“I haven’t seen him,” Enid protested. “But run along now and dance. It’s the last dance before supper. Remember that Grant Proctor is taking you down. Do be sweet to him, Sally.”
“She would like for me to marry Grant Proctor,” Sally reflected dully, as she obediently let herself be drawn into the dance by an ardent-eyed young man whose name she could not remember. “She wants me to marry Grant Proctor, when I’m already half-married to David. But David doesn’t want me! Oh, David!”
Just before supper was announced she slipped away to her own rooms, to cry the hot tears that were pressing against her eyeballs. And on her dressing table she found a note, undoubtedly placed there by her own maid. Her cold, shaking fingers had difficulty in opening it, for she knew at once that it was from David.
“Dear little Sally,” she read, and the tears gushed then. “Forgive me for bolting like this, but I couldn’t stand it any longer. You know I love you, that ‘I’ll be loving you always,’ but you must also know that Sally Barr cannot marry David Nash, and that anything less would be too terrible for both of us. You must be wondering why I came. I wanted to see for myself that you are happy, that your mother is good to you. And, of course, I wanted to see you again, wanted to see if there was anything of my Sally in this beautiful Sally Barr that the papers are making so much of.
“I think it has made it harder for me to find that underneath the new surface you are still Sally Ford. But they’ll change the core of you almost as rapidly as they have remade the surface of you into a society beauty. And after you’re changed all through you’ll be glad I went away. I’ll carry my own Sally in my heart always, and the new Sally Barr will fall in love with the splendid young son of some old family, marry him and make her mother very happy. She would never forgive us, Sally, if I took you away and made you live on what I can earn as a farmer, and she would be right not to forgive. I would not forgive myself, and after awhile you’d be unhappy, too, remembering all that you had lost, including a mother who adores you. Goodby, Sally. David.”
She was so quiet, so white at supper that Grant Proctor, who was already in love with her, begged her to let him give her a drink from his pocket flask, but she refused, scarcely knowing what he had said to her. Once she caught her mother’s eyes, and shivered at the anxiety and reproach in them.
Suddenly a fierce resentment against Enid Barr rose and beat sickeningly in her blood. If she had not interfered, she and David would have been married long ago. They would have been happy in poverty, would have struggled side by side to banish poverty, might even have had a tiny David and Sally of their own by this time. And now David was irrevocably gone, so that Enid Barr might keep her daughter. Sally wanted to nurse her anger against her mother, but it was impossible to do so, for she loved her.
When the jazz orchestra was hilariously summoning the debutantes to the dance floor again Arthur Van Horne claimed Sally over the protests of the half dozen younger men who were good-naturedly wrangling for the honor.
“You’re going to meet me after this foolish, delightful show is over, aren’t you? Of course you are!” he smiled down upon her as he led her out upon the floor.
Sally looked up at him wearily and saw that there was more than amusement and gallantry in his narrowed, smiling black eyes. There was menace, which he did not try to conceal, wanted her to see—