Gerard looked reproachfully at Elizabeth. "You promised me," he said, "that you would stay at home for a night or two."
She smiled back at him with the old touch of wilfulness. "Did I really make such a rash promise," she said, lightly. "Ah, I'm afraid I can't keep it—not to-night. I must be amused. A quiet evening would be unendurable." Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes glittered with feverish gaiety, there was an odd, strained note in her voice. Mrs. Bobby looked at her in some perplexity, then she glanced up deprecatingly at Gerard.
"It is her first season, you see Julian," she said, as if in apology. "You can't expect her to give up things."
"No," he repeated, mechanically. "I can't expect her to—give up things." He fell back silently, in increased gloom. Elizabeth glanced towards him involuntarily as she left the room.
"Now," she said to herself, "I have disappointed him again and he won't come near me this evening. But it is better so—far, far better," she repeated to herself, with a little sob, as she followed her hostess to the carriage.
Chapter XIX
The next day was unexpectedly mild. Winter, after reigning supreme, made sudden and treacherous overtures to approaching spring. The air in the Park was almost balmy, and the drives were gay, as though it were much later in the season, with carriages and riders and bicycles galore; yet the warm sunlight falling incongruously on sere, brown grass and bare branches, seemed but to emphasize their dreariness and the fact that winter had not really surrendered, and was only biding his time and the advent of the March winds, to make his power felt all the more strongly. Pedestrians, realizing this, refused to be inveigled out, even by the spring-like air, and there was no one to notice the young man and the young woman who sat on a bench in one of the secluded walks near Eighth avenue; the young woman, simply dressed in a dark tailor-made gown, with a small black hat pushed well over her face, which showed beneath it very pale and set, with hard lines about the mouth; the young man staring at her in bewilderment, a look of distress in his handsome blue eyes.