Hastings answered, “I shall be at the studio all day, and I imagine I shall be glad enough to come back at night.”
Mr. Bladen, who, at a salary of fifteen dollars a week, acted as agent for the Pewly Manufacturing Company of Troy, NY , smiled a sceptical smile and withdrew to keep an appointment with a customer on the Boulevard Magenta.
Hastings walked into the garden with Mrs. Byng and Susie, and, at their invitation, sat down in the shade before the iron gate.
The chestnut trees still bore their fragrant spikes of pink and white, and the bees hummed among the roses, trellised on the white-walled house.
A faint freshness was in the air. The watering carts moved up and down the street, and a clear stream bubbled over the spotless gutters of the Rue de la Grande Chaumière. The sparrows were merry along the curbstones, taking bath after bath in the water and ruffling their feathers with delight. In a walled garden across the street a pair of blackbirds whistled among the almond trees.
Hastings swallowed the lump in his throat, for the song of the birds and the ripple of water in a Paris gutter brought back to him the sunny meadows of Millbrook.
“That’s a blackbird,” observed Miss Byng; “see him there on the bush with pink blossoms. He’s all black except his bill, and that looks as if it had been dipped in an omelet, as some Frenchman says—”
“Why, Susie!” said Mrs. Byng.
“That garden belongs to a studio inhabited by two Americans,” continued the girl serenely, “and I often see them pass. They seem to need a great many models, mostly young and feminine—”
“Why, Susie!”