Chapter IV

A week after this was the first of April, and when Harrison, as was his wont, reached the reading-room a little before the opening hour, he found a notice on the door to the effect that the fall of some plastering from a ceiling necessitated the closing of the reading-room for that day. A week of daily lunches and talks with Miss Midland had given him the habit of communicating his ideas to her, and he waited inside the vestibule for her to appear. He happened thus, as he had not before, to see her arrival. Accompanied by an elderly person in black, who looked, even to Harrison's inexperienced eyes, like a maid-servant, she came rapidly in through the archway which led from the street to the court. Here, halting a moment, she dismissed her attendant with a gesture, and, quite unconscious of the young man's gaze upon her, crossed the court diagonally with a free, graceful step. Observing her thus at his leisure, Harrison was moved to the first and almost the last personal comment upon his new friend. He did not as a rule notice very keenly the outward aspect of his associates. "Well, by gracious," he said to himself, "if she's not quite a good-looker!--or would be if she had money or gumption enough to put on a little more style!"

He took a sudden resolution and, meeting her at the foot of the steps, laid his plan enthusiastically before her. It took her breath away. "Oh, no, I _couldn't_," she exclaimed, looking about her helplessly as if foreseeing already that she would yield. "What would people----?"

"Nobody would say a thing, because nobody would know about it. We could go and get back here by the usual closing time, so that whoever comes for you would never suspect--she's not very sharp, is she?"

"No, no. She's only what you would call my hired girl."

"Well, then, it's Versailles[125-1] for us. Here, give me your portfolio to carry. Let's go by the tram line[125-2]--it's cheaper for two poor folks."

On the way out he proposed, with the same thrifty motive, that they buy provisions in the town, before they began their sight-seeing in the chateau, and eat a picnic lunch somewhere in the park.

"Oh, anything you please now!" she answered with reckless light-heartedness. "I'm quite lost already."

"There's nothing disreputable about eating sandwiches on the grass," he assured her; and indeed, when they spread their simple provision out under the great pines back of the Trianon, she seemed to agree with him, eating with a hearty appetite, laughing at all his jokes, and, with a fresh color and sparkling eyes, telling him that she had never enjoyed a meal more.

"Good for you! That's because you work too hard at your old history of music."--By this time each knew all the details of the other's research--"You ought to have somebody right at hand to make you take vacations and have a good time once in a while. You're too conscientious."

Then, because he was quite frank and unconscious himself, he went on with a simplicity which the most accomplished actor could not have counterfeited, "That's what I'm always telling Maggie--Miss Warner. She's the girl I'm engaged to."

He did not at the time remark, but afterward, in another land, he was to recall with startling vividness the quick flash of her clear eyes upon him and the fluttering droop of her eyelids. She finished her éclair quietly, remarking, "So you are engaged?"

"Very much so," answered Harrison, leaning his back against the pine-tree and closing his eyes, more completely to savor the faint fragrance of new life which rose about them in the warm spring air, like unseen incense.

Miss Midland stood up, shaking the crumbs from her skirt, and began fitting her gloves delicately upon her slim and very white hands. After a pause, "But how would she like _this_?" she asked.

Without opening his eyes, Harrison murmured, "She'd like it fine. She's a great girl for outdoors."

His companion glanced down at him sharply, but in his tranquil and half-somnolent face there was no trace of evasiveness. "I don't mean the park, the spring weather," she went on, with a persistence which evidently cost her an effort. "I mean your being here with another girl. That would make an English woman jealous."

Harrison opened his dark eyes wide and looked at her in surprise. "You don't understand--we're not flirting with each other, Maggie and I--we're engaged." He added with an air of proffering a self-evident explanation, "As good as married, you know."

Miss Midland seemed to find in the statement a great deal of material for meditation, for after an "Ah!" which might mean anything, she sat down on the other side of the tree, leaning her blonde head against its trunk and staring up into the thick green branches. Somewhere near them in an early-flowering yellow shrub a bee droned softly. After a time she remarked as if to herself, "They must take marriage very seriously in Iowa."

The young man aroused himself, to answer sleepily: "It's Illinois where I live now--Iowa was where I grew up--but it's all the same. Yes, we do."

After that there was another long, fragrant silence which lasted until Harrison roused himself with a sigh, exclaiming that although he would like nothing better than to sit right there till he took root, they had yet to "do" the two Trianons and to see the state carriages. During this sightseeing tour he repeated his performance of the morning in the chateau, pouring out a flood of familiar, quaintly expressed historical lore of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which made his astonished listener declare he must have lived at that time.

"Nope!" he answered her. "Got it all out of Illinois libraries. Books are great things if you're only willing to treat them right. And history--by gracious! history is a study fit for the gods! All about folks, and they are all that are worth while in the world!"

They were standing before the Grand Trianon as he said this, waiting for the tram car, and as it came into sight he cried out artlessly, his dark, aquiline face glowing with fervor, "I--I just _love_ folks!"

She looked at him curiously. "In all my life I never knew any one before to say or think that." Some of his enthusiasm was reflected upon her own fine, thoughtful face as a sort of wistfulness when she added, "It must make you very happy. I wish I could feel so."

"You don't look at them right," he protested.

She shook her head. "No, we haven't known the same kind. I had never even heard of the sort of people you seem to have known."

The tram car came noisily up to them, and no more was said.