As I sat considering this and pulling at the fringe of my reticule, the last words that she had spoken began to assert themselves with a vague, new significance.
“He d-d-didn’t say a word, but he jus’ went on makin’ a egg-phosphate, in a heartbroke way, for a ole gentleman,” she had said. My attention had been so fixed on the image of Evan behind the counter that a supreme coincidence had escaped me.
I touched Cornelia Emmeline’s arm—I have dignity, I repeat, but not in the face of such a sorrow as this.
“What drug store?” I inquired.
There was only one in the world for her, so she knew what I meant.
“How long ago were you there to tell him?” I asked next, breathlessly.
Cornelia Emmeline thought that it might have been a matter of twenty minutes.
“The very same!” I cried, and fell to smiling at Little Nursemaid in a fashion that would have bewildered her had she not been so occupied in wiping her eyes.
For who in the world should be the old gentleman of the egg-phosphate but Pelleas?
Had I not, morning after morning, waited in that very drug store, amusing myself before a glass case of chest-protectors while Pelleas drank his egg-phosphate which he loathed? And so that handsome, curly-headed, long-lashed youngster who fizzed and bubbled among his delicacies with such dexterity was none other than Evan! Why, indeed, he was a friend of Pelleas’. Pelleas had given him a red muffler of his own only last Christmas.