The duck-hunters left that night. One after another the four gentlemen came over to speak to Athalie and to her sisters. There was some confusion and crowding in the hallway, what with the doctor, the undertaker's assistants, neighbours, and the New York duck-hunters. Ledlie ventured to overcharge them on the bill. As nobody objected he regretted his moderation. However, the taking off of Greensleeve helped business in the bar where sooner or later everybody drifted. When the four-seated livery wagon drove up to take the gunning party to the train, the boy lingered behind the others and then hurried back to where Athalie was standing, white-faced, tearless, staring at the closed door of the room where they had taken her father. Bailey Junior's touch on her arm made her turn: "I am sorry," he said. "I hope you will not be very unhappy.... And--here is a Christmas present--" He took the dazed child's icy little hand in his, and, fumbling the business rather awkwardly, he finally contrived to snap a strap-watch over the delicate wrist. It was the one he had been wearing. "Good-bye, Athalie," he murmured, very red. The girl gazed at him out of her lovely confused eyes for a moment. But when she tried to speak no sound came. "Good-bye," he said again, choking slightly. "I'll surely, surely come back to see you. Don't be unhappy. I'll come." But it was many years before he returned to the Hotel Greensleeve. CHAPTER IV She was fifteen years old before she saw him again. His strap-watch was still on her wrist; his memory, unfaded, still enshrined in her heart of a child, for she was as yet no more than that at fifteen. And the moment she saw him she recognised him. It was on the Sixth Avenue Elevated Station at Twenty-third Street one sunny day in April; he stood waiting for the downtown train which she stepped out of when it stopped. He did not notice her, so she went over to him and called him by name; and the tall, good-looking, fashionably dressed young fellow turned to her without recognition. But the next instant his smooth, youthful face lighted up, and off came his hat with the gay college band adorning it: "Athalie Greensleeve!" he exclaimed, showing his pleasure unmistakably. "C. Bailey, Junior," she rejoined as steadily as she could, for her heart was beating wildly with the excitement of meeting him and her emotions were not under full control. "You have grown so," he said with the easy, boyish cordiality of his caste, "I didn't recognise you for a moment. Tell me, do you still live down--er--down there?" She said: "I knew you as soon as I set eyes on you. You are very much taller, too.... No, we went away from Spring Pond the year after my father died."