A Man's Hearth. Eleanor M. Ingram

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СКАЧАТЬ How bright and clean a world he seemed to view, seated here! He felt a pang of longing, keen as pain, when he thought that he might have had such content as this as an abiding state, instead of a brief respite. How had he come to shut himself away from peace, all unaware? How was it that he never had valued the colorless blessing, until it was lost?

      After a while he fell to envying Maître Raoul, who had gone to the devil honorably.

      A long sigh from Holly, slumbering amid his trophies, awoke Adriance to realization that his companion possessed the gift of being silent gracefully. He had not spoken to her for quite half an hour, yet she appeared neither bored nor offended, but as if she had been engaged in following out some pleasant theme of meditation. A sparrow tilted and preened itself on the rail, not a yard from her bent, dark head. Over at the curbstone, the boy who guarded Adriance's horse had slipped the bridle over one arm and was playing marbles with two cheerful comrades who made calculated allowances for his handicap, based on his coming reward from the rider.

      "I am afraid I am very dull," Adriance presently offered vague apology.

      "Are you?"

      "I mean, I am not entertaining."

      She lifted her eyes from her sewing to regard him with delicate raillery.

      "No. If you had been the entertaining sort of person, I could never have let you talk to me," she said. "But I think you had better go, please, now. Two imported nursemaids in bat-wing cloaks have been glowering at us for some time as it is. Holly and I shall be grateful to you a thousand years for this morning's rescue."

      He rose reluctantly, with a feeling of being ejected from the only serene spot on earth.

      "Thank you for letting me stay," he answered. "You are very kind. I——"

      His lowered glance had encountered her little feet, demurely crossed under the edge of her sober skirt. They were very small, serious shoes indeed; not a touch of the day's capricious fancy in decoration relieved them. But what struck to the man's heart was their brave blackness, the blackness of polish that could not quite conceal that they had been mended. Of course, he at once looked away, but the impression remained.

      "I hope Holly will not imitate Maît' Raoul any more," he finished lamely.

      The girl frankly turned to watch him ride away. Her natural interest seemed to the man more modest than any pose of indifference.

      But it seemed that she was appointed by Chance to make Tony Adriance dissatisfied and restive. It was altogether absurd, but the fanciful legend she had told him taunted and hunted his sullen thoughts. He took it with him to his home, when he changed into suitable attire to keep a luncheon engagement with Mrs. Masterson. It still accompanied him when he entered the great apartment house where the Mastersons lived.

      He had not wanted to act as Lucille Masterson's escort on this occasion. His attendance had been skilfully compelled. But now he hated the duty so much that he was dangerously near rebellion. He hesitated on the threshold of the building, half inclined not to enter; to go, instead, to a telephone and excuse himself for desertion on some pretext.

      It was too late. Already the door was held open for him by a footman whose discreetly familiar smile Adriance saw, and resented. He winced again when the elevator boy stopped at the Mastersons' floor without being told, implying the impossibility of Mr. Adriance's call being intended for any other household. He never had noticed these things before; now, he felt himself disgracefully exposed before these black men.

      He was altogether in a mood of bitter exasperation, when he was ushered into Mrs. Masterson's little drawing-room. He recognized this condition with a vague sense of surprise at himself underlying the dominant emotion. All his life he had been singularly even-tempered. Now he combated a wish to say ugly, caustic things to the woman who had brought him here. He did not want to see her.

      Yet she was very pleasant to see. Indeed, both the scene and his hostess were charming, as they met his view. Mrs. Masterson was standing before a long mirror, surveying herself, so that Adriance saw her twice; once in fact, and once as a reflection. Sunlight filled the room, which was furnished and draped in a curious shade of deep blue with a shimmering richness of color, so that the lady's gray-clad figure stood out in clear and precise detail. But Mrs. Masterson could bear that strong light, and knew it. Without turning, she smiled into the mirror toward the man whose image she saw there.

      "How do you like the last Viennese fancy, Tony?" she composedly greeted him.

      Her voice was not one of her good points. It was naturally too high-pitched and harsh, and although by careful training she had accustomed herself to speak with a suppressed evenness of tone that smothered the defect to most ears, there resulted a lack of expression or modulation perilously near monotony. Adriance listened now, with a fresh sense of irritation, to the fault he only had observed recently. Before answering, he surveyed critically the decided lines of the costume offered for his approval; its audacious little waistcoat of cerise-and-black checked velvet, the diminutive hat that seemed to have alighted like a butterfly on the shining yellow hair brushed smoothly back from Mrs. Masterson's pink ears, and the high-buttoned gray boots with a silk tassel pendant at each ankle. Those exquisite and costly boots taunted him with their sharp contrast to those he had studied an hour before; they spurred him on to rudeness as if actual rowels were affixed to their little French heels.

      "The skirt is too extreme," he stated perversely.

      "They are going to be so; this is quite a bit in advance," she returned. "Do you like it?"

      "Not so well! It makes a woman look like a child; except for her face."

      Lucille Masterson's tact was often at fault from her lack of humor. Instead of retorting with laughter or silence, she opposed offence to his wilfulness.

      "Thank you," she answered freezingly. "I seem to have aged rather suddenly."

      "You know well enough how handsome you are," he said, a trifle ashamed. "Of course I did not mean what you imply. But, after all, we are not children, Lucille, either of us. We are a man and a woman who are going——"

      "Well?"

      "To gather a rather nasty apple!" He forced a smile to temper the statement.

      She slowly turned around and regarded him.

      "What do you mean?" she demanded, lifting her narrow, arched eyebrows. "My costume trottoir, and apples——? Aren't you considerably confused, Tony?"

      "Can't we at least face what we are doing?" he countered. "If we are able to do a thing, we ought to be able to look at it, surely. We can put through this thing, and our friends will think none the less of us; they are that kind. But they are not all the people on earth, you know. What the maid who brushes your gown or the man who opens the door for me says of us downstairs may come nearer the general opinion. Perhaps we would better have considered that. For I am afraid the majority of the white man's world cannot be altogether wrong."

      There was a quality in his voice that alarmed her. He had flung himself into a chair beside her desk, and sat nervously moving back and forth the trinkets nearest his hand. She stood quite still, studying him before committing herself by a reply. This was a Tony Adriance strange to her.

      "It seems very cowardly, to me, to be afraid of what people will say," she slowly answered. "And I will not have you speak to me as if I were a wicked woman, Tony. You know that I am not. You know I have borne with СКАЧАТЬ