“As you like,” she agreed. “But why tire yourself?”
The thin, firm lips shut into a resolute line. Then St. Jacques replied briefly,—
“I have been lying awake too much for my pleasure.”
“Thinking of your sins?” Nancy asked gayly.
“I have had dreams that were pleasanter.”
Nancy stole a sidelong glance at him, saw the expression in his eyes, and, turning, looked him full in the face.
“M. St. Jacques,” she said quietly; “something is wrong.”
He smiled, as he shook his head; but his eyes did not light.
“There is no use of denying it. I have been a nurse, you know,” she persisted laughingly; “and I have learned to watch for symptoms. Men don’t frown like that and beetle their brows, without some cause or other. Does something worry you; or aren’t you feeling well?”
Without breaking his even pace, St. Jacques turned and looked steadily into her earnest, sympathetic face. This time, his dark eyes lighted in response to the friendly look in her own.
“Perhaps it may be a little of both,” he answered quietly. “Even then, there is no reason one should be a worry to one’s friends.”
The pause which followed was a short one. Then St. Jacques roused himself and laughed.
“Really, Miss Howard,” he added, as he brushed his thick hair backward from the scarlet gash in his forehead; “it is only that I started with headache, this morning. I was too dull for work; but either Nurse Howard or the Good Sainte Anne has made me forget it.”
And Nancy smiled back at him in token of perfect understanding. She had not heard his last inaudible words,—
“Or perhaps it may be the work of good Saint Joseph.”
In fact, Nancy Howard as yet had gained no inkling of the especial attributes of Saint Joseph, nor did she suspect the part that the good old saint was beginning to play in the coming events of her life. To Nancy’s mind, May was always May. So long as it lasted, there was no reason for looking forward into the coming month of June. The future tense was created solely for those whose present was not absolutely good.
Confronted by a tea-tray and a Britisher in combination, Nancy Howard was conscious of a certain abashment.
At home in New York, she was accustomed to administer informal tea by means of a silver ball and a spirit lamp. These two diminutive pots, the one of water and the other of tea, left her in a blissful state of uncertainty whether she was to measure them out, half and half, or, emptying the teapot at the first round, fill it up with the water in the hopes of decocting a feeble second cup. Moreover, Nancy preferred lemon in her tea, and, worst of all, there were no sugar tongs. Nancy wondered vaguely whether Englishwomen were wont to make tea in brand-new gloves, or whether Englishmen were less finical than their transatlantic brethren.