“You name it well; it is insanity indeed, for you to love this woman.”
“Why?” asked his friend, constrainedly.
“Because it is not for the best.”
“For her or me?”
“Oh, for her⸺!” he finished the sentence with an expressive gesture.
“I understand you, Aubrey. I should not have believed it of you. If it were one of the other fellows; but you are generally so charitable.”
“You forget your own words: ‘Tramps, stray dogs and Negroes—,’ ” he quoted significantly. “Then there is your professional career to be considered—you mean honorable, do you not?⸺How can you succeed if it be hinted abroad that you are married to a Negress?”
“I have thought of all that. I am determined. I will marry her in spite of hell itself! Marry her before she awakens to consciousness of her identity. I’m not unselfish; I don’t pretend to be. There is no sin in taking her out of the sphere where she was born. God and science helping me, I will give her life and love and wifehood and maternity and perfect health. God, Aubrey! you, with all you have had of life’s sweetness, petted idol of a beautiful world, you who will soon feel the heartbeats of your wife against your breast when lovely Molly is eternally bound to you, what do you know of a lonely, darkened life like mine? I have not the manner nor the charm which wins women. Men like me get love from them which is half akin to pity, when they get anything at all. It is but the shadow. This is my opportunity for happiness; I seize it. Fate has linked us together and no man and no man’s laws shall part us.”
Livingston sipped his wine quietly, intently watching Reuel’s face. Now he leaned across the table and stretched out his hand to Briggs; his eyes looked full into his. As their hands met in a close clasp, he whispered a sentence across the board. Reuel started, uttered an exclamation and flushed slowly a dark, dull red.
“How—where—how did you know it?” he stammered.
“I have known it since first we met; but the secret is safe with me.”
VI
The scene which met the gaze when an hour later the young men were ushered into the long drawing-room of the Vance house was one well-calculated to remove all gloomy, pessimistic reasoning. Warmth, gaiety, pretty women, luxury—all sent the blood leaping through the veins in delightful anticipation.
Their entrance was greeted by a shout of welcome.
“Oh, Aubrey! I am so glad you are come,” cried Molly from the far end of the room. “Fancy tomorrow being Christmas! Shall we be ready for all that company tomorrow night and the ballroom, dining room and hall yet to be trimmed? Is it possible to be ready?”
“Not if we stand dawdling in idle talk.” This from “Adonis,” who was stretched full length on the sitting-room sofa, with a cigarette between his lips, his hands under his handsome head, surrounded by a bevy of pretty, chattering girls, prominent among whom was Cora Scott, who aided and abetted Charlie in every piece of mischief.
Molly curled her lip but deigned no reply.
Bert Smith, from a corner of the room where he was about ascending a stepladder, flung a book heavily at Adonis’s lazy figure.
“Don’t confuse your verbs,” exclaimed Aubrey. “How can you stand when you are lying down, and were you ever known to do anything else but dawdle, Adonis—eh?”
“I give it up,” said Charlie, sleepily, kicking the book off the sofa.
“Is this an amateur grocery shop, may I ask, Miss Vance?” continued Aubrey as he and Briggs made their way to their hostess through an avalanche of parcels and baskets strewn on the tables and the floor.
Molly laughed as she greeted them. “No wonder you are surprised. I am superintending the arrangement of my poor people’s gifts,” she explained. “They must all be sent out tonight. I don’t know what I should have done without all these good people to help me. But there are piles to be done yet. There is the tree, the charades, etc., etc.,” she continued, in a plaintive little voice.
“More particularly cetra, cetra,” said Aubrey from Bert’s corner where he had gone to help along the good works of placing holly wreaths.
“Oh, you, Aubrey—stop being a magpie.” Aubrey and Molly were very matter of fact lovers.
“Molly,” again broke in Charlie, “suppose the box from Pierson’s has never come, won’t you be up a tree?” and the speaker opened his handsome eyes wide, and shook off his cigarette-ash.
Molly maintained a dignified silence toward her brother. The firelight danced and dwelt upon her lovingly. She was so pretty, so fair, so slender, so graceful. Now in her gray plush tea-gown, with her hair piled picturesquely on the top of her small head, and fixed there with a big tortoiseshell pin, it would have been difficult to find a more delightful object for the gaze to rest upon.
“We shall have to fall back upon the wardrobes,” she said at length. “You are a horrid wet-blanket, Charlie! I am sure I—”
Her remarks were cut short as the door opened, and with laughter and shouting a bevy of young people who had been at work in another part of the house rushed in. “It is come; it’s all right; don’t worry, Molly!” they sang in chorus.
“Do be quiet all of you; one can hardly hear oneself speak!”
The box from the costumer’s had arrived; the great costume party was saved; in short, excitement and bustle were in full swing at Vance Hall as it had been at Christmas-time since the young people could remember.
Adonis lifted himself from the sofa and proposed to open the box of dresses at once, and try them on.
“Charlie, you are a brick!—the very thing!”
“Oh! yes, yes; let us try them on!”
Molly broke through the eager voices: “And we have not done the ballroom yet!” she said reproachfully.
“Oh! bother the ballroom!” declared Adonis,
