After he had gone she wondered at herself. She had trusted her precious elephant to a perfect stranger. He might be anything, a spy, a thief, with his "Gotts in Himmel" and his "Fräuleins"--how Jean would laugh at her for her softheartedness!
Oh, but he wasn't a thief, he wasn't a spy. He was a poet and a gentleman. She made very few mistakes in her estimates of the people who came to her shop. She had made, she was sure, no mistake in trusting Ulrich Stölle.
Jean and Derry motoring to Chevy Chase were far away from the world of the Toy Shop. As they whirled along the country roads the bare trees seemed to bud and bloom for them, the sky was gold.
The lovely clubhouse as they came into it was gay with big-flowered curtains and warm with its roaring fires.
As they crossed the room together, they attracted much attention. There was about them a fine air of exaltation--.
"Young blood, young blood," said an old gentleman in a corner. "Gad, I envy him. Look at her eyes--!"
But there was more than her eyes to look at. There were her cheeks, and her crinkled copper hair under the little hat, and the flower that she wore, and her white hands as she poured the tea.
They drank unlimited quantities of Orange Pekoe, and ate small mountains of toast. They were healthily happy and quite unexpectedly hungry, and the fact that they were sitting alone at the table gave the whole thing an enchanting atmosphere of domesticity.
"Ralph spoiled it the other day," Jean confided, "I had everything ready for you."
"Of course," and then they both laughed, and the old gentleman in the corner said to the woman who sat with him, "Let's get away. I can't stand it."
"You wouldn't see. But there was a time once when I loved a girl like that."
Drusilla and Captain Hewes coming in, after a canter through the Park, broke in upon the Paradise of the young pair.
Drusilla in riding togs still managed to preserve the picturesque quality of her beauty--a cockade in her hat, a red flower in her lapel, a blue tie against her white shirt.
"And she does it so well," Derry said, as the two came towards them. "In most women it would have an air of bad taste, but Drusilla never goes too far--"
Captain Hewes in tow showed himself a captured man. "I didn't know that American women could ride until Miss Gray showed me--today. It was rippin'."