“Some of them, I think,” she said smiling. “And now to think we’ve met here on Long Island. It’s a far cry to Paris.”
“For me it’s people who make places—the places themselves don’t matter—you and I are here,” he said gently.
The girl sighed a little. “Still, Paris is Paris,” she insisted.
“Rather!” he answered, sighing too. “Do you remember that afternoon in front of the Café de la Paix? We had vin gris and watched the Frenchman with the funny dog, and the boys calling La Presse, and the woman who made you buy some ‘North Wind’ for me, and the people crowding around the newspaper kiosks.”
In the adjoining room Nora was strumming the piano, and was now playing “Un Peu d’Amour.” She had looked in the hall and finding the stranger so wholly absorbed in Ethel Cartwright, had retired to solitude.
“And do you remember the hole in the table-cloth?” Ethel demanded.
“And wasn’t it a dirty table-cloth?” he reminded her. “And afterwards we had tea in the Bois at the Cascade and the Hungarian Band played ‘Un Peu d’Amour.’” He looked at the girl smiling. “How did you arrange to have that played just at the right moment?”
They listened in silence for a moment to the dainty melody, and then she hummed a few bars of it. Her thoughts were evidently far away from Long Island.
“And don’t you remember that poor skinny horse in our fiacre?” she asked him. “He was so tired he fell down, and we walked home in pity.”
“Ah, you were tender-hearted,” he sighed.