She was fifteen years old before she saw him again. His strap-watch
was still on her wrist; his memory, unfaded, still enshrined in her
heart of a child, for she was as yet no more than that at fifteen. And
the moment she saw him she recognised him.
It was on the Sixth Avenue Elevated Station at Twenty-third Street one
sunny day in April; he stood waiting for the downtown train which she
stepped out of when it stopped.
He did not notice her, so she went over to him and called him by name;
and the tall, good-looking, fashionably dressed young fellow turned to
her without recognition.
But the next instant his smooth, youthful face lighted up, and off
came his hat with the gay college band adorning it: "Athalie Greensleeve!" he exclaimed, showing his pleasure
unmistakably.
"C. Bailey, Junior," she rejoined as steadily as she could, for her
heart was beating wildly with the excitement of meeting him and her
emotions were not under full control.
"You have grown so," he said with the easy, boyish cordiality of his
caste, "I didn't recognise you for a moment. Tell me, do you still
live down--er--down there?"
She said: "I knew you as soon as I set eyes on you. You are very much taller,
too.... No, we went away from Spring Pond the year after my father
died."
"I see," he said sympathetically. And back into his memory flashed
that scene with her by the stove in the dusky bar. And then he
remembered her as she stood in her red hood and cloak staring at the
closed door of the room where her dead father lay. And he remembered
touching her frosty little hand, and the incident of the watch.
"I never went back there," he mused, half to himself, looking
curiously at the girl before him. "I wanted to go--but I never did."
"No, you never came back," she said slowly.
"I couldn't. I was only a kid, you see. My mother wouldn't let me go
there that summer. And father and I joined a club down South so we did
not go back for the duck-shooting. That is how it happened."
She nodded, gravely, but said nothing to him about her faith in his
return, how confidently, how patiently she had waited through that
long, long summer for the boy who never returned.
"I did think of you often," he volunteered, smiling at her.
"I thought of you, too. I hoped you would come and let me teach you to
sail a boat."