Then, at that, for a sudden short moment, the real man broke through. “Then none of it’s mine, because I owe it all to you,” he said. The words might have been a continuation of his mockery; they would have borne that construction. But they were not; his voice shook a little; his mind was back on Number Twenty-one and what that meant—or had meant—to him. But he recovered his chosen tone in an instant. “And behold her generosity! She gives it back to me—she won’t touch a penny of it!”
At that a sudden gleam of intelligence shot into Godfrey’s eyes. He fixed them inquiringly on Lucinda. She was in great looks that evening—in her plain, close-fitting, black frock, with never an ornament save a single scarlet flower in her fair hair; he might well look at her; but it was not her beauty that drew his gaze at that moment. He was questioning more than admiring. She gave him back his look steadily, smiling a little, ready to let him make what he could of her husband’s exclamation.
“Let me give one dinner party out of it,” implored Arsenio. “Just we four—a perfect partie carrée. If I do, will you come to it, Lucinda?”
She gave him an amused little nod; he had touched her humor. “Yes, if you give Mr. Frost a dinner, I’ll come,” she said. “What day?”
“Why, the first on which we can eat a dinner! And that’s to-morrow! Upstairs—in my apartment?”
“No—here—if Julius will let us,” she said mildly, but very firmly. “You accept, Mr. Frost? And we’ll all dress up and be smart,—to honor Mr. Frost, and Arsenio’s banquet.”
So the arrangement was made, and it promised, to my thinking, as I lay in bed, another queer evening. Somebody, surely, would break the thin ice on which Arsenio was cutting his capers! What if we all began to speak our true thoughts about one another? But the evening that I was recalling held still something more in it—the most vivid of all its impressions, although the whole of it was vivid enough in my memory.
Godfrey rose to take his leave. “Till to-morrow, then!” he said, as he took Lucinda’s hand, bowing slightly over it; he pressed it, I think, for her fingers stiffened and she frowned—Arsenio standing by, smiling.
“See him down the stairs, Arsenio,” she ordered. “The light’s very dim, and two or three of the steps are broken.”
The two went out! I heard Arsenio’s voice chattering away in the distance as they went down the high steep stairs. Lucinda stood where she was for a minute, and then came across to the chair on which I had sat down, after saying good-night to Godfrey. She dropped on her knees beside it, laying her arms across my knees, and looking up at me with eyes full of tears.