Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/343

 He was full of hope, voluble of encouragement, gallant with a protective deference that was as winning as flattery. He walked the noisy streets in a devoted attention to her that seemed to leave him oblivious to everything else. Even when he spoke of himself, it was only to give her his experience as an aid to her in making her plans. And all this single-hearted and unconscious devotion came appealingly to her in her mood of loneliness and fear for herself.

They wandered about until she was tired, and then he took her to the galleries of the Fifth Avenue art dealers, where she could sit on plush-upholstered seats and talk of Europe and the Louvre. He confessed that he had always liked landscapes with roads in them—roads up which you might imagine yourself walking to a house that just showed its roof over a hill—or pictures of men and women who were saying something which you could guess.

"But don't you like the colour? the poetry?"

He studied the row of landscapes before him. "Yes, I think I do. But I like them best when there's something to invite you to get inside them and explore, don't you know?"

"0h, you're a Philistine," she teased him.

"Am I? . . . Oh, well, never mind; you're not, anyway," he said; and he said it with such an innocent pride in her that she could not laugh at him.

When it was time for her to return to her boarding-house for dinner, she faced the prospect of loneliness with a reluctance which he was quick to see; and they went together to a little Sixth Avenue restaurant where