Mermaid, hurrying down the street from school, did not notice a boy coming out of the side street on which young Dick Hand lived. The boy was walking along with a most unboyish air. His head was down and he looked up too late to avoid a collision. It nearly knocked Mermaid’s breath out of her. When she could talk she accepted his confused apology, and smiled.

“You’re Guy Vanton, aren’t you?”

He was a short boy with very black hair, a snub nose, and a pale face. His eyes, which were brown, had something uncanny about them; Mermaid was struck with their resemblance to the eyes of wild animals. She had seen deer with eyes like that. The boy stood before her with his cap in his hand; he was somehow not in the least like Dick Hand or Tommy Lupton or any of the other Blue Port boys. He seemed to have very good manners and to be politely exercising them. Mermaid unconsciously assumed her own.

“Guy Vanton, yes, mademoiselle.” The French word aroused Mermaid to a high pitch of curiosity, and the immediate effect of her heightened curiosity was to make her still more polite.

“I—I beg your pardon,” the boy repeated. “It was all my fault. I was not looking where I was going, mademoiselle.”

[94]She noticed that he spoke English without the Blue Port twang, but also without a foreign accent; his speech was like that of one or two of the schoolteachers she had had.

He seemed about to replace his cap and hurry away. He made a little bow to her—from the waist. Mermaid had seen the bow before. Dickie Hand had learned it in a children’s dancing class at Patchogue. She smiled at young Mr. Vanton, who was so eager to get along. She had no intention he should go until they were fairly acquainted.

“You speak French?”

“Mais oui, mademoiselle!” His uncanny eyes fixed her for a moment and his pale face flushed a little.

“Oh, I don’t speak it,” Mermaid explained, hastily, whereupon he looked down at the ground, as if he had lost interest. “What was that you just said?”

“I said: ‘But yes!’”

“I wish I knew it,” she exclaimed. “I should love to study it, but I don’t think they teach it even in High School at Patchogue.”

He said, without looking at her: “I learned it in Paris. I—we used to live there. My mother——” He stopped.

Mermaid said, sympathetically: “She’s an invalid, isn’t she?”

“Oh, that isn’t—I mean—why, why, yes. She is—she has to walk with a crutch. And then, only a[95] little.” His confusion was so evident that Mermaid felt sorry for him. With true feminine instinct she decided that he must suffer some more so that ultimately she might help him. She knew he did not go to school, she knew that he lived all alone, shut up in that expensive house, surrounded by gloomy evergreens, which must be as sunless as Miss Smiley’s front parlour had been once on a time. He lived there with a crippled mother and a formidable father, a retired sea captain who was undoubtedly a stern disciplinarian. He was pale and undersized. Mermaid had heard stories of sea captains all her remembering life and knew them to be a peculiar race of men. Her imagination worked rapidly on the problem presented by Guy Vanton, and she concluded, perhaps somewhat rashly, that his father had spent most of his money on the mahogany and teakwood of the parlour and fed his boy on ship’s biscuits and water. At any rate, he looked it. But his eyes fascinated her. Considering briefly the means of further advancing their acquaintance she decided that he should teach her French. In turn, she would ask him home with her to supper, and see that he got a square meal.

“I wonder if you wouldn’t teach me French?”

Guy Vanton looked surprised, but then an expression of pleasure came into the brown eyes. He nodded. Mermaid continued: “I could come over in the afternoon, sometimes, when I haven’t to help Miss Smiley[96] clean house. We could be very still and not bother your mother. And sometimes you could come to our house. I’m sure Miss Smiley wouldn’t mind. I bring Dickie Hand there and she gives him cookies though she hates his father like anything.”

They were walking along the street together. Young Mr. Vanton had got his cap back on his head at last, but he walked stiffly, a little deferentially, his body half turned toward the girl. Mermaid chattered along easily on whatever themes came into her head, occasionally punctuating her talk with a question calling for no answer more elaborate than a “Yes” or a “No.” She was much gratified when Dick Hand and Tommy Lupton stopped their regular afternoon pastime of punching each other’s heads to stare acro............