I THE PRINCE (continued 2)

As for Stella—she refused to give in to those darker promptings which suggested that Mr. King might, alas, have been merely amusing himself, and had no intention really of calling. No, it was too wonderful to turn out thus. Even Irmengarde would be thrilled—she couldn’t help herself.

The evening after the party Jerome came, and wanted to make it up. “I don’t see what I’ve done all of a sudden,” he said, “to make you turn against me like this!” And a moment later he was assuring her, with most unusual vigour, that he didn’t intend to let a girl throw him down just because she “gets an idea in her head.” Indeed, as he urged his cause, Jerome looked quite roused and fiery. He rather amazed her, and finally, by way of overwhelming climax, produced a ring. “I got to thinking,” he covered it very simply. “Not such a big stone, of course—the big ones cost like a house and lot. But the clerk at Ascher’s said we could trade it in toward a larger one any time, and he told me it was a good little diamond, even if it’s not so very showy.”

“Oh, Jerome—!” She clasped her hands in bewilderment.

“Let’s see how it fits!” he pleaded.

So she let him slip it on to her finger—how life galloped! And after that—well, since she knew less now than ever which way to turn, Stella ended by consenting to keep the ring, at least until she’d definitely made up her mind. Tenderness and remorse and tears nearly overcame her. “You must let me think.... I—I’ll send you a note!” Her eyes were soft with romance. And they kissed—for one may kiss, even if one doesn’t know which way to turn.

From the time he left her until the next morning when the florist’s boy arrived, Stella’s mind was indeed in a state of quandary, and Jerome had at least a fair fighting chance. However, the florist’s boy brought a small but authentic box of violets, and a note from Mr. King written on the stationery of Captain Utterbourne’s club; he was going to call that evening! And then—had Jerome but known it as he sat poring over the ledger, he might just as well have withdrawn from the arena altogether.

The only drawback, except that Mr. King must necessarily learn what a shabby house she lived in, was the fact that Stella would have to receive him in the same gown she had worn to the ball, and which fortunately hadn’t yet been returned. Nothing in her wardrobe would suffice. However, capable Maud found that the neck of Elsa’s gown could be temporarily built up with a bit of chiffon so that it would appear a less formal creation; and in fact, her mouth mumblingly impeded with pins, Maud very soon proved how surprisingly it might be disguised as another gown altogether.

Just at the last minute Stella ran to her sister and pressed a tiny package into her hand. “Won’t you please ask Ted to run around to the Stewarts’ and give this to Jerome? There won’t be any answer—he’ll understand.” Then she turned up the gas in the parlour and sat in glittering state to receive her caller.

After a quarter of an hour of more or less breathless readjustment, the situation began to show signs of growing manageable. His ample charm and magnetism carried everything before them. Their talk led them by degrees into a simpler intimacy than it had been possible to establish at the ball. He told her, discreetly, more of his romantic life; and she managed to tell him of her life, too, without quite letting the cat out of the bag—that is, without quite letting him see that what she showed him was the wistful all.... He left with reluctance, but they were to meet again the next afternoon, at the matinée.

The house was still and dark; yet she was partly mistaken in deciding all the family were asleep at the time of Mr. King’s departure. Hardly had she turned out her light on an image in the glass which had become strangely tolerable, when she heard slippered feet, and Maud was kneeling beside the bed, searching her hand.

“Oh, Stella!” she whispered in tones of throbbing and unselfish delight, “I think Mr. King’s just grand, dear!”

II

It all seemed so bewildering—so utterly incredible. They went to the matinée. They strolled in Golden Gate Park and watched the swans and laughed a great deal over hot tamales on the beach. He became a frequent caller—and sometimes it seemed to the delighted girl that the florist’s box was even more frequent. He seemed to know so expertly how everything should be done: such intoxicating manners, such style! He seemed to have dropped right from the skies into her dazzled heart. From this time forward her little romance moved swiftly indeed.

Before she had half time to realize—yes, even begin to realize—what was really taking place, he had asked her to become his wife. “You’re the first girl I’ve cared enough for,” was the way he phrased it; though it goes without saying that a man of Mr. King’s temperament must more or less have cared for a good many girls in his day. “I guess I can manage to make you happy, little girl,” he assured her, with a certain splendid imperiousness, “though perhaps you might come to long for a more settled life....” He had just arrived from a secret conference with Captain Utterbourne under the shadow of an august map of the world. But of course Stella was up in arms at once: “I never want to stop! I want to go on and on, out in the world, seeing new things, meeting new people...!” And, in his graceful way, he allowed her to carry the point.

Oh, life! Oh the forces of life—and the world—and human destiny!

“I just have to blush right to his face every time he looks at me, he is so handsome!” was one of Aunt Alice’s voluble confidences shared by Maud out in the kitchen. “I’ve got a psychic feeling he’s just the one for our little Stella, and yet don’t it beat all! My gracious, Maud, you’d think he’d never look at any one less than a countess! And his side view makes me think of a picture I saw once in the paper of a man who was going to marry a duchess!”

Oh, life! Oh the forces of life—and the world—and human destiny!

The afternoon was idyllic. Mr. King and Stella were sitting together before a tiny fire, and there was tea. It was very cosy and romantic. She had been doing some mending before he came, and had hurriedly laid her basket aside. Breaking off in the midst of a very glowing description of the Riviera when at its gayest, however, he suddenly begged her to go on with her sewing. She demurred, naturally: “It’s such awfully plain and uninteresting work!” But he insisted that it completed the “domestic picture,” and added: “You don’t know how charming it is to see a woman sitting before the fire busy with needlework.” At length she complied; but it vaguely alarmed the girl. “All I want to do is to get away!” she cried throwing her arms wide, though she still grasped the garment she was mending, bringing it thus a little whimsically into the gesture. “What you’ve told me of your life sounds so wonderful!” she sighed happily.

“Well, it’s adventurous,” he conceded. And then he asked her: “What does your father think about it?”

“Why, what could he think but what every one thinks?”

King might have asked, not perhaps egregiously or unreasonably, what every one did think; but he merely amplified: “I had in mind my immediate prospects.”

“With Captain Utterbourne?”

“Yes—and its having to be handled in so hushed and confidential a way.”

“Oh, but to me the mystery—that is the most wonderful part!” she cried. “I love having everything mysterious!”

He gave her hand a little squeeze, and she looked up at him, happily thrilled. She pictured herself going through life with him like this, thrilled, always thrilled, each day full of delicious mystery and romance.

He began murmuring a bit of nursery jingle, which sounded in her charmed ears like the rarest music:

“Oh, I wonder,” she laughed softly, “—will it really be like that? How did this wonderful thing ever happen to me?”

III

As he rather suspected, Mr. King was destined to encounter a brief impediment in the person of Stella’s father. Who was Mr. King? What did any one really know about him, and why so much mystery about the future? But the answer was always simply: “Why, Utterbourne—your old friend Captain Utterbourne.” Mr. Meade’s position was certainly not a simple one, especially since he seemed to be the only one attempting, even hesitatingly, to stand in the way of true love. And, though he tried to see the situation all clearly and advise what seemed best, the worst of it was he felt Mr. King’s peculiar fascination, too, in a sense, and so seemed unable to make up his mind as to the values of an unusual situation.

“Stella,” he said, in his grave way, “are you sure—that’s the point—dead sure, girlie?”

And Stella was thinking excitedly: “If father really makes a fuss, we’ll elope!” It was just the tang of fire which completed the romance of this whole unbelievable circumstance.

Captain Utterbourne, as a matter of fact, was inclined, in his faintly quizzical and even petulant way, to dissuasion, when he learned the length to which affairs had run. He tried delicately to ease his mind. Meade was so simple.

“King’s all right, of course—h’m? Though perhaps romantic....” It was as near as he could come to uttering platitudes like Iago. “The trouble with King is, he’s too irresistible. How he’s managed to escape all these years is beyond my comprehension! I must say,” the Captain complained, “it’s something of a calamity he should have chosen this particular time—h’m? But the man, it seems, refuses to listen to reason, just as the woman refuses. However,” he added, in a thin, hand-washing tone, “from your point of view I can see how it may appear something of a catch—h’m?” And he left, humming To a Wild Rose.

But at length the creases were quite ironed out. Mr. Meade called King into the back parlour and told him it was all right—though his voice broke just a little as he added: “I only want my girl to be happy.”

They were definitely to be married, and Stella naturally didn’t have time for anything any more. Even sleep was an indulgence almost crowded out. How life tore along!

One day she unexpectedly met Jerome downtown. The contrast between them was really startling. It seemed unbelievable a man so hopelessly obscure and a girl so conspicuously important could have been engaged to each other only a few short weeks ago. What a pace she had gone! But Jerome, with the clip on his tie and his jaunty little pipe between his lips, looked more than ever irrevocably fixed in a certain niche. He tried still to flatter his ego into believing that, despite appearances, Stella would be the heavier loser; but such flattery was obviously growing harder every day.

When they met, Stella was bound for a tea engagement with Elsa. Indeed, just as they were speaking, Elsa herself came along.

“Ah?” she said, with cool uplifting voice and cool down-drooping eyes.

“Oh, am I late, Elsa?”

“No. But even if you were, a bride-to-be is always forgiven anything.” She gave Jerome a glancing look.

“I’d like you to meet my friend Miss Utterbourne,” said Stella, turning to Jerome, and feeling that the situation might possibly develop embarrassments.

The two nodded formally, Elsa’s eyes merely drooping a little more. Then Jerome felt so profoundly unhappy that he just mumbled something, raised his hat, and left them. But as he walked he unconsciously straightened his shoulders a little, and held his head surprisingly high.

“Isn’t that the young man you threw over, Stella?”

“Yes, we were engaged for awhile,” Stella replied with a tone of attempted lightness.

Elsa gazed after him. “Something tells me you’ll never see him again.”

Her friend appeared rather startled. “What do you mean, Elsa?”

“I don’t know,” the other shrugged. “The way his back looked, I guess. Things come to me like that, and I always speak them out.”

“Do you mean he might do something—something desperate?” faltered Stella.

Then Elsa laughed. “No, little one, you miss my meaning. What I meant was he’d never give you another chance.” She chuckled cryptically.

“I suppose, in a way, it does look like rushing into matrimony,” observed Stella happily, sipping her tea and trying to be convincingly sophisticated.

Elsa stared in her blank way. “Everybody admits he’s wonderful,” she etched. “Still, to be perfectly frank, it does seem somewhat pell-mell, even assuming the man to be wealthy and—well, a kind of prince.” Her eyes were whimsical. But since Mr. King had to dash away to parts unknown in the Star of Troy, without giving any one a chance to catch one’s breath, was there anything to be done about it, after all? “Parts unknown,” mused Elsa. Yes, rather a complete mystery, all round.

“I can’t tell you any more about it, Elsa, because I don’t know any more. Hasn’t your father even mentioned it?”

Elsa smiled with not a little of the parental cynicism, though it flickered more warmly upon her kindlier mouth and in her cow-brown eyes. “I haven’t a bit of pull, dear child. The Captain, though he’s a sort of an old dear, is just about as communicative as a clam, even with me.”

“Whenever I say anything about it all,” admitted Stella, but with shining eyes, “Ferdinand tells me to remember what happened in the case of Lohengrin. What did happen, do you remember?” she smiled.

Still, though she had coaxed very prettily at times, especially toward the last, she had also come, perhaps even a bit consciously, as the closer intimacy developed, to live up to that doll-like ideal King seemed rather to nurse in his high-sailing heart. “Leave everything to me, little lady,” he had urged, in his magnetic, irresistible fashion. “Never you worry that dear little head of yours about business. It doesn’t belong in a woman’s sphere. Does it, peaches? You just leave things to me, and if we’re successful in this deal, I’ll take you to Paris and buy you all the hats in the rue de la Paix!”

Elsa warned her young friend against “letting any man make a ninny” of her. “You seem to be quite hypnotized, Stella. It’s all very well,” she observed, her eyes drooping so much that it looked as though she were pulling the corners down with her fingers, “to let a man think he can run his business without you to begin with. They always lead off like that. But unless you mean to be a traitor to your sex, you can’t begin too soon letting it be known (I don’t care if he is a prince!) that the old lord-and-master idea has been converted into a sieve.” She paused, then smilingly dropped in an extra lump. “It’s because I refuse to be a traitor that I’m no longer wearing my engagement ring.”

“What!” cried Stella in real dismay.

Elsa held up the vacant finger with a philosophic grimace.

“But—”

“I’d rather not go into it now, if you don’t mind,” she half yawned. “It’s rather a boring business, and I’m trying to forget I was ever such a fool as to be taken in.”

“Oh, but Elsa—after starting off so splendidly—the dance....”

“Well, isn’t it better to wake up now than too late? Besides, it’s merely an episode. Love is only an episode, little one. Don’t you hang on so hard to your dangerous ideals!”

And she reached across and pinched Stella’s cheek in her vaguely rough way.

IV

The wedding was a very quiet and modest affair—a little quieter and more modest, to tell the truth, than quite appealed to Stella’s ambitious notions of grandeur, though it was a church wedding, too, with a small reception afterward.

Of course every one was tremendously impressed by the bridegroom, and everybody said how sweet the bride looked. Aunt Alice wept happy tears on people’s shoulders, and between whiles talked faster than any one else.

Meade gave his daughter away, and looked very proud, though also a little pathetic in his dress suit.

There were all sorts of nice gifts for the bride, most of which, for the time being, would have to be left behind. And one of the gifts gave Stella a real momentary, ungraspable heartache. It was a small cut-glass fruit bowl, and within lay a blank card on which, in cramped scrawl, appeared the single word: Jerome.

CHAPTER SEVEN LIKE THE BARQUE OF CLEOPATRA

I

She was now Mrs. Ferdinand King, and had sailed away in Captain Utterbourne’s Star of Troy on a honeymoon full of mystery—one destined to carry her not even she knew whither or how far. But Jerome just remained a clerk immersed in the dust and antiquity of Oaks, Ferguson & Whitley’s.

He told himself he must keep up a worldly front behind which he could hide his great unhappiness. This attempt found expression in a certain rather superficial cockiness, valiantly aided and abetted by the jaunty little pipe. But he had lost the one girl he ever really cared for, and felt the loss bitterly. With Stella seemed to go out, too, forever, that dream of hearth and kiddies to which he had clung so lovingly and so long. He could not show these things, however. And his ego, though not morbidly sensitive or in the least vindictive, was still squirming—it was all pretty complex.

During this unhappy period his defensive cheerfulness was made vaguely easier by a somewhat surprising friendship which had developed between himself and the picturesque impresario. After the visit to the schooner, and certainly after the dinner, the impresario might very logically have dropped from his horizon; nevertheless, Jerome went right on seeing him at odd times and places—and, most notably, had been permitted to attend several rehearsals. These were naturally dazzling experiences, which gave the clerk glimpses of a wholly new world and brought him into vivid if momentary contact with men and women who, in their blithe, impressively sophisticated manner, appeared to know about all there was to know about life.

Some of the songbirds, it is true, rather kidded the impresario for taking up with the young clerk; and one of the singers, the official comedian of the company, worked up a highly successful imitation, which became one of the best things he did. Yet of course when he appeared upon the scene, Mr. Curry’s new friend was treated with tremendous respect.

As for Jerome, he thought the members of the troupe without exception splendid; and, partly, no doubt, as a means of easing the distress in his heart, even began telling himself he was growing positively infatuated with a certain girl who did a few small rôles, but mostly sang in the chorus. Her name was Lili—an extraordinary creature, with great wide, bewitching, wicked light brown eyes which were always beaming; a mouth that existed only for eating and loving; a wealth of rich massed hair and—well, nobody ever did know how much there was underneath it—perhaps a very great deal, for Lili was deep, in her way, despite genuinely child-like qualities. She was a truly delightful person, impulsive and affectionate and a trifle flighty, with a healthy desire to be a prima donna.

Lili used to amuse herself, when Jerome came amongst them, by beaming on the poor clerk till he had to blink and would grow quite red. She had a way of gradually opening her eyes wider and wider as she beamed, which produced a really electric effect and would make any one’s pulse, pre-eminently the pulse of a clerk who had never been beamed on that way before, double and treble its accustomed beat. He didn’t dream it was she who laughed most heartily over the efforts of the comedian, and that she herself one day took round a petition, drawn up by the comedian, requesting signatures of all the male members of the troupe who would agree to adopt fashion’s latest mandate: a patent clip to hold down the ends of one’s tie and keep one’s shoulders from growing too haughty.

II

With everything vigorously under way, and the actual sailing day in sight, Xenophon Curry was calling on his friend and benefactress, Flora Utterbourne, to express for perhaps the hundredth time his overwhelming gratitude. He stirred his tea happily and looked about the little drawing room which Flora had made so much her own with the assistance of sales and auctions. Glancing about one understood Flora’s success.

The tea things stood between them on the very gate-legged table acquired at Crawl Hill, and in which the impresario insisted upon feeling a whimsical part interest. Flora had just returned from a luncheon party—they had met, as a matter of fact, on her threshold—and as they sipped and chatted she informally lifted off a hat of faun straw and figured silk, thrusting the pins back into it, with the veil still where it had been brushed up out of the way across the crown. She laid the hat aside and touched her hair comfortably. His response to the geniality of this hour of early twilight, with a small clock ticking somewhere, was very whole-hearted, though of course sentimental, because everything about the impresario was sentimental.

Some turn or other in the talk presently brought up the subject of his rings. “I’ve been noticing them,” she smiled. “It seems to me I’ve never seen so many—and some of the ‘stones’ seem quite wonderful!”

“I know,” he laughed, “there are a good many more than there ought to be, but I get so attached to each new one that drops into my hands, I couldn’t bear to give any of ’em up.”

“Good gracious!” she exclaimed. “Do they really come as easily as all that?”

“Oh, well,” he confided, “it’s become a sort of custom that when one of my songbirds is offered a contract by one of the big managers and has to leave me—and I want to tell you I’ve discovered more than one now famous star and given the boost to begin with!—then I get a ring in remembrance. Sometimes it will be a great big stone—like this one, you see? Then again a more modest size, like this one. It depends,” he added confidentially, “a little on the contract; but I love every single ring on my fingers exactly the same, because each one stands for a songbird.”

“A songbird who has flown away,” she murmured, her fine eyes a little sad.

“Yes,” he sighed. “But it can’t be helped, and it doesn’t mean, you know, that they don’t go right on being loyal. We all have to make our way in the world. Lord, if it isn’t one thing it’s another! Money’s the main difficulty, and what can you hope to do if you never had any?”

Ah, what indeed? The impresario set down his cup thoughtfully; and a moment later she sympathetically brought out her own special phase of that curious irony they had spoken of at the auction. “No one would think, to see how ‘entrenched’ we look, that I’d be out of here, ‘bag and baggage,’ early in the morning!”

“What?” cried Mr. Curry, really quite shaken.

She nodded and smiled at him over a slice of caramel cake she was nibbling.

“Tomorrow!”

“It’s really heart-breaking,” she admitted slowly, “though when I’ve had time to grow a little interested in the new ‘apartment’ it won’t matter. But it did strike me as so irresistibly funny, sitting here with you ‘over the teacups,’ that at eight o’clock the men will be at the door for my trunks!”

Suddenly he leaned toward her with great earnestness. “Miss Utterbourne, I want to ask you a favour.”

“Yes?” Her brows were arched in cordial interrogation.

“It—it’s about this table—table we bought,” he said, quite steadily despite the brazen pronoun, and fixing her with his honest, eager gaze.

“Of course,” she laughed softly, and with a subtle note of warm joyousness, “I’ve always thought of it as ‘our’ table! I shall never think of it otherwise!”

“Well, I want to ask you,” he continued, earnestly thumping with one sparkling finger, “not to leave the table behind.” She coloured a little, and he pressed on: “I want you to take it with you to the new apartment for a kind of nucleus—to begin building around!”

“Ah,” she sighed lightly, but with a gently glowing graciousness, “you’re a diabolical tempter at my elbow, for I’m sure you know my weakness for ‘gate-legged’ tables!”

“I guess I have a weakness for them, too,” he admitted doggedly.

“Well,” she laughed, blushing still more happily, “then I’m afraid the table will have to go along, really, though I’m sure the people who are subletting will notice! What would sound most plausible, do you think?” She was growing quite excited. “For it would hardly do to tell quite the facts—would it?”

III

Meantime, the Skipping Goone was taking on a lively appearance indeed, as the great sailing day drew close. She had hugged her wharf so long in apathetic solitude that it had begun to look as though she might be destined just to settle down in the peaceful calm of the harbour for the remainder of her days. She seemed a little weary and careless of reputation. Small urchins of the wharf played familiarly all over her decks, while a shore cat, who would have raised her paws in horror at the thought of becoming a ship’s cat, had strayed aboard through pardonable misapprehension and become parent to a generous brood of kittens. The hawsers had taken on a staid and permanent look. But lo! a great change was come about, and the Skipping Goone strained at her moorings, ready to launch forth upon the most strenuous period of her career.

It was at length the very eve of departure. Jerome had been feeling very sad, with the hour of severance so nearly arrived; but as the night wore on he felt less and less sad in proportion to the augmenting glasses of claret poured out for him by the incomparable Lili, who, herself in a distinctly uplifted state, didn’t leave off beaming at all. His, just now, were sensations he could wish to prolong into an eternity; they eased his hurt at the same time that they encouraged in him a feeling that he might, if he would, cut a tremendous figure in life. Could Stella look in upon him now here in the dazzling midst of Girardin’s French table d’hôte, surrounded by gay opera singers making the most of their last night on shore, she would think there had been strides since the day they had quarrelled in the fog.

“Pass the bottle along down, dear old dear!” somebody shouted.

All things considered, it was a remarkably democratic aggregation of songbirds. Naturally when he boasted about its being one big family, the impresario exaggerated a little; for of course there was a perpetual swarm of petty jealousies and artistic differences—though what are most families like, anyhow? By and large, the troupe was an extraordinary model of ruined caste.

When the fun was at its height, Curry waved a gem-encrusted hand, gave his songbirds a departing smile, and removed himself to a distant corner of the restaurant where he could spread out all those “dreadful lists and things” which Captain Bearman insisted must be checked up. His retreat was deplored by a prodigious groan, and impulsively covered by Lili, who chased after him with a slopping goblet of wine and a depleted plate of sandwiches. “So you won’t starve to death, old dear!” And she flung her arms spontaneously round his neck before returning to beam upon her clerk.

“You’d think it ought to be an easy thing to run a schooner,” Curry smiled up wanly at M. Girardin, who had strolled over from his little cash booth in a relaxed mood. “But Lord! there’s been nothing but trouble from the word go!” Captain Bearman was turning out to be a master full of whines and unforeseen exactions. There had been endless fault to find with the Shipping Goone. “What a vessel! Sails rotten, hull rotten! Rudder in the last stages!” Apparently there was nothing quite right about the poor old Skipping Goone, of which the impresario had been so proud, except perhaps the new coat of paint—and even the colour of that had been grumblingly objected to as unnautical. “And then,” Girardin was told, “the cargo!”

“But mon dieu, do you intend to handle it all yourself? Have you no business manager, par example?”

“Well, perhaps not in the strict sense,” admitted Mr. Curry in his petitioning, confidential way. “There’s a sort of treasurer—you see that man just waving the bottle? But he just handles the box office receipts. Then I’ve got a kind of assistant, too, who’s supposed to do things; but he’s been so crazy to go on the stage that I’ve had to let him sing in the chorus, and that seems to make him not much good for anything else.”

An unusual amount of commotion on the other side of the restaurant made them look across. Most of the troupers had had sense, but a few were in a very mellow condition—notably Jerome, who wasn’t used to stimulants and so reacted to them with awful completeness. The songbirds were grouped in a crowding and boisterous circle. One of the men was whistling a jig tune, and several were clapping their hands in syncopated time, while in the centre, very much flushed and largely unable to keep his balance, was Jerome, doing the sailor’s hornpipe.

IV

In the cold grey dawn of the great sailing day, shadowy figures began going aboard the Skipping Goone. The city delivered them up. Then gradually the city awoke, and the waterfront went about its usual occupations.

As morning advanced, the Skipping Goone became a setting for some of the wildest scenes in the history of opera in America. Red-eyed sopranos were bumped by stevedores; a stout lady whose forte was contralto matrons, went madly about in search of a trunk. Sailors were puttering, while Captain Bearman croaked out sullen orders through his beautiful flaming whiskers. Finally, the lord of all commotion, Xenophon Curry, who was sure, yes desperately and perspiringly sure, half the important things had been forgotten.

And of course Flora Utterbourne was on hand to see them off. She walked right aboard the Skipping Goone, her face smilingly full of every good wish for the impresario as she stood beside him on deck conversing with unbroken animation, yet always in that fluid, gliding manner which he knew so well now. Yes, Flora in her speech flowed on like a gracious river. And there was just a faint sadness behind her frank gaze, which meant that this departure was going to leave an unexpected emptiness. However, if there was sadness in her gaze, there was sadness also in the impresario’s. Xenophon Curry, though borne up by unquenchable optimism, realized that it was going to be surprisingly hard to say good-bye—maybe for years or a lifetime—to the lady who had asked him the way to Crawl Hill.

The Skipping Goone looked small and a little pathetic this morning. What was in store for them in the wide, wild ocean?

A crowd was waving on the wharf. The last perfervid farewells had been said, and the singers went about nibbling bon voyage chocolates, defiant of mal de mer. There were flowers, there was even confetti. The drab old schooner had taken on a very festive look indeed—almost like the barque of Cleopatra!

Every hand clutched a handkerchief, every handkerchief sought its niche in the vibrating atmosphere. A tenor tried his voice behind the deckhouse and emerged singing Auld Lang Syne. The last hawser was cast off. A tug hooted.

And so it was that the Skipping Goone in her brave new paint, bearing a mixed cargo of merchandise and songbirds, gay with flutter and bloom, was trundled off down the bay and out upon the heaving vast, bound for parts remote and adventures cloaked in an impenetrable veil.