke furled from great funnels and dropped a billowy screen across their phosphorescent wake. A happy laugh floated out a sharply defined door from the ladies lounging room up forward.
A face in a star! Whose face?
Nathan thought of a woman he had seen in Springfield one night—the night of the Harvard-Pennsylvania boat race—before he had gone to his hotel to get that awful wire about little Mary’s going away—a girl sitting across a snowy-white table from a man in dinner clothes,—a girl raised just above him—with features he had never quite forgotten, they were so fine and tender and cameo-rare.