The Silver Poppy

NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY MCMIII
Copyright, 1903, by D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Published, August, 1903
From her dark towers she lightly threw To him three roses red; He spake no word, but pale he grew, And bowed his troubled head.
John Hartley, The Broken Knight.
To make your heart, you must first break your heart! — The Silver Poppy.
It was a warm, humid evening of early September, and every window and skylight of Repellier's huge studio was open its widest. Between the muffled rhythm and beat of an orchestra the sound of laughter and merriment, and the murmur of many voices, floated out on the hot night air.
Of a sudden the throb of the music and the hum of voices ceased, expectantly, for it had been whispered from group to group that the supreme event of an evening of surprises was about to occur.
Then out from its hiding-place behind a bank of azaleas there floated into the crowded, hushed studio a Venetian gondola of black and gold. Three slim young girls, in the brightest of red and yellow silk, reclined with studied languor on the boat's curved prow, and to the music of guitars suddenly broke out into an Italian boat-song. The strange craft, piloted with much skill by Hanchett, the portrait-painter, glided slowly up and down the great, high-ceilinged room with its rows of canvases and tapestries and Daghestan rugs, with its methodic litter of small-arms and casts and trophies and costumes, cruising cautiously in and out over a flashing, many-tinted course of applauding men and women.
It was not until the barcarole had all but come to a close that the gondola was discovered to be nothing more than Mrs. Alfred Spaulding's motor runabout, deftly enclosed in a canvas-covered framework. And although, at the last, something went wrong with the steering-gear and the automobile had to be shouldered ignominiously back into its corner, it was unhesitatingly agreed that its short-lived cruise had been a triumph of novelty. The patter of a hundred clapping hands showed, indeed, that the bizarrerie of Repellier's entr' acte was a success, and a success with an audience sadly used to novelties.