With that bird-like shyness so winning in a really beautiful little girl, May walked up to the stranger and made a funny, hesitating courtesy. He looked at her askance, his smiling face shooting forth a ray of tenderness along with a gleam of shrewd suspicion, as he made out the album in her dimpled little hand.
"Good morning, little one," he said cheerily. "Have you come to make a call?"
He held out both hands and looked so kindly and good that she smiled until dimples just like her mother's played over her cheeks and chin. Half sidewise she crept into his arms and held up the book.
"Pleathe write your photograph in my book," she murmured.
He took her very gently on his knee, chuckling vigorously, his heavy jaws shaking and coloring.
"Who told you to come?" he inquired, with a guilty cunning twinkle in his gray eyes.
Again the man chuckled, and, between the shame he felt for having betrayed the child and delight at the success of his perfidy, he grew quite red in the face. He took the autograph album and turned its stiff, ragged-edged leaves, glancing at the names.
"Ah, this is your mama's book, is it?" he went on.
He took from his pocket a stylographic pen and dashed a picturesque sign manual across a page.
While the ink was drying he tenderly kissed the child's forehead and then rested his chin on her bright hair. He could hear the clack of balls and mallets and the creak of a lazy swing down below on the so-called lawn, and a hum of voices arose from the veranda. He looked through the open window and saw, as in a dream, blue peaks set against a shining rim of sky with a wisp of vultures slowly wheeling about in a filmy, sheeny space.
"Mama said I muthn't stay," apologized the child, slipping down from his knee, which she had found uncomfortably short.
He pulled himself together from a diffused state of revery and beamed upon her again with his cheerful smile.
She turned near the door and dropped another comical little courtesy, bobbing her curly head till her hair twinkled like a tangle of starbeams on a brook-ripple, then she darted away, book in hand.
Little Mrs. Philpot snatched the album from May, as she ran to her, and greedily rustled the leaves in search of the new record, finding which she gazed at it while her face irradiated every shade of expression between sudden delight and utter perplexity. In fact she could not decipher the autograph, although the handwriting surely was not bad. Loath as she naturally was to sharing her secret with her friends, curiosity at length prevailed and she sought help. Everybody in turn tried to make out the two short words, all in vain till Crane, by the poet's subtle vision, cleared up the mystery, at least to his own satisfaction.