“This feller, Back, they were speakin’ about at dinner to-night,” he went on. “I’m kind o’ rusty on op’ras, lately. So I’ve lost track of him. Is he composin’ much, nowadays?”
“Bach has been de-composing for a couple of centuries,” answered Caine.
One or two men laughed. Caleb waxed glum once more. Nor could the combined tact of Caine and their host draw him again into speech.
The Fighter, glowering in a corner, watched the stream of musicale guests trickle in through the great double doors. He was lonely, cross, disappointed. He could not define his own sensations, nor see how nor wherein he had failed. Failure he had met. He knew that. But the knowledge made him the more determined to persist in his assault until the social citadel whose outworks he had stormed, should be his. And, the more he thought, the more his amorphous idea of entering that citadel under a wife’s aegis began to take definite shape. He found his gaze straying to where Letty Standish stood laughing and talking with a knot of newcomers. Once his eye caught hers, and she smiled. A polite, deprecatory smile that strengthened Caleb’s growing resolution. After all, he reflected, one might do worse than to marry.
An indefinable something swept across his busily-planning mind, like a breath of May through a slum. Even before he raised his eyes eagerly to the door, he knew that Desirée Shevlin had come into the room. Slender, dainty, infinitely pretty, in her soft white dress, the sight of her struck athwart Caleb’s senses; scattering to the winds every thought but delight at seeing her,—pride in the way she bore herself among the people in whose presence he felt so ill at ease.
And she had seen him. Seen him and noted his discomfiture, his aloneness; even while she was responding to her hosts’ welcome. As soon as she could leave Mrs. Hawarden’s side, she moved toward him. As he advanced to meet her, the labored grin of festivity wherewith Caleb had sought to wreathe his features for her benefit, gave way to a glow of boyish pleasure.
“Gee, but you’re dandy to look at in those clo’es, Dey!” he exclaimed. “There ain’t a one in the room who’s a patch on you.”
She smiled up at him in frank joy at the compliment. Then, looking more keenly into his face, she murmured, her pretty brows knit:
“You poor, poor boy! You’ve been having a horrid, hagorous time! What have they been doing to you?”