"Do you go to Winter Harbor?" he asked.
"We have gone there every summer until this one, for years. Have you
friends who go there?"
"I had--once. There was a classmate of mine from Rouen----"
"What was his name? Perhaps I know him." She stole a glance at him. His
face had fallen into sad lines, and he looked like the man who had come up
the aisle with the Hon. Kedge Halloway. A few moments before he had seemed
another person entirely.
"He's forgotten me, I dare say. I haven't seen him for seven years; and
that's a long time, you know. Besides, he's 'out in the world,' where
remembering is harder. Here in Plattville we don't forget."
"Were you ever at Winter Harbor?"
"I was--once. I spent a very happy day there long ago, when you must have
been a little girl. Were you there in--"
"Listen!" she cried. "The procession is coming. Look at the crowd!" The
parade had seized a psychological moment.
There was a fanfare of trumpets in the east. Lines of people rushed for
the street, and, as one looked down on the straw hats and sunbonnets and
many kinds of finer head apparel, tossing forward, they seemed like surf
sweeping up the long beaches.
She was coming at last. The boys whooped in the middle of the street; some
tossed their arms to heaven, others expressed their emotion by
somersaults; those most deeply moved walked on their hands. In the
distance one saw, over the heads of the multitude, tossing banners and the
moving crests of triumphal cars, where "cohorts were shining in purple and
gold." She was coming. After all the false alarms and disappointments,
she was coming!
There was another flourish of music. Immediately all the band gave sound,
and then, with blare of brass and the crash of drums, the glory of the
parade burst upon Plattville. Glory in the utmost! The resistless impetus
of the march-time music; the flare of royal banners, of pennons on the
breeze; the smiling of beautiful Court Ladies and great, silken Nobles;
the swaying of howdahs on camel and elephant, and the awesome shaking of
the earth beneath the elephant's feet, and the gleam of his small but
devastating eye (every one declared he looked the alarmed Mr. Snoddy full
in the face as he passed, and Mr. Snoddy felt not at all reassured when
Tom Martin severely hinted that it was with the threatening glance of a
rival); then the badinage of the clown, creaking along in his donkey cart;
the terrific recklessness of the spangled hero who was drawn by in a cage
with two striped tigers; the spirit of the prancing steeds that drew the
rumbling chariots, and the grace of the helmeted charioteers; the splendor
of the cars and the magnificence of the paintings with which they were
adorned; the ecstasy of all this glittering, shining, gorgeous pageantry
needed even more than walking on your hands to express.