"I'd like to know that chap," said Richard thoughtfully. Then for a moment or two there was a deep silence. It was broken by the sound of a noisy little automobile rattling down the road. As it came nearer Miss Crewes recognized it and started to her feet in surprise. "Well, this is the most remarkable coincidence that ever was!" she exclaimed. "There he is this blessed minute!"

If the man had driven on by we wouldn't have known his name, and probably might never have discovered it. But the surprise of seeing him made her forget that she was disclosing the ident.i.ty of the hero of her story. At sight of her he stopped his car, got out and came over to where we were sitting, to speak to her. After a cordial greeting she introduced him to us. _And he was Doctor John Wynne._

My heart beat so hard that I was sure everybody must hear it. To meet in this unexpected fashion by the roadside when I had been picturing all sorts of romantic ways! And yet it wasn't a bit strange that he should happen by, for we were only a couple of miles out of Yarmouth, and his calls were liable to bring him along that road almost any hour of the day or night.

He is an older looking man than I imagined him to be. He has that keen X-ray gaze that doctors have when they're asking you your symptoms, and I was afraid that he'd know just by looking at me how hard my heart was beating, and that I'd made up all those romantic day-dreams about him.

My guilty conscience made my face burn like fire. I looked away every time he glanced at me. I'd never really expected to have him appear so unexpectedly. Fortunately he stayed only a few minutes and then was off again in a cloud of dust.

Richard stood and looked after him till he was out of sight and then said slowly, "There's nothing picturesque about a rickety second-hand machine like that, and nothing heroic looking about an ordinary village doctor, but when it comes to a choice between them and one of your old guys in armor, it's me for the modern knight every time."

Not till then did it dawn on Miss Crewes that she had unwittingly betrayed a confidence. Then she felt perfectly awful about it, and said so much that we swore over and over we'd never repeat what she told us, under any circ.u.mstance.

But I'm glad she did let it slip. So glad I know that "little John Wynne" grew up to be that kind of a man. I wonder if the "loveliest girl in Christendom" is worthy of him. If she appreciates him as he deserves.

CHAPTER VIII

DISILLUSIONED

MANY times since making that promise to Miss Crewes I have wished I could take it back. I'd give a fortune to tell just one person in this world what Dr. Wynne did, but Barby says no. Miss Crewes has sailed and I can't reach her for weeks to get her permission, and under the circ.u.mstances I'd not be justified in breaking my promise. I must keep my word. But I almost know it would right a great wrong if I could tell, and it almost breaks my heart not to be able to do it. The way of it is this.

The French Relief entertainment took place last Sat.u.r.day night, after being postponed four times, and I did the Spanish dance in my lovely green and gold costume. Esther got back Sat.u.r.day morning, just in time for it. I was too busy to go over to see her, but she telephoned that she would be at the entertainment, and that I must look my prettiest.

Some of her Yarmouth friends were coming. The posters had attracted people from all over the Cape.

My heart sang for joy all the rest of the day. Everybody says that I am at my best in that Spanish dance and look my best in that costume, and naturally if one is to do any shining one wants one's best beloved there to see it.

Babe Nolan was behind the scenes with me before the performance began.

Jim and Viola were both on the program, and she was there to help them make up and prompt them if they forgot. It was the first chance I had to mention those letters of Esther to her, and I took advantage of it a few minutes before the curtain went up.

Of course I didn't tell her it was Richard whom I saw with the six letters written in the seven days of Esther's absence. I just mentioned the fact that I had seen them and added, "So, of course, she couldn't be engaged to that doctor she danced with in Barnstable."

Babe was standing with one eye glued to a peep-hole in the curtain, trying to see who was in the audience. She never turned her head but just kept on looking with one eye, and said in that flat, c.o.c.ksure way of hers, "Well, that doesn't prove anything."

It made me so mad I didn't know what to do. It wasn't what she said so much as the way she said it that was so odious. There have been a few times in my life when I've been sorry that I was born a Huntingdon with the family manners to live up to, and this was one of them. Before I could think of an answer she added in that calm, I'll-prove-it-to-you-voice:

"She's down there with him right now, in the third row, next to the middle aisle, on the left."

Then she stepped aside for me to put my eye to the peep-hole, and for one giddy instant I thought I was going to faint. The shock of the surprise was so great. There sat Esther looking like a dream and the man with her was Doctor John Wynne. So _she_ was the "loveliest girl in Christendom" whom he was working and waiting for, and whom he'd have to go on working and waiting for no telling how long, because he had acted the part of a true knight, helping an unfortunate stranger who had no claim on him whatsoever. When Babe talked about the doctor who was attentive to Esther, I took it for granted he was a Barnstable man. It never occurred to me that he had gone from Yarmouth to see her.

My head was in such a whirl that I was thankful the orchestra struck up just then, and we had to scurry to seats in the wing before the curtain went up. My dance didn't come till near the last, so I had plenty of time to think it all over. My first and greatest feeling after the tremendous surprise was one of gladness for both of them. It seemed too good to be true that my ideal girl and my ideal man should have found each other--should belong to each other. It is exactly what I could have wished for each of them. But a little doubt kept raising its head like a tiny snake in a rose-bower. If she were really engaged to him how could she be writing daily to Richard, those long fat letters, and carrying on with him in that fascinating, flirtatious, little way of hers that keeps him simply out of his head about her?

My mind went round and round in that same circle of questions like a squirrel in a cage, never getting anywhere, till all of a sudden my name was called. It was my time to go on the stage and I had forgotten my steps--forgotten everything. For a second I was as cold as ice. But at the first notes of the fandango my castanets seemed to click of their own accord, and I glided on to the stage feeling as light as a bubble and as live as a flash of fire. I was dancing for those two down there in the third row, next to the middle aisle. I would do my best, and not a doubt should cloud my belief in my beautiful Star.

After the performance they were among the first to come up and congratulate me. This time I could meet his gaze fearlessly, and I saw his eyes were just like the little boy's in the picture. They hadn't changed a bit, but looked out on the world as if they trusted everybody in it and everybody could trust him. When he put Esther's scarf around her shoulders he did it in such a masterful, taking-care-of-her sort of way, and she looked up at him so understandingly that I realized Babe Nolan was right about their caring for each other.

I could hardly go to sleep that night for thinking about them. I felt as if I had stepped into a real live story where I actually knew and loved both hero and heroine, and was personally interested in everything that happened to them. I didn't think of Richard's part in it.

And now--oh how can I tell what followed, or how it began? I scarcely know how the change came about, or how it started--that

"little rift within the lute, That by and by will make the music mute, And ever widening, slowly silence all."

Maybe Barby's suggestion that I was seeing Esther through a prism started me to looking at her more critically. And Babe Nolan's statements dropped with such calm precision every time we met, stuck in my memory like barbed arrows with poison on them. I had been mistaken in one thing, why not in others?

At first I made excuses for everything. When Esther counted the pile of photographs given her by the different boys who have rushed her this summer, and said she would have plenty of scalps to show when she went back home, I thought it was just as Judith had said. It wasn't because she was a born flirt that she made each boy think his picture was the only one she cared for. They all did that way back in her home town. She was brought up to think that was part of the game.

But if she were really engaged to Doctor Wynne, as Judith admitted when I asked her, then she had no business to treat Richard as she did. It wasn't fair to him to lead him on so far and to accept so much from him, and it wasn't fair to Dr. Wynne.

But Judith said, "For the land sakes, Esther wasn't ready to settle down to any one person yet. Besides, Richard was too young for her to take him seriously, and John Wynne was too deadly in earnest for a girl like Esther. He was too intense. He couldn't understand a little b.u.t.terfly like her whose only thought was to have a good time. She'd be utterly miserable tied for life to a man like him, who put duty ahead of her and her pleasure. It would probably end in her marrying one of the men back home that she'd been engaged to off and on ever since she was fifteen.

She said of course it would make things dreadfully uncomfortable when it came to breaking her engagement with John Wynne, because he was so horribly in earnest that he considered her actually his. It was a mistake to let the affair go so far. When I asked how about Richard, Judith just shrugged her shoulders and said it wasn't to be wondered at that Esther should have a little summer affair with him, such a good-looking boy and so entertaining, with that lovely car at his disposal.

Just then Esther came downstairs in a soft white dress, beaded in crystal, looking like such an angel with the lamplight falling on her amber hair and sweet upturned face, that all my old faith in her came back in a rush. "The loveliest girl in Christendom." No wonder he called her that.

It was then that I first thought, oh, if I could only tell her the story that Miss Crewes told us, of that knightly deed her John Wynne did without any hope of guerdon, she wouldn't want to break tryst with him.

But I couldn't tell then. I had given my promise.

The next week-end he came up to Provincetown again. He was to stay all night at the hotel and take Esther down to Chatham next day to a house-party. Some old school friends of hers were giving it. But he went back without her. When she found he had come for her in the same shabby little old automobile that he had last Spring when she was in Barnstable, she refused to go with him. Said she'd be ashamed to have the girls know he drove such an old rattletrap, and that he'd promised her last Spring--at least halfway promised her--that he'd get a new one in time for this house-party, so that he could join them sometimes and take them on picnics.

He explained to her that he had fully intended to do so, but that something came up lately which made it impossible. He wouldn't tell her what, although she coaxed and pouted. He just stuck to it doggedly that it was something he couldn't talk about. Somebody needed his help and he felt forced to give it. Then he grew stern and told her that she must believe him when he said the sacrifice was necessary, and forgive him if he couldn't humor her wishes.

It was Judith who told me about it. She said that Esther has always queened it over everybody, and is so used to being considered first in everything that she wouldn't stand for his putting some old charity patient ahead of her wishes and her comfort. She just gave him his ring back and he went home that night.

I wanted to cry out that I knew the reason. That I could tell her something that should make her proud to be seen in that shabby old machine, because of the gallant sacrifice it stood for. But my lips were sealed by my promise.

Only once before in my whole life have I ever had such a gone-to-pieces feeling. That was when our old gardener, Jeremy Clapp sneezed his teeth into the fire. I was so little then I didn't know that teeth could be false, and when I saw all of his fly out of his mouth I thought he was coming apart right before my eyes. The shock was so awful I screamed myself almost into spasms. My faith in everything seemed crumbling. I felt the same way this time.

I had been so sure of Esther, so absolutely sure of her high standards of honor, that the slightest flaw in her was harder to forgive than a crime in a less shining soul. And now to think that she had cruelly hurt and disappointed the man who, to me, was the knightliest of all men, was more than I could bear. I felt I could never take another person on trust as long as I lived. I wished I could have died before I found out that she wasn't all I believed her to be.

Barby had guests when I reached home. I could hear their voices as I paused an instant on the front door-step. I knew that if I tried to slip up the stairs she'd see me and call me to come in, so I tip-toed across the hall into the big downstairs guest chamber, and threw myself on the couch by the open window. I was too miserable to face anybody. Too miserable even for tears.

But the tears came presently when I looked up and caught sight of the picture that I had rescued at the auction, "little John Wynne," leaning against his mother's shoulder, looking out on the world so trustingly from that safe refuge. As I looked at the curl her fingers had brushed so carefully into shape, and the curve of the baby lips that had never known anything but truth, I just couldn't bear to think of him growing up to be deceived and disappointed. I had to admit that Esther wasn't worthy of him, but I recalled the way he looked at her as he put her scarf around her that night, and I felt that if he still wanted her as much as he did then, I wanted him to have her. It didn't seem fair for her not to be told about his Sir Gareth sacrifice. I believe I cried more for his disappointment than for my own, as I pictured his blighted future, although mine seemed empty enough, goodness knows. I wished I was old enough to be a trained nurse and go to Flanders right away.

It was almost dark when the guests left. I had cried myself into a blinding headache. I hadn't intended to tell Barby, but she happened to glance in as she pa.s.sed the door, and, seeing me face downward on the couch, came in with an exclamation of surprise, and before I knew it the whole miserable story was out. Then I was glad I told, for she was so sweet and comforting as she sat and stroked my forehead with her cool fingers. Some of the ache went away as she talked. It helped a lot to know that she had gone through the same kind of an experience. Everyone does, she said, "in their salad days." One can't expect to be an expert at reading character then.

But she insisted that I mustn't tell Esther about the typhoid fever patient. She said it wouldn't help matters. That John Wynne had been looking through a prism too. He saw her pretty, fascinating, gracious ways and imagined her perfect as I had done. He hadn't seen what a shallow little creature she really is, vain and selfish. It was better for his disillusionment to come now than later.

"But how is one ever to be sure?" I wailed. "There was Richard and Doctor Wynne and me, all three of us mistaken. She was like a star to each of us. I called her 'Star.' It seemed the most beautiful name in the world and I thought it fitted her perfectly."

"Don't be too hard on her," Barby said. "It was your mistake in taking her measure, and giving her a misfit name. Remember how many mistakes the prince made before he found a perfect fit for Cinderella's slipper.

But cheer up! You'll find some one worthy of the name some day."

I didn't want to cheer up, so I just closed my eyes, and Barby, seeing that I didn't wish to talk, went on rubbing the headache away in silence. When I opened them again it was twilight, so I must have dozed off for a while. Barby was sitting across the room in the window-seat, her elbow on the sill. Her dress glimmered white. Beyond her, through the open cas.e.m.e.nt, glowed the steady harbor lights and the winking red eye of the Wood End lighthouse. I went over to her and leaned out into the sweet-smelling summer dusk. It made me feel better just to sniff that delightful mingling of sea salt and garden fragrances.

"Look up," said Barby. "Did you ever see the stars so bright? I've been sitting here taking a world of comfort out of them. It's good to feel that no matter what else goes wrong they keep right on, absolutely true to their orbits and their service of shining; so unfailingly true that the mariner can always steer his course by them. And Georgina--you don't believe it possible now, but I want you to take my word for it--_there are people in the world like that--there are friendships like that--there is love like that--just as dependable as the stars_!"