They had come to the corner of Forty-first Street. Uncle Chris felt in his pocket and produced a key.
“If you want to go and take a look at my little nest, you can let yourself in. It’s on the twenty-second floor. Don’t fail to go out on the roof and look at the view. It’s worth seeing. It will give you some idea of the size of the city. A wonderful, amazing city, my dear, full of people who need Nervino. I shall go on and drop in at the club for half an hour. They have given me a fortnight’s card at the Avenue. Capital place. Here’s the key.”
Jill turned down Forty-first Street, and came to a mammoth structure of steel and stone which dwarfed the modest brown houses beside it into nothingness. It was curious to think of a private apartment nestling on the summit of this mountain. She went in, and the elevator shot her giddily upwards to the twenty-second floor. She found herself facing a short flight of stone steps, ending in a door. She mounted the steps, tried the key, and, turning it, entered a hall-way. Proceeding down the passage, she reached a sitting-room.
It was a small room, but furnished with a solid comfort which soothed her. For the first time since she had arrived in New York, she had the sense of being miles away from the noise and bustle of the city. There was a complete and restful silence. She was alone in a nest of books and deep chairs, on which a large grandfather-clock looked down with that wide-faced benevolence peculiar to its kind. So peaceful was this eyrie, perched high up above the clamor and rattle of civilization, that every nerve in her body seemed to relax in a delicious content. It was like being in Peter Pan’s house in the tree-tops.
2.
Jill possessed in an unusual degree that instinct for exploration which is implanted in most of us. She was frankly inquisitive, and could never be two minutes in a strange room without making a tour of it and examining its books, pictures, and photographs. Almost at once she began to prowl.
The mantelpiece was her first objective. She always made for other people’s mantelpieces, for there, more than anywhere else, is the character of a proprietor revealed. This mantelpiece was sprinkled with photographs, large, small, framed and unframed. In the center of it, standing all alone and looking curiously out of place among its large neighbors, was a little snapshot.
It was dark by the mantelpiece. Jill took the photograph, to the window, where the fading light could fall on it. Why, she could not have said, but the thing interested her. There was mystery about it. It seemed in itself so insignificant to have the place of honor.
The snapshot had evidently been taken by an amateur, but it was one of those lucky successes which happen at rare intervals to amateur photographers to encourage them to proceed with their hobby. It showed a small girl in a white dress cut short above slim, black legs, standing in the porch of an old house, one hand swinging a sunbonnet, the other patting an Irish terrier which had planted its front paws against her waist and was looking up into her face with that grave melancholy characteristic of Irish terriers. The sunlight was evidently strong, for the child’s face was puckered in a twisted though engaging grin. Jill’s first thought was “What a jolly kid!” And then, with a leaping of the heart that seemed to send something big and choking into her throat, she saw that it was a photograph of herself.
With a swooping hound memory raced hack over the years. She could feel the hot sun on her face, hear the anxious voice of Freddie Rooke—then fourteen and for the first time the owner of a camera—imploring her to stand just like that because he wouldn’t be half a minute only some rotten thing had stuck or something. Then the sharp click, the doubtful assurance of Freddie that he thought it was all right if he hadn’t forgotten to shift the film (in which case she might expect to appear in combination with a cow which he had snapped on his way to the house), and the relieved disappearance of Pat, the terrier, who didn’t understand photography. How many years ago had that been? She could not remember. But Freddie had grown to long-legged manhood, she to an age of discretion and full-length frocks, Pat had died, the old house was inhabited by strangers — and here was the silent record of that sun-lit afternoon, three thousand miles away from the English garden in which it had come into existence.