"No, no! It doesn't matter. I'm not afraid. How can I be--now? Please let me go--alone. Good-by!"
And in a moment she had vanished in the cross street.
Mortimer Crabb watched the retreating figure.
"H-m," he said, "the Eternal Question--as usual--without the answer. And yet I would have sworn that that parasol in the Square----"
He had always possessed an attitude of amused and tolerant patronage for the City of Brotherly Love--it was the birthright of any typical New Yorker--and yet since that inconsiderable adventure in Rittenhouse Square, he had discovered undreamed-of virtues in the Pennsylvania metropolis. It was a city not of apartments, but of homes--homes in which men lived with their families and brought up interesting children in the old-fashioned way--a city of conservative progress, of historic association, of well-guarded tradition--an American city, in short--which New York was not. At the Bachelors' Club he sang its praises, and mentioned a plan of wintering there, but was laughed at for his pains. Anything unusual and extraordinary was to be expected of Mortimer Crabb. But a winter in Philadelphia! This was too preposterous.
Crabb said nothing in reply. He only smiled politely and when the _Blue Wing_ was put in commission went off on a cruise with no other company but his thoughts and Captain Jepson. Jepson under ordinary circumstances would have been sufficient, but now Mortimer Crabb spent much time in a deck chair reading in a book of poems, or idly gazing at the swirl of foam in the vessel's wake. Jepson wondered what he was thinking of, for Crabb was not a man to spend much time in dreaming, and the Captain would have given much that he possessed to know. He would have been surprised if Mortimer Crabb had told him. To tell the truth Crabb was thinking--of a parasol. He was wondering if after all, his judgment had been erring. The lady in the Square had left the parasol, it was true. But then all the tribe of parasols and umbrellas seemed born to the fate of being neglected and forgotten, and there was no reason why this particular specimen of the genus should be exempt from the frailties of its kind. As he remembered, it was a flimsy thing of green silk and lace, obviously a French frippery which might be readily guilty of such a form of naughtiness.