Lark Ascending. Mazo de la Roche

      “I’d like us to be friends. You’ve never been very friendly with me.”

      “What about to-night?”

      He gave her an amused look. “You’ll be angry if I tell you what I think about that.”

      “I swear I won’t! Tell me—please!”

      “Better not.”

      “You must!”

      “Very well. I think you were pretending to yourself that I was Diego.”

      Her colour flamed but she said quietly:

      “I daresay you’re right. . . . I’m as silly about him as you are about Fay.”

      She had given better than she had got. Bond almost dropped the bottle. “Well—that was a mean one,” he said.

      “I didn’t intend to be mean. I just want you to know that we’re in the same boat.”

      “And might as well pull together, eh?”

      “I’ll help you, if I can.”

      Bond was much embarrassed. He fidgeted with the things on his desk to hide it.

      “I guess I’ll go,” said Josie.

      He took up his hat. “I’ll go with you as far as the door and see how he is. That was a terrible thing for him to do.”

      “Better than hanging, though.”

      At the door of the bakery she said:

      “You wait here and I’ll run in and see if they’ve made it up. Perhaps Fay will want to speak to you.”

      In a few minutes she was back.

      “She says to come in. They’re sitting on the sofa together. As thick as thieves. What a pair! We do all the worrying.”

      They went in.

      “Hello, Purley!” called out Fay when she heard his step in the shop. “Come right in! I want you to look at Diego and see if you think I ought to get a doctor. He seems kind of feverish.”

      She and her son were sitting pressed close together on the sofa. Their resemblance, not often noticeable, was at the moment striking. They both were flushed, with eyes bright, and under the eyes the skin was brownish dark. Their dark thick hair was ruffled.

      Bond felt his pulse, Fay looking up at him with what, he suddenly thought, was a look of animal trust. Diego’s hand hung limp from his, like a child’s.

      “How is he?”

      “His pulse is a little quick. He ought to get to bed. I’ll come in the morning and take his temperature.”

      “Want my supper first,” muttered Diego in a surly, sick-boy voice. “Nothing to eat since breakfast.”

      “For pity’s sake, Josie, get us something to eat!” exclaimed Fay. “We’re starving! Purley’s to stay and eat with us. Don’t you say a word against it, Purley!”

      Josie laid a new yellow-and-white check cloth on the table and set it with the best dishes. It was the first time Bond had taken a meal with them. She was so excited by the presence of a guest that she took twice as long as usual in preparing the meal. It was laid in the sitting-room so that Diego need not leave the heat which Fay had created by filling the self-feeder to the lid.

      “What are you giving us, Josie?” asked Fay. “Let’s see—ham and eggs, fried potatoes, that’s all right.” She drew Josie aside. “What’s to finish on?”

      “Canned peaches,” answered Josie, “and cocoanut cake. There are two pies left in the case—mince and pumpkin. Which will you have?”

      “Which would you like?” Fay asked of Bond, with a happy intimate look.

      “Let Diego choose,” answered Bond a little grimly. “It’s his party.”

      “Punkin!” shouted Diego.

      The four who were to have so many meals together sat down.

      Fay had had the table moved beside the sofa so that Diego might not be caused the exertion of crossing the room. He sat up tousle-headed beside it, beaming with satisfaction. Bond had his back against the stove and his rather pale skin soon glowed a deep pink. Fay had coiled up her hair so rapidly that it was now of itself uncoiling, and curled, like a snake ready to spring, on her shoulder. She was oblivious of everything but her relief of spirit. She praised everything Josie had done. She pressed Bond to eat to repletion. She hung over Diego, reached out her dark-skinned shapely hand to stroke his hair, all but fed him.

      With their cigarettes they drank large cups of coffee golden tan with thick cream.

      Bond, accustomed to eating alone, experienced a feeling of boyish hilarity in the closeness of this group. He found himself talking fluently about the travel books he had read. He found himself wanting to tell them of his plan for selling the drug business which his father, with so many cautious ponderings, had bought for him. All the while he talked of France and Italy and Algiers he was thinking how astonished they would be if they knew what was in his mind. Then, almost before he knew it, the words slipped out and the half-formed idea loomed like an accomplished fact. It was a fact, he said recklessly, he had advertised the business in a Boston paper.

      The other three were in a mood in which nothing surprised them. It seemed the natural thing that Bond should sell out and join them in their adventure.

      “We’ll say that you are my brother,” said Fay. “And so prevent any gossip.”

      He did not object even to that.

      “I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” he said. “We’ll take a Mediterranean cruise and get off at Monaco. Then we can make our way to Paris, taking our own time.”

      “How heavenly!” said Fay, stroking Diego’s hand. “If only someone will come along and buy us out!”

      Someone did. Before the New Year, both the drug store and the bakery had been disposed of, and their passages were booked on a foreign cruiser

      CHAPTER IV

      THE four people, of such diverse temperaments, who sailed in the New Year for France, now saw the Atlantic in an entirely different aspect from the one to which they were accustomed. They had been born and had lived all their lives within sight, sound and smell of it. The prosperity of Saltport depended on it. It was like a great dancing bear secured by the iron chain of the shore. It might rage and roar all the winter, but in summer it danced for the Summer Colony and Saltport passed the hat. But it was a new experience to see it in mid-ocean from the heaving deck of a liner. If it was, in truth, a dancing bear, they were now no more than the fleas on its shaggy back.

      Their new situation affected them according to their individual characters. Fay Palmas, the oldest of the quartette, responded in a spirit the most temerarious and childlike. Even as she lay seasick in her berth, wondering if the ship would ever right herself after the last roll, she felt a wild joy in her escape from what she looked back on as years of hateful bondage. She had ceased to love her husband from the time of Diego’s birth. She had always been conscious that he had been criticising her, and she abhorred criticism. Now she thrust the remembrance of his aproned figure, his floury arms, his ascetic face, out of her mind forever. She stretched her arms towards the Old World with the rapturous hope that spurred early explorers on toward the New.