"Is he really so good, I wonder?" Sophy asked pensively.
"I do not know," Louise sighed. "I only know that when I first talked to him, he seemed different from any man I have ever spoken with in my life. I suppose there are few temptations up there, and they keep nearer to the big things. Sometimes I wonder, Sophy, if it was not very wrong of me to draw him away from it all!"
"Rubbish!" Sophy declared. "If he is good, he can prove it and know it here. He will come to know the truth about himself. Besides, it isn"t everything to possess the standard virtues. Louise, he will be here in a minute. You want to be left alone with him. What are you going to say when he asks you what you know he will ask you?"
Louise looked down at her.
"Dear," she said, "I wish I could tell you. I do not know. That is the strange, troublesome part of it--I do not know!"
"Will you promise me something?" Sophy begged. "Promise me that if I stay in here quietly until after he has gone, you will come and tell me!"
Louise leaned a little downward as if to look into her friend"s face.
Sophy suddenly dropped her eyes, and the color rose to the roots of her hair. There was a knock at the door, and the parlor maid entered.
"Mr. Strangewey, madam," she announced.
XIX
"There can be no possible doubt," Louise remarked, as she unfolded her napkin, "as to our first subject of conversation. Both Sophy and I are simply dying of curiosity to know about the prince"s supper party."
"It was very cheerful and very gay," John said. "Every one seemed to enjoy it very much."
"Oh, la, la!" Sophy exclaimed. "Is that all you have to tell us? I shall begin to think that you were up to mischief there."
"I believe," Louise declared, "that every one of the guests is sworn to secrecy as to what really goes on."
"I can a.s.sure you that I wasn"t," John told them.
"The papers hint at all sorts of things," Sophy continued. "Every one who writes for the penny ill.u.s.trated papers parades his whole stock of cla.s.sical knowledge when he attempts to describe them. We read of the feasts of Lucullus and Baccha.n.a.lian orgies. They say that at supper-time you lie about on sofas and feast for four hours at a stretch."
"The reports seem exaggerated," John laughed. "We went in to supper at half past twelve and we came out just before two. We sat on chairs, and the conversation was quite decorous."
"This is most disappointing!" Louise murmured. "I cannot think why the prince never invites us."
"The ladies of his family were not present," John remarked stiffly.
There was a moment"s silence. Louise had looked down at her plate, and Sophy glanced out of the window.
"Is it true that Calavera was there?" the latter asked presently.
"Yes, she was there," John replied. "She danced after supper."
"Oh, you lucky man!" Louise sighed. "She only dances once or twice a year off the stage. Is she really so wonderful close to?"
"She is, in her way, very wonderful," John agreed.
"Confess that you admired her," Louise persisted.
"I thought her dancing extraordinary," he confessed, "and, to be truthful, I did admire her. All the same, hers is a hateful gift."
Louise looked at him curiously for a moment. His face showed few signs of the struggle through which he had pa.s.sed, but the grim setting of his lips reminded her a little of his brother. He had lost, too, something of the boyishness, the simple light-heartedness of the day before.
Instinctively she felt that the battle had begun. She asked him no more about the supper party, and Sophy, quick to follow her lead, also dropped the subject.
Luncheon was not a lengthy meal, and immediately its service was concluded, Sophy rose to her feet with a sigh.
"I must go and finish my work," she declared. "Let me have the den to myself for at least an hour, please, Louise. It will take me longer than that to muddle through your books."
Louise nodded and rose to her feet.
"We will leave you entirely undisturbed," she promised. "I hope, when you have finished, you will have something more agreeable to say than you had before lunch. Shall we have our coffee up-stairs?" she suggested, turning to John.
"I should like to very much," he replied. "I want to talk to you alone."
She led the way up-stairs into the cool, white drawing-room, with its flower-perfumed atmosphere and its delicate, shadowy air of repose. She curled herself up in a corner of the divan and gave him his coffee. Then she leaned back and looked at him.
"So you have really come to London, Mr. Countryman!"
"I have followed you," he answered. "I think you knew that I would. I tried not to," he went on, after a moment"s pause. "I fought against it as hard as I could; but in the end I had to give in."
"That was very sensible of you," she declared knocking the ash from her cigarette. "There is no use wearing oneself out fighting a hopeless battle. You know now that there are things in life which are not to be found in your pa.s.sionless corner among the hills. You have realized that you owe a duty to yourself."
"That was not what brought me," he answered bluntly. "I came for you."
Louise"s capacity for fencing seemed suddenly enfeebled. A frontal attack of such directness was irresistible.
"For me!" she repeated weakly.
"Of course," he replied. "None of your arguments would have brought me here. If I have desired to understand this world at all, it is because it is your world. It is you I want--don"t you understand that? I thought you would know it from the first moment you saw me!"
He was suddenly on his feet, leaning over her, a changed man, masterful, pa.s.sionate. She opened her lips, but said nothing. She felt herself lifted up, clasped for a moment in his arms. Unresisting, she felt the fire of his kisses. The world seemed to have stopped. Then she tried to push him away, weakly, and against her own will. At her first movement he laid her tenderly back in her place.
"I am sorry!" he said. "And yet I am not," he added, drawing his chair close up to her side. "I am glad! You knew that I loved you, Louise. You knew that it was for you I had come."
She was beginning to collect herself. Her brain was at work again; but she was conscious of a new confusion in her senses, a new element in her life. She was no longer sure of herself.
"Listen," she begged earnestly. "Be reasonable! How could I marry you?
Do you think that I could live with you up there in the hills?"
"We will live," he promised, "anywhere you choose in the world."
"Ah, no!" she continued, patting his hand. "You know what your life is, the things you want in life. You don"t know mine yet. There is my work.
You cannot think how wonderful it is to me. You don"t know the things that fill my brain from day to day, the thoughts that direct my life. I cannot marry you just because--because--"
"Because what?" he interrupted eagerly.