"You think us too frivolous, I see," said Mrs. Bobby. "But you don't realize how clever I can be if I try, and as for Elizabeth, she knows a lot more than she seems to know."
"Does she?" asked Gerard with a smile, and he glanced across at Elizabeth, who still would not meet his eyes. "She looks very innocent," he said, musingly, after a pause. "I should be sorry to think of her as—concealing anything."
A little pang, a thought sharp like a stone, struck Elizabeth for an instant. It was the first rift in the lute. She put it resolutely away from her.
"You think me too stupid, I see," she said "to have any knowledge to conceal."
He had no time to answer before some woman began to sing. She had a beautiful voice, and Elizabeth listened, yet chiefly conscious, all the while, of the fact that Gerard had managed to shift his position, and was standing directly behind her.
"I never thought you stupid," he said, under cover of the applause, in a low voice that no one but she could hear, "no, nor ignorant; but I have sometimes thought you frivolous, and flippant, and—and a little hard. You seem, I sometimes think, to take pleasure in showing these qualities to me. Why is it, I wonder?"
"I—I don't know," she murmured, in the same low voice, and gazing straight before her. "You—somehow you seem to compel it. You ought to be grateful, I think. At least you know the worst of me."
She spoke these words with an absolute unconsciousness of their falseness; and even as they died away on her lips, she glanced across the room and saw Paul Halleck standing in the door-way.
That old mythological king whom some vague reminiscence of her school-days had conjured up in Elizabeth's mind, he who had every wish fulfilled, till he grew at last to dread his own prosperity—was it, I wonder, in some such moment of foreboding that the final crash came, or was it when his fears were lulled and his senses stilled, by some delicious, over-powering sense of happiness that shut out for the moment all unpleasant thoughts? This, at all events, was the way in which fate overtook Elizabeth.
Paul Halleck stood in the door-way, having apparently just arrived. His blue eyes were wandering about the room. They did not fall, as yet, upon Elizabeth.