Jean Webster - Just Patty

Mr. Gilroy was writing, and it was a second before he glanced up. His eyes widened with astonishment—the clerk had delivered the message verbatim. He leaned back in his chair and studied the ladies from head to foot, then emitted a curt:

"Well?"

There was not a trace of recognition in his glance.

Patty's only intention had been to announce their identity, and invite him to deliver them at St. Ursula's door, but Patty was incapable of approaching any matter by the direct route when a labyrinth was also available. She drew a deep breath, and to Conny's consternation, plunged into the labyrinth.

"You Mr. Laurence K. Gilroy?" she dropped a curtsy. "I come find-a you."

"So I see," said Mr. Laurence K. Gilroy, dryly. "And now that you've found me, what do you want?"

"I want tell-a your fortune," Patty glibly dropped into the lingo she and Conny had practised on the school the night before. "You cross-a my hand with silver—I tell-a your fortune."

This was no situation of Conny's choosing, but she was always staunchly game.

"Nice-a fortune," she backed Patty up. "Tall young lady. Ver' beautiful."

"Well, of all the nerve!"

Mr. Gilroy leaned back in his chair and regarded them severely, but with a gleam of amusement flickering through.

"Where did you get my name?" he demanded.

Patty waved her hand airily toward the open window and the distant horizon—as it showed between the coal sheds and the dynamo building.

"Gypsy peoples, dey learn signs," she explained lucidly. "Sky, wind, clouds—all talk—but you no understand. I get message for you—Mr. Laurence K. Gilroy—and we come from long-a way off to tell-a your fortune." With a pathetic little gesture, she indicated their damaged foot gear. "Ver' tired. We travel far."

Mr. Gilroy put his hand in his pocket and produced two silver half dollars.

"Here's your money. Now be honest! What sort of a bunco game is this? And where in thunder did you get my name?"

They pocketed the money, dropped two more curtsies, and evaded inconvenient questions.

"We tell-a your fortune," said Conny, with business-like directness. She brought out the pack of cards, plumped herself cross-legged on the floor, and dealt them out in a wide circle. Patty seized the gentleman's hand in her two coffee-stained little paws, and turned it palm up for inspection. He made an embarrassed effort to draw away, but she clung with the tenacious grip of a monkey.

"I see a lady!" she announced with promptitude.

"Tall young lady—brown eyes, yellow hair, ver' beautiful," Conny echoed from the floor, as she leaned forward and intently studied the queen of hearts.

"But she make-a you lot of trouble," Patty added, frowning over a blister on his hand. "I see li'l' quarrel."

Mr. Gilroy's eyes narrowed. In spite of himself, he commenced to be interested.

"You like-a her very much," pronounced Conny from below.

"But you never see her any more," chimed in Patty. "One—two—three—four months, you no see her, no spik with her." She looked up into his startled eyes. " But you think about her every day! "

He made a quick movement of withdrawal, and Patty hastily added a further detail.

"Dat tall young lady, she ver' unhappy too. She no laugh no more like she used."

He arrested the movement and waited with a touch of anxious curiosity to hear what was coming next.

"She feel ver' bad—ver' cross, ver' unhappy. She thinks always 'bout that li'l' quarrel. Four months she sit and wait—but you never come back."

Mr. Gilroy rose abruptly and strode to the window.

His unexpected visitors had dropped from the sky at the psychological moment. For two straight hours that afternoon he had been sitting at his desk grappling with the problem, which they, in their broken English, were so ably handling. Should he swallow a great deal of pride, and make another plea for justice? St. Ursula's vacation was at hand; in a few days more she would be gone—and very possibly she would never come back. The world at large was full of men, and Miss Jellings had a taking way.

Conny continued serenely to study her cards.

"One—More—Chance!" She spoke with the authority of a Grecian sibyl. "You try again, you win. No try, you lose."

Patty leaned over Conny's shoulder, eager to supply a salutary bit of advice.

"Dat tall young lady too much—" she hesitated a moment for fitting expression—"too much head in air. Too bossy . You make-a her mind? Understand?"

Conny, gazing at the round-faced, chubby Jack of Diamonds, had received a new idea.

"I see 'nother man," she murmured. "Red hair and—and— fat . Not too good-looking but—"

" Very dangerous! " interpolated Patty. "You have no time to waste. He comes soon."

Now, they had fabricated this detail out of nothing in the world but pure fancy and the Jack of Diamonds, but as it happened, they had touched an open wound. It was an exact description of a certain rich young man in the neighboring city, who loaded Miss Jellings with favors, and whom Mr. Gilroy detested from the bottom of his soul. All that afternoon, mixed in with his promptings and hesitations and travail of spirit, had loomed large, the fair, plump features of his fancied rival. Mr. Gilroy was a common-sense young business man, as free as most from superstition; but when a man's in love he is open to omens.

He stared fixedly about the familiar office and out at the coal sheds and dynamo, to make sure that he was still on solid earth. His gaze came back to his visitors from the sky in absolute, anxious, pleading bewilderment.

They were studying the cards again in a frowning endeavor to wrest a few further items from their overtaxed imaginations. Patty felt that she had already given him fifty cents' worth, and was wondering how to bring the interview to a graceful end. She realized that they had carried the farce too impertinently far, ever to be able to announce their identity and suggest a ride home. The only course now, was to preserve their incognito, make good their escape, and get back as best they could—at least they had a dollar to aid in the journey!

She glanced up, mentally framing a peroration.

"I see good-a fortune," she commenced, "if—"

Her glance passed him to the open window, and her heart missed a beat. Mrs. Trent and Miss Sarah Trent, come to complain about the new electric lights, were serenely descending from their carriage, not twenty feet away.

Patty's hand clutched Conny's shoulder in a spasmodic grasp.

"Sallie and the Dowager!" she hissed in her ear. "Follow me!"

With a sweep of her hand, Patty scrambled the cards together and rose. There would be no chance to escape by the door; the Dowager's voice was already audible in the outer office.

"Goo' by!" said Patty, springing to the window. "Gypsies call. We must go."

She scrambled over the sill and dropped eight feet to the ground. Conny followed. They were both able pupils of Miss Jellings.

Mr. Laurence K. Gilroy, open-mouthed, stood staring at the spot where they had been. The next instant, he was bowing courteously to the principals of St. Ursula's, and striving hard to concentrate a dazed mind upon the short-circuit in the West Wing.

Patty and Conny left the car—and a number of interested passengers—at the corner before they reached the school. Circumnavigating the wall, until they were opposite the stables, they approached the house modestly by the back way. They had the good fortune to encounter no one more dangerous than the cook (who gave them some gingerbread) and they ultimately reached their home in Paradise Alley none the worse for the adventure—and ninety cents to the good.

When the long, light evenings came, St. Ursula's no longer filled in the interim between dinner and evening study with indoor dancing, but romped about on the lawn outside. To-night, being Saturday, there was no evening study to call them in, and everybody was abroad. The school year was almost over, the long vacation was at hand—the girls were as full of bubbling spirits as sixty-four young lambs. Games of blindman's-buff, and pussy-wants-a-corner, and cross-tag were all in progress at once. A band of singers on the gymnasium steps was drowning out a smaller band on the porte-cochère; half-a-dozen hoop-rollers were trotting around the oval, and scattered groups of strollers, meeting in the narrow paths, were hailing each other with cheerful calls.