“I beg pardon, Elvira, do you mean—can you mean that I can never—I can never hope!”
She nodded her pretty flower-like head gravely. “Come in to tea, won’t you?” she said, coolly. “I want father to hear you talk about Art.”
He turned on his heel. At last he, too, was angry.
“Thanks, awfully,” he said. “But if I go back to the hotel now, I shall just have time to pack my valise and catch the evening train.”
He walked rapidly away, leaving her standing upon the white-pillared portico, looking with pure, sweet, upturned face, like a saint who has for all time renounced the world, the flesh, and the devil. Had he looked back, Mr. Jerome Archibald’s tender heart would have been touched by her attitude; he would have returned, and, against her will, clasped her in his arms and covered her pale lips with warm kisses. It might have melted her high “standard” a little. But he let a night intervene without seeing her, and the entering wedge of her high sense of duty did its work before morning. He determined to remain another day and make a further trial. When he called the next day she was obdurate. “Love cannot be built upon deceit and untruth,” she said, sententiously. “I was not frank, you were not. It is better that we should part. I could never hold up my head—I could never face the world. I know what they would call me. They would call me an adventuress! and they would hate me for being successful. Yes—your mother, your sisters—everyone.”
“But you were perfectly innocent about it, Elvira.”
There was a little pause.
“I, too, was innocent. I meant no more than to have you near me, where I could learn to know you—love you—and now, really, it seems as if you had built up a mountain of ice between us, don’t you know.”
She merely shook her head.
When Archibald returned to the city his malaria compelled him to go away again almost immediately to Newport. There, a few weeks later, his agent wrote him that he had succeeded in renting the house “at an exorbitant figure to a very rich tenant without children”—thus fulfilling his mother’s conditions to the letter. He went back to the city, recovered in health, to pack up a few personal effects, and found to his surprise that Miss Perkins and her niece were, at the moment he arrived, in the house. They had taken board on Ninth Street, and had gone up to take a last look of the charming interior where, Elvira guiltily acknowledged, life had been “so wrongly pleasant.” He found Elvira holding a fan in her hand and seated pensively in an old Venetian chair in what was formerly her studio. As he entered the room she rose, blushing a most vivid red, and as rapidly turning pale again.