"I am only lending it to you, remember that, for you will give it to me with your heart's love, Dita, and soon."
She was roused from her reverie by the sound of a motor stopping without. Her maid waited to place a black and gold wrap about her shoulders. "One moment," said Dita. Quickly she slipped the amulet on a thin, old-fashioned gold chain and fastened it about her throat. Then she went downstairs to greet her husband.
Commonplaces of the most conventional and banal order they talked. Nothing else on the drive to the restaurant, nothing else on first taking their seats at the table on one side of the great garish room. There were many curious eyes on them, necks craned, the incredulous whisper ran:
"Mr. and Mrs. Cresswell Hepworth actually together! What does it mean!"
The stereotyped babbling went on intermittently, until dinner had been ordered and the earlier courses come and gone, and then Dita suddenly awoke to the fact that her husband had taken the conversation into his own hands and was actually talking to her. Oh, of course, he had often talked to her before, arranged new amusements for her, discussed what jewels she would like, what plays she would care to see, what people interested her most, what journey she would enjoy.
But now, she almost caught her breath at the surprise of it, he was talking to her as if she were a man, or at least an intelligent human being and not just merely—a pretty woman.
He was talking straight ahead, discussing business matters, several interesting problems which had come up in his affairs during his recent western sojourn. He did not pause to explain anything to her, quite took it for granted that she would understand. He did not apparently stop to consider whether she was interested or amused, and that pleased her enormously. She began to ask questions, and he answered them fully, even pondering some of them carefully before replying. One he considered for a moment or so and then said: "Do you know, I had not thought of that before, that puts a new phase upon the whole situation." Her strand of rubies had never given Dita such a glow of pride and pleasure.
"Ah, why have you never talked to me like this before?" she asked naïvely. "Think of all the stupid dinners we've eaten together when you treated me like a tiresome little girl who had to be continually amused, and I was one, too; as tongue-tied and missish as anything, because you took it for granted that I was."
"No one could accuse you of being either tongue-tied or missish to-night. You are quite matronly in that black gown."
"Oh, I love to hear about the big things that go on," she said enthusiastically, if irrelevantly, "but men will never talk to me about them. All my life, whenever I'd try really to talk sense to a man, he'd say, 'What wonderful eyes you have,' showing that he hadn't heard one word I'd been saying. They always seem to think that I expect them to tell me how lovely I am. It's the curse of the pretty woman."
"Oh, well, console yourself," he said carelessly. "There are prettier women in the world than you, quantities of them!"
"I—I—suppose so." Dita had rarely been so taken aback. She looked at him a moment like some insulted queen. His eyes, however, were discreetly downcast. "Oh, of course," she said as quickly as she could recover her breath, "of course," her laugh was forced and rang hollowly.
"Oh, yes, don't let your beauty get on your nerves. The world is full of beautiful women. My new amulet—I told you that I had a new one, did I not?—was given me by one of the most beautiful women I ever saw. I have her picture somewhere. I must show it to you."
Mr. Cresswell Hepworth was entirely without design in his choice of topics. He had spoken of some of his great western enterprises because his mind had been more or less occupied with them during the day, and had been so surprised and pleased that these subjects had gained his wife's interests that he had continued the discussion of them. Again, in his seeming disparagement of her beauty, he had merely thought to console her for what she regarded as the constant belittling of her mental endowment, evidently a sore spot in her consciousness.
Dita played with her fork a moment without answering his last remark. She had no right to feel either resentment or irritation. Her sense of justice assured her of that, but she suffered a twinge of both emotions, nevertheless.
"Wallace Martin tells me that good old Hewston made an awful scene when those distorted pictures of Fuschia Fleming and myself appeared in the paper." Hepworth laughed more heartily than usual.
"Oh, do not mention that unspeakable old creature!" she cried petulantly. "Tell me of more interesting things."
"Dita," he spoke to her more earnestly, more self-revealingly she felt than he had ever done before, "I am going to tell you something. When I went west last winter, it was not alone because I was called thither by various business affairs, but because, after thinking the matter all over, I definitely decided that the only thing for me to do was to relieve you of my presence. I was convinced that, although you might not be fully conscious of it, still in the depths of your heart you really loved Gresham. I was also convinced that I loved you infinitely, and that it was quite beyond my power to interest you. But since my return I find myself at sea. The moment I saw you I saw the difference in you, the change that made me revise my former crude, stupid estimates of you. I realize that you are the sort of woman who must have an object, a purpose in life, an expression; in fact, that you set little store by the beauty others praise extravagantly, because it has always been yours. You value it no more than one values the sun and wind. It is achievement that fascinates you, isn't it?"
"Ah, yes, but I had failed, you know, and I was afraid to try again. I knew that you were doing big things, but you never would talk of them to me, and I thought that you considered me too stupid to understand them."
"Dita, how blindly we have misunderstood each other. Is it too late?" He whispered the words as he put her wrap about her shoulders, his voice ardent, impassioned as she had never heard it.
She cast one astonished, almost frightened glance upon him. Then, as in a daze, a dream, walked down the room, never seeing the admiring eyes that everywhere met her. She might have been in the desert, as far as they were concerned.
As the door of the motor closed on them a panic of shyness seized her. "You, you spoke of your new amulet," she said, snatching at a topic. "Have you it with you?"
"Yes. But I do not know whether you can get a very good idea of it in these shifting lights."
He took the case from his pocket and, lifting out the ornament, gave it into her hands. It was fashioned of half a dozen uncut diamonds in a setting of the most delicate and exquisite filigree.
"Old Spanish, you see," he said.
"Beautiful!" she exclaimed, turning it over and looking at it more closely. But the attention she was bestowing upon it was a mere seeming. She was thinking, or rather attempting to think, but her heart was fluttering wildly, her whole impulsive nature seemed to impel her to the action she was meditating.
"Cresswell," she lifted a face white as a snowdrop to his, "will you make an exchange with me? Will you give me this amulet and take mine?"
"Perdita!" he cried, "you do not—" his voice broke.
"Yes, I do," she exclaimed, "it is not a wild whim, a caprice on my part. I have been thinking about it all day, ever since this morning."
"This morning!" sharply; looking at her keenly, quickly. "Ah," with a long breath, "it was this morning that Hewston drove poor Isabel to your house to prevent the duel between Gresham and myself." He laughed, but it was dreary mirth. "Hewston is a most imaginative fellow. I have a railway deal on which I spoke of to him as a duel. And so, you were going to sacrifice yourself in order to make quite sure that I would spare Eugene. Oh, rest content, Perdita. He is quite safe from my poignard or pistol. Never fear."
It seemed to her that the satire in his voice bit into her soul. With a great gasp of relief she realized that the car had stopped before her door. "Oh, take your amulet," she cried, "since you will not have mine." She almost threw it at him.
He thought that she was angry and sullen as she walked up the steps and into the house without a word to him, and with the barest inclination of the head. In reality, she was striving hard to control her sobs.
The hour which Dita had set for her appointment with Cresswell Hepworth was twelve the next morning, consequently she was not only surprised but perturbed when Eugene's name was brought to her a little after eleven.
He looked haggard, she thought, as if he had not slept, but his eyes were brighter than usual.
"Good morning, Queen of the May," he cried, coming forward to take both her hands in his as she came through the doorway. "Did you know, by the way, that this is May day? Ah," his eyes fastening themselves on the crystal amulet gleaming against her white gown, "you have it still. That was what disturbed me and drove slumber from my eyelids during the long night. He is a strong man, a very able and masterful man and he wants that amulet and you, Dita, and I feared—oh, you know how things appear in the dead of night, what monstrous and fantastic ideas come to one."
"You might have saved your fears and your fancies," she answered with a delicately ironical smile. "He does not want me. He would, I think, like the amulet. Nevertheless, he declined it."
"Then you offered it to him? Really!"
"Yes," the irony still in her voice. "You were a better prophet than you dreamed, Eugene, you predicted exactly what happened. I offered it to him and he declined." Her voice faltered.
"Naturally," laughing, "what else could he do under the circumstances? Even he, with all a collector's greed, would hardly care for a gift which is supposed to be invariably accompanied by the heart's love of the donor. He knew, poor wretch, that all he was getting was the bit of glass, while the heart's love was mine, for ever and ever mine."
His voice sank to those musical cadences which ever prove so enthralling to the ear. And Dita, who loved music and beauty and romance, smiled dreamily. But doubt, like a shadow, lay in her eyes and about her mouth.
"No," she cried, "oh, I do not know, Eugene. When I am with you, you throw a glamour over me. I believe that I am just on the eve of loving you—that any minute you will say the word which will make me fully realize that I do, but as soon as you leave me, Eugene, the moment passes."
"It is because you are perplexed, worried about this other matter, that is all, dearest. When that is settled and you are free, then I will sweep away at once and for ever all these doubts in your mind, sweep them away as if they were cobwebs."
"Will you? Perhaps," but she shook her head as if only half convinced. "Hush! What is that! I think it was the bell of the outer door. You must go at once, Eugene. Cresswell was to be here at twelve o'clock. It must be quite that now."
"And I have no desire to meet him." He picked up his hat. "I will step through the little back room into the hall, and thence out. I dare say you and he have some final arrangements to make. Is that it, eh?"
She nodded, but without looking at him. Her face had grown very pale and the hand which she placed on the tall back of a chair to steady herself trembled a little.
Her ears had not deceived her, it was Hepworth's ring—and the echo of Eugene's retreating footsteps had barely died away before a maid drew a curtain and Hepworth crossed the threshold.
If he upon his arrival had at once noticed a subtle but marked change in Perdita, she now was struck by an equally vital and informing alteration in him. He had always seemed to her before as one who leaned back in an automobile and merely dictated the directions the chauffeur was to take, but now he was the man who was driving his car himself, at unlawful speed, and keeping quite cool and collected during the performance.
He took the chair opposite the one in which she had seated herself, and she noticed a flicker of a smile across his face as his eye caught the amulet hung about her neck, a tender, humorous, sad little smile.
"Yes, I am still wearing it," she said, as if in answer to some question of his, "and I have had the box containing the others brought down here. It is there on that table in the corner." She spoke with a bravado which only half concealed her embarrassment.
He glanced toward it indifferently. "Then we will fasten my new one in the space left vacant by yours," his swift, delightful smile came and went, transforming his face for the moment like a gleam of sunlight, but although brilliant, it was sad, sad as all regret, and Dita, seeing it, felt some wild, momentary impulse to beseech forgiveness, she could not tell exactly for what.
The amulet, her old bit of crystal, was swinging at the end of a long chain, and, a little embarrassed, she lifted it in her hand and gazed at it mechanically, turning it this way and that to catch the different reflections of light.
"Did you know that we are lawbreakers, you and I, Dita?" asked Hepworth with another smile, "meeting to discuss the details of a properly arranged divorce? Well, my dear, it will not rest particularly heavy on my conscience if it makes things easier for you in the least degree. Your lawyers will instruct you just what to do, but there is one matter which I wish to discuss with you personally, and that is some settlements.
"Why, Dita," breaking off sharply and starting to his feet, "what is the matter? Are you ill?"
Indeed he was justified in thinking so. She had grown white as snow. The color had left even her lips.
"No," she spoke with an effort, but she lifted her head, as if by main strength of will. "No," and he was infinitely relieved to see a bit of color creep back into her lips, but the eyes she courageously raised to his were dark with an emotion which he could only translate as fear or horror, he could not tell which.
"Have I offended you, then?" he murmured. "Believe me—"
"No, no," she insisted so definitely that he was forced to believe her. "It was something quite different. Something, something I just remembered."
She was manifestly so confused and disturbed that he did not press the point. It would have seemed both unkind and unwise to do so, and then, although her eyes still retained that curiously shocked, almost horror-stricken expression, the color had returned to her cheek.
"You were saying?" she began, her voice steady enough now. "Oh, yes, I remember, about the money." Those deep vibrations of emotion thrilled her tones. "Well, I won't have it. Won't touch it. I will not hear of settlements. I can make enough for my needs."
He lifted his eyes and looked at her quickly and then the eyelids almost closed. Perdita was under very close observation.
"Naturally, I do not for a moment dispute that. It is a fact already proven, but it is my wish to remove the necessity from you. Your occupation will then continue to be a source of amusement, of interest to you, but you will not feel that it is your sole dependence."
She shook her head with a sort of irrevocable gentleness with which he could not fail to be struck.
"No," she said, "it is really quite useless to discuss the matter. Truly, Cresswell, I will not even consider it."
"But, Dita," he began, then paused a moment as if to make a choice of arguments, desirous of using at once the most potent and evidently preparing to undermine and break down the barriers of her decision if it took a month.
She forestalled him, however, with a quick flank movement. She rose to her feet. "Cresswell," she said, "I promised you last night that I would discuss this matter with you this morning, but now," there was the least hesitation in her voice, "I am going to ask a favor. I dined with you last night, now will you dine with me to-night? Will you? There will only be Miss Fleming and her father, and she will just sit at the table a few minutes, she never dines before playing; Wallace Martin and Maud, and they are going somewhere, so you and I will have the leisure of a long evening to discuss all the pros and cons of this question, your side and mine. Will you come?"
She was looking at him so earnestly, there was something so strange in the depths of her dark eyes, that he felt tempted on the moment to beg an explanation of this postponement. Then, as quickly he relinquished it.
"I shall be delighted to come," he said heartily. "And if to-night you are in no mood to talk over dry details, we will put it off again until a more convenient season."
"No." Her tone was positive. "I am quite sure that we will come to one decision or another this evening. Good-by."
When the curtain at the door had fallen behind him, Dita sat down again. She did not seem to be thinking or mentally engaged in any way whatever. On the contrary, she seemed to be waiting, two or three minutes passed, five. Still she waited. Ah, a bitter smile hovered for one moment around her lips. Her whole tense figure relaxed a little as if the moment which she had so confidently expected had come.
There was the sound of the shutting of the outer door in the small room to the left, then a halting step across the bare and polished floor. Eugene's step. He paused a moment in the doorway leading into the larger room, but as Dita did not turn nor give any sign whatever of having heard him, he came on.
"Back again, you see," he said. "I saw Hepworth leaving the house just as I came about the corner up here, so I knew the coast was clear. May I sit down?"
For the first time Dita looked at him. He was unmistakably not of the same temper in which he had left her an hour before. The buoyancy and spring of him had vanished. His eyes were clouded, his mouth depressed, certain lines on his brow and about his mouth stood out more markedly than usual. In fact, he seemed to have halted midway in some mood between dismay and anger. And as Dita observed this, there again played about her mouth for one instant that same, sad, bitter, secretive smile.
She had leaned back in her chair as if prepared to remain some time, but she made no effort whatever to carry on a conversation or even to embark on one.
The frown deepened on Eugene's brow. This attitude on her part was evidently irritating to him.
"Everything settled, Dita, and satisfactorily?"
"What do you mean by satisfactorily?" she asked, letting a moment or two lapse between his question and her answer.
"I mean everything arranged in your favor," he replied with a short laugh. "He is rather sure to do that, you know. He likes to do things with the grand air."
"Oh, no, Eugene, it is you who like to affect the grand air. With him it is natural."
He looked up at her quickly. "It sounds, it sounds," he said, "as if you might possibly be on the verge of a sirocco. Don't Dita, I implore you. I am off the key myself."
"Why?" she asked.
He lifted his shoulders. "Ah, that I do not know."
"I refused any alimony, Eugene," she said abruptly.
"What! Oh, Dita, you must not! Why, it is the height of folly! My dear child, it is quixotic to the verge of idiocy." All his moodiness had vanished. He was arguing her case fervently enough now. "You have had your head turned by the success you and Maud have enjoyed in this venture this winter, but that is purely ephemeral. You were a fad, a novelty. How long do such things last in New York? And here is Hepworth willing and anxious to endow you with houses and lands. Dita," and never had she heard him plead his love with such fervor, "Dita, you must not ruin your whole life by a blind whim. You must listen to advice. You must be guided by your friends in this matter.
"It is true, of course," he continued, "that I make a very large income, but I lay nothing by. It is impossible. I must keep up an appearance—the painter prince, and all that sort of thing. It is expected of me. It is a part of my stock in trade."
"Then you consider, 'Gene," her voice was calmly, reassuringly reasonable now, "you consider that fully to enjoy life we must both possess more than an ordinarily large income?"
"Dearest Dita," he bent forward with his tenderest, most ingratiating smile, "do not for one moment mistake me. I think, I know we could be happy without a centime between us, but viewing life as it is lived and considering your tastes and my tastes, the mode of existence to which we have accustomed ourselves and all that, I think we, like most other people, would do well to avoid the perilous experiment of comparative poverty. Whether we wish to believe it or not, really to invest life with romance and interest and charm requires more than mere imagination, of which you and I possess an abundant store, Dita. It also requires money."
"It would require a great deal more than that for me, Eugene," she rose to her feet now and stood looking at him as if from mountain heights, so remote and distant she seemed. "Remember the old legend of my amulet,"—she lifted it and swung it to and fro as she talked,—"that sooner or later it would force the one who possessed it to reveal himself in his true character? Well, it has proved its ancient claim. You apparently possessed it long enough for it to force you to reveal your true self; or perhaps that was inevitable under any circumstances."
"What do you mean, Dita?" he, too, had sprung to his feet, and stood facing her, both fear and chagrin in his eyes.
"This," she flung out her hand with the amulet in it; "while I sat here talking to Cresswell, I was turning this square bit of crystal this way and that, watching it catch the light. Suddenly, as I held it between my thumb and forefinger, I saw you, it reflected you quite clearly. You thrust your head a little forward from the door, down there," indicating by a gesture the door at the lower end of the room, "anxious to hear the better what Cresswell was saying and quite sure from the position of our chairs that we could not see you. Then I sent him away and waited. I knew, I knew instinctively, that you would do just as you did, Eugene, and—so I waited. I knew that I should hear that outer door close, that I should hear you walk across the floor, I knew it."
The moments pulsed like heartbeats between them.
"I shall not deny it," he said at last, "but Dita, Dita, I did it for you. I felt that you would follow some quixotic course, which you would regret for a lifetime. I know so well your mad, impulsive recklessness. Oh, Dita," he stretched out his arms to her.
There was no responsive movement on her part. She stood mute, immovable, eyes downcast, as if she could not bear to look upon his humiliation.
The long chain had slipped through her fingers, and the amulet swung at the end of it, to and fro between herself and him, like the pendulum of an inflexible fate.
"Dita," his voice was irresistibly appealing, "you will not thrust me thus out of your heart, oh, not for this!"
"You never had a place in my heart, Eugene, I know that now."
She swept across the floor, but as she put up her hand to pull aside the curtain before the door, she paused. "I—I'm sorry, Eugene," she faltered and by an effort of will lifted her eyes to him at last.
But they fell neither on the shamed nor the conquered. His head was thrown back, his eyes met hers. He was smiling, and his smile held unfathomable things. It spoke of a spirit eternally young and yet which had felt the weary weight of all dead and crumbling centuries. It was sad, disillusioned, yet eagerly joyous. It had tasted all things and found them vanity, yet pursued an unending quest with infinite zest.
"Dear Dita," he murmured, "never doubt that I loved you, love you still, but as the artist loves, not the plodder. You or any woman can only be to him the 'shadow of the idol of his thought,' the mere symbol of beauty, but what he really loves, Dita, is beauty's self."
He spoke now with a sincerity almost stern. "You or all the world may think me false," his head lifted lightly, "it is nothing to me. To the one thing I know as truth I am eternally true. I really, fundamentally do not care that," he snapped his fingers, "for the rest of the show. I have always the dream and before me lies the great achievement. So out of your house, out of your life, out of your heart I go." He came near her as he spoke, his voice was like music. Before she knew it, his arms were about her and he was kissing her hair, where the copper shadows rippled into gold above her temple. "Beautiful and still loved Perdita! Good-by."
Perdita committed an unpardonable social sin that evening. She, the hostess, was late in her own house. In fact she had sent down word that they were to begin dinner without her.
The three of them then, Maud, Wallace Martin and Hepworth were sitting gazing at one another in a rather mournful and embarrassed fashion, when Mr. and Miss Fleming were announced. Fuschia had stipulated that she was only to remain with them until the appearance of the roast. That was the signal for her departure, the definite limit of her stay. She was due at the theater before eight and it was her custom never to eat anything before the evening performance. This was the first time any of the group had seen her since her tremendous success of a few evenings before.
"Hands up!" she called from the doorway, her gay, delicious voice pealing through the room, "hands up, I say," making an imaginary pistol of her thumb and forefinger and covering the three. "I don't want either your money or your life, but I do insist upon seeing who has blisters on his hands. I shall accept no other proof of friendship."
Hepworth and Martin promptly held up their hands. "I'm entitled to first honors," said Hepworth, "I've sprained both wrists, can't write my signature and have to have my food cut up for me."
"My hands," said Wallace Martin proudly, "are trained. They no longer show wear and tear. You could drive a dagger against them and it would splinter harmlessly. From long practice in trying to make my own plays go by virtue of my own applause they have acquired the substance and fiber of hickory."
"But dear Miss Fleming," cried Maud, "I deserve more credit than they, for I recklessly sacrificed my most beautiful fan. When the curtain went down for the last time and we climbed off our seats and stopped howling, I held in my hand a limp shred of something and discovered that I had beaten my poor, exquisite, fragile fan to bits."
Fuschia's eyes were full of starry twinkles, her smile was a revelation of joyousness. She drew a long, ecstatic breath, "Boys and girls, it was nice, wasn't it?"
"Nice!" exclaimed Hepworth pushing a chair forward for her, "Nice! Is that the only word you can find to express your pleasure in the fact that the curtain rose thirty times amid continuous cheers, and New York simply took you to her heart and hugged you?"
"Good old New York! She knew her own little Fuschia by the strawberry mark on her left arm, didn't she? I heard Caruso sing for the first time the other afternoon, and when they asked me afterward how I liked it, I said I only knew of one thing more heavenly and that was the sound of a great audience clapping and shouting. There's no music like that."
Dinner was announced, and Maud, with a slightly worried expression, began explaining to Fuschia that Perdita had been detained; but as they moved toward the door, Hepworth noticed that Fleming had not stirred from the remote corner he had sought upon entering the room.
"Jim, what is the matter?" said Hepworth with some concern; "you haven't interrupted Fuschia once since she came in and you know it's always a neck and neck race between you to see which can talk the faster?"
"He's been asleep," said Fuschia, taking her seat at the table. "Poor papa! the gay life, you know!"
Fleming eyed her indignantly across the bank of primroses in the center of the board. "The gay life! I've had no sleep since I struck New York, that's true. I've had to keep going, and take these poor little pick-me-ups of cat-naps whenever I can get them; but why? For a week before this great first night, I had to sit up with Fuschia and hold her hand and tell her what an unparalleled success she was going to have and then that night, after all the excitement and anxiety I suffered as her father, and the exhaustion incident upon being firstclaqueur, why she drove me out into the cold, damp, rainy streets with one of your New York blizzards just setting in, to buy her the first morning papers, and since then I've had to celebrate her triumph. I'll tell you what it is, friends, I'm a raveled sleeve of care and no kind sleep to knit me up."
"Do you know what has really happened?" said Fuschia, in calm explanation. "Dear papa can't help putting in those Dumas and Poe touches, but come to me for the straight truth. It's really the funniest thing about papa. His luck always comes right along with mine. Now what do you think?"
"He's made a million since he came to New York," said Wallace Martin.
"Lost the other fellow's million, you mean," said Hepworth with feeling.
"Wrong. It's the most unexpected thing you ever dreamed of," Fuschia's voice was triumphant, "papa's got a social success. Yes," nodding impressively, "just look at him closely and you'll see that he's lost his natural, unconscious man-look. He now has a drawing-room-pet expression and he's wearing his hair differently, and throwing out his chest. Oh, you needn't laugh, Mr. Hepworth, it's true. 'Hyperion curls, the front of Jove himself.' When we were coming on I determined that I would always be very kind to papa. I'd never neglect nor ignore him, no matter how famous I became; but, of course, he'd just be Fuschia Fleming's father. But what are the real facts of the case? Father sits in the seats of the mighty, flattered by great ladies and avoids mention of his humble actress daughter. King Cophetua and the chorus girl!"
"I had to come to New York to find out that the feminine boycott against me wasn't complete," said Mr. Fleming with emotion. "I tell you, Hep, it's a wonderful experience suddenly to realize that the entire crew of petticoats the world over don't look at you as if they all had glass eyes in their heads instead of real ones."
"How do you account for it, Jim?" asked Hepworth.
"From camp to court, my boy, has ever been but a step, although sometimes it's a mighty long one," returned Fleming oratorically. "Now this is the way I've explained it to myself. You see, I've got that wild, free, above-timber-line flavor about me that simply locos the type of woman that keeps husband hobbled to a stake under the big tree by the back porch where she can keep an eye on him from the kitchen windows. Now, personally, the catnip and parsley kind of woman never did appeal to me; but these New York orchids are different. They know how to appreciate the Rocky Mountain edelweiss, and seem grateful to me for taking their husbands off their hands now and then. And they're so interested, too, in the little every-day incidents of an old prospector's life."
"You just ought to hear papa Othelloize those Ophelias," said Fuschia, deftly seizing the first opportunity to get into the conversation. "He'll tell them about being carried down a thousand feet in a mighty snowslide and escaping unhurt, and of the fabulous properties he's discovered, and of frequent encounters with enormous grizzlies, where he'll tap them lightly on the jaw and advise them to hasten home and then if they get too familiar, he gives them a twist of the wrist that sends them howling back to the woods."
"Fuschia," said her father sternly, "you talk entirely too much, and there's a day of reckoning coming for you. Just wait till you get to London. There you'll be sneaking in at the back door and eating a cold biscuit in the pantry while you're waiting to do a few recitations for the ladies and gentlemen; while I'll be sailing in to dinner with a belted earless on one arm and a tiaraed duchess on the other."
"I'm afraid I see your finish, Jim," sighed Hepworth. "You'll end as a leader of cotillions. Your head is badly turned."
"There's no denying, Hep, that we are apt to set and undue value on what we've never had, and these late-blooming feminine smiles are like a bottle of champagne in the desert."
"Oh, dear, here is the roast," cried Fuschia disconsolately, "and Cinderella must run away. Is there no hope of seeing Mrs. Hepworth this evening?" turning to Maud.
Maud hesitated a moment, then, "I really do not know," she confessed frankly, "she—she has not been particularly well all day." She simply could not plead for Perdita the conventional bad headache while Hepworth's steady eyes were fixed upon her.
Fuschia, who happened to be looking at him, saw a quick shade of disappointment pass over his face, and her impulsive sympathy was roused by the depth and poignancy of that immediately suppressed emotion. She threw herself into the breach.
"Oh, I want dreadfully to see her to-night about the gown I am to wear when I play the scheming adventuress next week. We were to have decided it to-night. She is thinking of putting me in green instead of the usual black with touches of scarlet, and the accustomed badge of the adventuress, high-heeled scarlet slippers. And I am so anxious to know if Mrs. Hepworth has decided upon green, a wonderful, wicked, dazzling green, with strange blue lights in the shadows. Oh, may I send a message and ask her to see me just a moment?"
But before Maud could answer, Perdita entered the room. She pleaded the usual headache, which Maud had so carefully avoided, and that threadbare social fiction was for once upheld and substantiated. Dita's appearance fully bore it out. Her face was pale, her eyes heavy. She promised, however, to give a full consideration to the question of Fuschia's green gown the next morning, and the actress who had already overstayed the limits of the time she had allotted herself prepared to take her departure.
"Oh," she cried from the door, "I forgot to announce my two important bits of good news. Mr. Martin is going to write me a comedy and Eugene Gresham is going to paint my portrait."
A faint smile hovered for one moment about Perdita's lips. "When did Eugene make his request?" she asked in her usual low tones, although her head lifted suddenly.
"This afternoon," replied Fuschia, and Dita's smile deepened. "And he is going to give me a fête in his studio."
"The usual ball in the artist's studio?" laughed Maud looking at Martin.
"Don't you dream it," Fuschia laughed irrepressibly, also; "not the stage kind with its crowd of maskers. This is to be patterned after an afternoon among the great artists in Japan. You wear Japanese things and crawl through a little door into a room with nothing in it but just one perfect flower in a perfect vase, and we will all sit on the floor and drink tea."
"It sounds very much like him," said Maud, "but is it true Wallace that you are really going to do a play for Miss Fleming?"
"It happily is," said Martin, "a comedy."
"Not a problem play?" The light of hope dawned in Miss Carmine's eyes.
"Oh, dear me, no," cried Fuschia; "and he's going to write it just as he talks."
"I'd very much prefer to have you talk it as I write," said Martin, but she had already vanished.
In a very few minutes the others followed her example, Fleming leaving the house with Maud and Wallace.
Scarcely had the hall door closed behind them when Hepworth turned to Dita inquiringly. "Would you not very much prefer that I left you?" he asked. "I can see that you are not well, and we can discuss anything that remains to be talked over at any other time."
"No," she shook her head, "I am quite well. I have not even the headache I claimed, and I must, indeed I must, talk to you to-night."
"But if our conversation this morning so upset and unnerved you," he urged, "would it not be wise to defer this?"
"Our conversation didn't," she replied with emphasis. "It was another conversation. Cresswell, will you answer me a question or two?"
"Anything you wish to know," he replied.
She got up, and, after a fashion she sometimes showed, perhaps unconsciously copied from him, began to walk restlessly up and down, occasionally stopping to pick up and examine some ornament quite as if she had never happened to notice it before.
She had picked up a small jade vase from the mantelpiece and was now bestowing upon it what appeared to be an exhaustive observation. In reality she was hardly conscious that she held it in her hand.
"Cresswell, why did you marry me?"
He started ever so slightly and then answered unhesitatingly, "Because I loved you, Dita."
A little spasm of some emotion he could not fathom passed over her face. "It was not because you wished to see how the flower blooming in a tin can in a tenement window would bloom in a wonderful lacquered vase in a marble court? It was not from curiosity or pity, Cresswell?"
"It was love, Dita."
Again that wave of emotion over her face, and then she looked about her with sad, tear-wet eyes and a trembling mouth.
"And my caprices, my stupidity, my inadequacy, soon destroyed that?"
"Never," he repeated. "Believe that. I was no gardener trying experiments. It was the flower I loved, Dita; the flower whose happiness I longed for, whose happiness I still long for. You do not need my love, do not care for it, why should you? But give me the happiness of still being able to assure for you the marble courts and the lacquered vases."
The little jade vase dropped from her fingers and fell unheeded to the rug at her feet. The tears were pouring now, down her white face. She made no effort either to conceal or to staunch them.
"Ah, blind and wasteful creature that I am!" she cried. "Why, why should you have chosen to love me?"
She stepped toward him and with both hands unwound the slender old-fashioned gold chain from her throat. She lifted her face, quivering, broken with feeling, and still streaming with tears, to his. She held out the amulet toward him. "Cresswell," poignantly, "will you take this now, my old talisman, with my heart's love?"
He made one quick movement as if to take her in his arms and hold her close, close to his heart for ever. His face was irradiated, his cold eyes glowed with a warmth and fire that more mercurial and mutable natures can never know.
Then the light went out of his eyes and face. It did not fade, it was as if it were extinguished by some strong effort of will. His arms fell to his sides.
"My dear, my dear," his voice trembled, "how like your sweet, generous, prodigal nature! I see it all now, the reason for your pallor and heavy eyes. You have spent the day, since I left you this morning, in accusing and denouncing yourself until you have reached the frame of mind where you can only appease your offended and tyrannical conscience by some act of high sacrifice. And do you think I would accept it, poor, heroic, overwrought Dita? All day," that swift, flashing, heart-breaking smile of his gleamed a moment, "you have been convicting yourself of ingratitude, merely because I was offering you some of my money with the entirely selfish motive of securing my own happiness."
"You are wrong, wrong," she cried vehemently, passionately. "What can I do to convince you? Oh, of course, you think that I am a creature of moods; you have every reason to think so; but what can I do, what can I say to convince you that I am not speaking from one of them now?"
"Say nothing, dearest," he murmured deeply, soothingly; "say no more. I shall always remember the sweetness of this moment."
"But I will not have it so," she cried. "You must, you must listen to me. You think that I love Eugene, that I have always loved Eugene. And I did not know, I did not know what love was. Eugene is charming and famous, and there was a sympathy between us, on one side of our natures. We have the same love of color. It is a passion with us. It spells music and poetry and all sorts of untranslatable things. It is something instinctive with us, something we were born with and we see shades and harmonies and values that other people do not. But this absolute understanding between us was only on one side of our natures, and yet sometimes it was so—so encompassing that I thought it embraced them all. So I did not know my own mind. I was puzzled, confused, always in doubt. And then, when I began really to—to flirt with Eugene, or so people construed it, it was when I was beginning to be bored with my marble court and my lacquered vase. I got so bored with being amused, just amused all the time."
"Ah, that was where I made my great, my unforgivable mistake," he interrupted.
"Yes, you made a mistake, in not letting me know you as you really are," she conceded, "but then, with all the boredom, I had that sense of futility, of failure behind me. Failure behind and nothing to look forward to but an endless succession of marble courts. No beautiful, dazzling unexpected. Just the same thing over and over and over. And then you went away and for a time I was frightened and forlorn, so Maud and I started our venture. Ah!" she clasped her hands together, the amulet dangling on its chain, "I have told you what work and success meant to me. You understand that; but gradually, as I got used to it, I began to see that it wasn't enough. No," she shook her head sadly, "it wasn't enough—there must be love. But I had got the idea into my head that it was Eugene who would speak the magic word, that magic word that I believed in and waited for. Yet all, all the time, from the moment you left me, you were in my thoughts. You see," with a faint smile, "I understood Eugene, but you were the unsolvable problem. I was always thinking about you, trying to understand you, and last night," her face glowed with a lovely light, "when you talked to me of the big, wonderful things, when you made me feel that I was an intelligent human being and not merely a pretty woman, why, my whole heart went out to you and I knew it was you, you alone that I loved. It is not the man who can conquer a city, many cities, with his grace and charm and genius. Not he who can win my poor heart, but the man who can conquer his own spirit. Ah, Cresswell," she held out the amulet again to him, "will you not take this now?" "Perdita!" he cried deeply and held her close.