The Burial of the Guns Part 4

"She isn't as beautiful as someone else I know," said Floyd, pleasantly.

"Isn't she? As whom?"

Floyd took hold of the child's hand and said, "Let's go and get some supper."

"I don't like her," said the little girl, positively.

"Don't you?" said Floyd. He stopped and glanced across the room toward where the girl had stood. He saw only the gleam of her fine shoulders as she disappeared in the crowd surrounded by her admirers.

A little later Floyd met the young lady on the stairway. He had not recognized her, and was pa.s.sing on, when she spoke to him.

"I saw you talking to a little friend of mine," she began, then--"Over in the corner," she explained.

"Oh! yes. She is sweet. They interest me. I always feel when I have talked with a child as if I had got as near to the angels as one can get on earth."

"Do you know I was very anxious to meet you," she said.

"Were you? Thank you. Why?"

"Because of a line of yours I once read."

"I am pleased to have written only one line that attracted your attention," said Floyd, bowing.

"No, no--it was this--"The whitest soul of man or saint is black beside a girl's."

"Beside a child's," said Floyd, correcting her.

"Oh! yes, so it is--'beside a child's.'"

Her voice was low and musical. Floyd glanced up and caught her look, and the color deepened in her cheek as the young man suddenly leant a little towards her and gazed earnestly into her eyes, which she dropped, but instantly raised again.

"Yes--good-night," she held out her hand, with a taking gesture and smile.

"Good-night," said Floyd, and pa.s.sed on up the stairs to the dressing-room. He got his coat and hat and came down the stairway. A group seized him.

"Come to the club," they said. He declined.

"Roast oysters and beer," they said.

"No, I'm going home."

"Are you ill?" asked a friend.

"No, not at all. Why?"

"You look like a man who has seen a spirit."

"Do I? I'm tired, I suppose. Good-night,--good-night, gentlemen," and he pa.s.sed out.

"Perhaps I have," he said as he went down the cold steps into the frozen street.

Floyd went home and tossed about all night. His life was breaking up, he was all at sea. Why had he met her? He was losing the anchor that had held him. "They call her the queen," the little girl had said. She must be. He had seen her soul through her eyes.

Floyd sent her the poem which contained the line which she had quoted; and she wrote him a note thanking him. It pleased him. It was sympathetic. She invited him to call. He went to see her. She was fine in grain and in look. A closely fitting dark gown ornamented by a single glorious red rose which might have grown where it lay, and her soft hair coiled on her small head, as she entered tall and straight and calm, made Floyd involuntarily say to himself, "Yes"--

"She was right," he said, half to himself, half aloud, as he stood gazing at her with inquiring eyes after she had greeted him cordially.

"What was right?" she asked.

"Something a little girl said about you."

"What was it?"

"I will tell you some day, when I know you better."

"Was it a compliment?"

"Yes."

"Tell me now."

"No, wait."

He came to know her better; to know her very well. He did not see her very often, but he thought of her a great deal. He seemed to find in her a sympathy which he needed. It reminded him of the past. He awoke from his lethargy; began to work once more in the old way; mixed among men again; grew brighter. "Henry Floyd is growing younger, instead of older," someone said of him. "His health has been bad," said a doctor.

"He is improving. I thought at one time he was going to die." "He is getting rich," said a broker, who had been a schoolmate of his. "I see he has just invented a new something or other to relieve children with hip or ankle-joint disease."

"Yes, and it is a capital thing, too; it is being taken up by the profession. I use it. It is a curious thing that he should have hit on that when he is not a surgeon. He had studied anatomy as a sort of fad, as he does everything. One of Haile Tabb's boys was bedridden, and he was a great friend of his, and that set him at it."

"I don't think he's so much of a crank as he used to be," said someone.

The broker who had been his schoolmate met Floyd next day.

"I see you have been having a great stroke of luck," he said.

"Have I?"

"Yes. I see in the papers, that your discovery, or invention, or whatever it was, has been taken up."

"Oh! yes--that? It has."

"I congratulate you."

"Thank you."

"I would not mind looking into that."

"Yes, it is interesting."

"I might take an interest in it."