think so," he said. "What a terrible din everybody is making! How hot and stifling it is here – with all those cloying gardenias… A man said, this evening, that this sort of thing makes for anarchy… It's rather beastly of me to sit here criticising my host's magnificence… Do you know – it's curious, too – but I wish that, for the next hour or two, you and I were somewhere alone under a good wide sky – where there was no noise. It's an odd idea, isn't it, Mrs. Leeds. And probably you don't share it with me."
She remained silent, thoughtful, her violet-gray eyes humorously considering him.
"How do you know I don't?" she said at last. "I'm not enamoured of noise, either."
"There's another thing," he went on, smiling – "it's rather curious, too – but somehow I've a sort of a vague idea that I've a lot of things to talk to you about. It's odd, isn't it?"
"Well you know," she reminded him, "you couldn't very well have a lot of things to talk to me about considering the fact that we've known each other only an hour or so."
"It doesn't seem logical… And yet, there's that inexplicable sensation of being on the verge of fairly bursting into millions of words for your benefit – words which all my life have been bottled up in me, accumulating, waiting for this opportunity."
They both were laughing, yet already a slight tension threatened both – had menaced them, vaguely, from the very first. It seemed to impend ever so slightly, like a margin of faintest shadow edging sunlight; yet it was always there.
"I haven't time for millions of words this evening," she said. "Won't some remain fresh and sparkling and epigrammatic until – until – "
"To-morrow? They'll possibly keep that long."
"I didn't say to-morrow."
"I did."
"I'm perfectly aware of the subtle suggestion and subtler flattery, Mr. Quarren."
"Then, may I see you to-morrow?"
"Utterly impossible – pitiably hopeless. You see I am frank about the heart-rending disappointment it is to me – and must be to you. But after I am awake I am in the hands of Mrs. Lannis. And there's no room for you in that pretty cradle."
"The next day, then?"
"We're going to Florida for three weeks."
"You?"
"Molly and Jim and I."
"Palm Beach?"
"Ultimately."
"And then?"
"Oh! Have you the effrontery to tell me to my face that you'll be in the same mind about me three weeks hence?"
"I have."
"Do you expect me to believe you?"
"I don't know – what to expect – of you, of myself," he said so quietly that she looked up quickly.
"Mr. Quarren! Are you a sentimental man? I had mentally absolved you from that preconception of mine – among other apparently unmerited ideas concerning you."
"I suppose you'll arise and flee if I tell you that you're different from other women," he said.
"You wouldn't be such an idiot as to tell me that, would you?"
"I might be. I'm just beginning to realise my capacity for imbecility. You're different in this way anyhow; no woman ever before induced me to pull a solemn countenance."
"I don't induce you! I ask you not to."
"I try not to; but, somehow, there's something so – so real about you– "
"Are you accustomed to foregather with the disembodied?"
"I'm beginning to think that my world is rather thickly populated with ghosts – phantoms of a more real world."
He looked at her soberly; she had thought him younger than he now seemed. A slight irritation silenced her for a moment, then, impatiently:
"You speak cynically and I dislike it. What reason have you to express world-weary sentiments? – you who are young, who probably have never known real sorrow, deep unhappiness! I have little patience with a morbid view of anything, Mr. Quarren. I merely warn you – in the event of your ever desiring to obtain my good graces."
"I do desire them."
"Then be yourself."
"I don't know what I am. I thought I knew. Your advent has disorganised both my complacency and my resignation."
"What do you mean?"
"Must I answer?"
"Of course!" she said, laughing.
"Then – the Harlequin who followed you up those stairs, never came down again."
"Oh!" she said, unenlightened.
"I'm wondering who it was who came down out of that balcony in the wake of the golden dancer," he added.
"You and I – you very absurd young man. What are you trying to say?"
"I – wonder," he said, smiling, "what I am trying to say."
CHAPTER III
Sunshine illuminated the rose-silk curtains of Mrs. Leeds's bedroom with parallel slats of light and cast a frail and tremulous net of gold across her bed. The sparrows in the Japanese ivy seemed to be unusually boisterous, and their persistent metallic chatter disturbed Strelsa who presently unclosed her gray eyes upon her own reflected features in the wall-glass opposite.
Face still flushed with slumber, she lay there considering her mirrored features with humorous, sleepy eyes; then she sat up, stretched her arms, yawned, patted her red lips with her palm, pressed her knuckles over her eyelids, and presently slipped out of bed. Her bath was ready; so was her maid.
A little later, cross-legged on the bed once more, she sat sipping her chocolate and studying the morning papers with an interest and satisfaction unjaded.
Coupled with the naïve curiosity of a kitten remained her unspoiled capacity for pleasure, and the interest of a child in a world unfolding daily in a sequence of miracles under her intent and delighted eyes.
Bare of throat and arm and shoulder, the lustrous hair shadowing her face, she now appeared unexpectedly frail, even thin, as though the fuller curves of the mould in which she was being formed had not yet been filled up.
Fully dressed, gown and furs lent to her something of a youthful maturity which was entirely deceptive; for here, in bed, the golden daylight revealed childish contours accented so delicately that they seemed almost sexless. And in her intent gray eyes and in her undeveloped mind was all that completed the bodily and mental harmony – youth unawakened as yet except to a confused memory of pain – and the dreamy and passionless unconsciousness of an unusually late adolescence.
At twenty-four Strelsa still looked upon her morning chocolate with a healthy appetite; and the excitement of seeing her own name and picture in the daily press had as yet lost none of its delightful thrill.
All the morning papers reported the Wycherlys' house-warming with cloying detail. And she adored it. What paragraphs particularly concerned herself, her capable maid had enclosed in inky brackets. These Strelsa read first of all, warm with pleasure at every stereotyped tribute to her loveliness.
The comments she perused were of all sorts, even the ungrammatical sort, but she read them all with profound interest, and loved every one, even the most fulsome. For life, and its kinder experience, was just beginning for her after a shabby childhood, a lonely girlhood, and a marriage unspeakable, the memory of which already had become to her as vaguely poignant as the dull recollection of a nightmare.
So her appetite for kindness, even the newspaper variety, was keen and not at all discriminating; and the reaction from two years' solitude – two years of endurance, of shrinking from public comment – had developed in her a fierce longing for pleasure and for play-fellows. Her fellow-men had responded with an enthusiasm which still surprised her delightfully at moments.
The clever Swedish maid now removed