Jack Hudson, a powerfully built bronze figure of a man, beamed on Paulette, saying nothing and in his silence saying everything. The dark man kept his eyes on Carlotta, who was oblivious to everyone but Roger, clearly her friend of long standing. She sat clasping one of his hands, her head almost upon his shoulder. “Roger it’s so good to see you again! I’ve thought of you so often! I’ve been meaning to write to you; we’re having a big house party this summer. You must come! Dad’s asking up half of Washington; attachés, ‘Prinzessen, Countessen and serene English Altessen’; he’ll come up for weekends.”
A member of the haut monde, evidently she was well-connected, powerful, even rich. A girl of Roger’s own set amusing herself in this curious company. Angela felt her heart contract with a sort of helpless jealousy.
The dark man, despairing of recapturing Carlotta’s attention, suddenly asked Angèle if she would care to dance. He was a superb partner and for a moment or two, reinvigorated by the food and the snappy music, she became absorbed in the smooth, gliding motion and in her partner’s pleasant conversation. Glancing over her shoulder she noted Carlotta still talking to Roger. The latter, however, was plainly paying the girl no attention. His eyes fixed on Angela, he was moodily following her every motion, almost straining, she thought, to catch her words. His eyes met hers and a long, long look passed between them so fraught, it seemed to her, with a secret understanding and sympathy, that her heart shook with a moment’s secret wavering.
Her partner escorted her back to the table. Paulette, flushed and radiant, with the mien of a dishevelled baby, was holding forth while Hudson listened delightedly. As a raconteuse she had a faint, delicious malice which usually made any recital of her adventures absolutely irresistible. “Her name,” she was saying loudly, regardless of possible listeners, “was Antoinette Spewer, and it seems she had it in for me from the very first. She told Sloane Corby she wanted to meet me and he invited both of us to lunch. When we got to the restaurant she was waiting for me in the lobby; Sloane introduced us and—she pulled a lorgnette on me—a lorgnette on me!” She said it very much as a Westerner might speak of someone “pulling” a revolver. “But I fixed that. There were three or four people passing near us. I drew back until they were well within hearing range, and then I said to her: ‘I beg pardon but what did you say your last name was?’ Well, when a person’s named Spewer she can’t shout it across a hotel lobby! Oh, she came climbing down off her high horse; she respects me to this day, I tell you.”
Roger rose. “We must be going; I can’t let Miss Mory get too tired.” He was all attention and courtesy. Miss Parks looked at her again, narrowing her eyes.
In the car Roger put his arm about her. “Angèle, when you were dancing with that fellow I couldn’t stand it! And then you looked at me—oh such a look! You were thinking about me, I felt it, I knew it.”
Some treacherous barrier gave way within her. “Yes, and I could tell you were thinking about me.”
“Of course you could! And without a word! Oh, darling, darling, can’t you see that’s the way it would be? If you’d only take happiness with me there we would be with a secret bond, an invisible bond, existing for us alone and no one else in the world the wiser. But we should know and it would be all the sweeter for that secrecy.”
Unwittingly he struck a responsive chord within her—stolen waters were the sweetest, she of all people knew that.
Aloud she said: “Here we are, Roger. Some of the day has been wonderful; thank you for that.”
“You can’t go like this! You’re going to let me see you again?”
She knew she should have refused him, but again some treacherous impulse made her assent. He drove away, and, turning, she climbed the long, steep flights of stairs, bemused, thrilled, frightened, curious, the sense of adventure strong upon her. Tomorrow she would see Jinny, her own sister, her own flesh and blood, one of her own people. Together they would thresh this thing out.
II
A curious period of duelling ensued. Roger was young, rich and idle. Nearly every wish he had ever known had been born within him only to be satisfied. He could not believe that he would fail in the pursuit of this baffling creature who had awakened within him an ardour and sincerity of feeling which surprised himself. The thought occurred to him more than once that it would have been a fine thing if this girl had been endowed with the name and standing and comparative wealth of—say Carlotta Parks—but it never occurred to him to thwart in this matter the wishes of his father who would, he knew, insist immediately on a certified account of the pedigree, training and general fitness of any strange aspirant for his son’s hand. Angela had had the good sense to be frank; she did not want to become immeshed in a tissue of lies whose relationship, whose sequence and interdependence she would be likely to forget. To Roger’s few questions she had said quite truly that she was the daughter of “poor but proud parents”;—they had laughed at the hackneyed phrase—that her father had been a boss carpenter and that she had been educated in the ordinary public schools and for a time had been a schoolteacher. No one would ever try to substantiate these statements, for clearly the person to whom they applied would not be falsifying such a simple account. There would be no point in so doing. Her little deceits had all been negative, she had merely neglected
