been guilty of a philandering that he had not allowed to go as far as her wishes. The thing had not been serious on his part. Nor had he permitted it to become serious on her side. Nevertheless, sufficient flirtatious passages had taken place to impel him this night to look to her, rather than to the other Wickenberg women, for the first signals of suspicion.
«Oh, yes, he's a beautiful dancer,» Dick, as he came up to them half an hour later, heard Lottie Mason telling little Miss Maxwell. «Isn't he, Dick?» she appealed to him, with innocent eyes of candor through which disguise he knew she was studying him.
«Who?—Graham, you must mean,» he answered with untroubled directness.
«He certainly is. What do you say we start dancing and let Miss
Maxwell see? Though there's only one woman here who can give him full
swing to show his paces.»
«Paula, of course,» said Lottie.
«Paula, of course. Why, you young chits don't know how to waltz. You never had a chance to learn.'—Lottie tossed her fine head. «Perhaps you learned a little before the new dancing came in,» he amended. «Anyway, I'll get Evan and Paula started, you take me on, and I'll wager we'll be the only couples on the floor.»
Half through the waltz, he broke it off with: «Let them have the floor to themselves. It's worth seeing.»
And, glowing with appreciation, he stood and watched his wife and Graham finish the dance, while he knew that Lottie, beside him, stealing side glances at him, was having her suspicions allayed.
The dancing became general, and, the evening being warm, the big doors to the patio were thrown open. Now one couple, and now another, danced out and down the long arcades where the moonlight streamed, until it became the general thing.
«What a boy he is,» Paula said to Graham, as they listened to Dick descanting to all and sundry on the virtues of his new night camera. «You heard Aaron complaining at table, and Terrence explaining, his sureness. Nothing terrible has ever happened to him in his life. He has never been overthrown. His sureness has always been vindicated. As Terrence said, it has always delivered the goods. He does know, he does know, and yet he is so sure of himself, so sure of me.»
Graham taken away to dance with Miss Maxwell, Paula continued her train of thought to herself. Dick was not suffering so much after all. And she might have expected it. He was the cool-head, the philosopher. He would take her loss with the same equanimity as he would take the loss of Mountain Lad, as he had taken the death of Jeremy Braxton and the flooding of the Harvest mines. It was difficult, she smiled to herself, aflame as she was toward Graham, to be married to a philosopher who would not lift a hand to hold her. And it came to her afresh that one phase of Graham's charm for her was his humanness, his flamingness. They met on common ground. At any rate, even in the heyday of their coming together in Paris, Dick had not so inflamed her. A wonderful lover he had been, too, with his gift of speech and lover's phrases, with his love-chants that had so delighted her; but somehow it was different from this what she felt for Graham and what Graham must feel for her. Besides, she had been most young in experience of love and lovers in that long ago when Dick had burst so magnificently upon her.
And so thinking, she hardened toward him and recklessly permitted herself to flame toward Graham. The crowd, the gayety, the excitement, the closeness and tenderness of contact in the dancing, the summer– warm of the evening, the streaming moonlight, and the night-scents of flowers—all fanned her ardency, and she looked forward eagerly to the at least one more dance she might dare with Graham.
«No flash light is necessary,» Dick was explaining. «It's a German invention. Half a minute exposure under the ordinary lighting is sufficient. And the best of it is that the plate can be immediately developed just like an ordinary blue print. Of course, the drawback is one cannot print from the plate.»
«But if it's good, an ordinary plate can be copied from it from which prints can be made,» Ernestine amplified.
She knew the huge, twenty-foot, spring snake coiled inside the camera and ready to leap out like a jack-in- the-box when Dick squeezed the bulb. And there were others who knew and who urged Dick to get the camera and make an exposure.
He was gone longer than he expected, for Bonbright had left on his desk several telegrams concerning the Mexican situation that needed immediate replies. Trick camera in hand, Dick returned by a short cut across the house and patio. The dancing couples were ebbing down the arcade and disappearing into the hall, and he leaned against a pillar and watched them go by. Last of all came Paula and Evan, passing so close that he could have reached out and touched them. But, though the moon shone full on him, they did not see him. They saw only each other in the tender sport of gazing.
The last preceding couple was already inside when the music ceased. Graham and Paula paused, and he was for giving her his arm and leading her inside, but she clung to him in sudden impulse. Man-like, cautious, he slightly resisted for a moment, but with one arm around his neck she drew his head willingly down to the kiss. It was a flash of quick passion. The next instant, Paula on his arm, they were passing in and Paula's laugh was ringing merrily and naturally.
Dick clutched at the pillar and eased himself down abruptly until he sat flat on the pavement. Accompanying violent suffocation, or causing it, his heart seemed rising in his chest. He panted for air. The cursed thing rose and choked and stifled him until, in the grim turn his fancy took, it seemed to him that he chewed it between his teeth and gulped it back and down his throat along with the reviving air. He felt chilled, and was aware that he was wet with sudden sweat.
«And who ever heard of heart disease in the Forrests?» he muttered, as, still sitting, leaning against the pillar for support, he mopped his face dry. His hand was shaking, and he felt a slight nausea from an internal quivering that still persisted.
It was not as if Graham had kissed her, he pondered. It was Paula who had kissed Graham. That was love, and passion. He had seen it, and as it burned again before his eyes, he felt his heart surge, and the premonitory sensation of suffocation seized him. With a sharp effort of will he controlled himself and got to his feet.
«By God, it came up in my mouth and I chewed it,» he muttered. «I chewed it.»
Returning across the patio by the round-about way, he entered the lighted room jauntily enough, camera in hand, and unprepared for the reception he received.
«Seen a ghost?» Lute greeted.
«Are you sick?'—'What's the matter?» were other questions.
«What
«Your face—the look of it,» Ernestine said. «Something has happened.
What is it?»
And while he oriented himself he did not fail to note Lottie Mason's quick glance at the faces of Graham and Paula, nor to note that Ernestine had observed Lottie's glance and followed it up for herself.
«Yes,» he lied. «Bad news. Just got the word. Jeremy Braxton is dead.
Murdered. The Mexicans got him while he was trying to escape into
Arizona.»
«Old Jeremy, God love him for the fine man he was,» Terrence said, tucking his arm in Dick's. «Come on, old man, 'tis a stiffener you're wanting and I'm the lad to lead you to it.»
«Oh, I'm all right,» Dick smiled, shaking his shoulders and squaring himself as if gathering himself together. «It did hit me hard for the moment. I hadn't a doubt in the world but Jeremy would make it out all right. But they got him, and two engineers with him. They put up a devil of a fight first. They got under a cliff and stood off a mob of half a thousand for a day and night. And then the Mexicans tossed dynamite down from above. Oh, well, all flesh is grass, and there is no grass of yesteryear. Terrence, your suggestion is a good one. Lead on.»
After a few steps he turned his head over his shoulder and called back: «Now this isn't to stop the fun. I'll be right back to take that photograph. You arrange the group, Ernestine, and be sure to have them under the strongest light.»
Terrence pressed open the concealed buffet at the far end of the room and set out the glasses, while Dick turned on a wall light and studied his face in the small mirror inside the buffet door.
«It's all right now, quite natural,» he announced.
