He had long since grown used to that freedom of action, to that unthought-of abandon of the Bohemian which Cordelia laid claim to as her natural right, and which the world about her had the habit of laughing away as the mere unrestrained eccentricity of guileless genius. He had noticed that this careless freedom seemed to suit her best. He liked her least when she was least ingenuous.
"It's so stupid and lonesome downstairs in that big sepulchral dining-room!" she said. "Let's have dinner up here."
A momentary and careless feeling that some too boldly effacing sponge was wiping out the last blurred line of formality passed through him.
"Oh, I have nearly all my meals served up here, now that I'm alone!" she explained. "It's much quieter and more cozy. Here we can have dinner in peace, and be undisturbed. You don't mind, do you?"
After his stiff ride the blood was still running through his veins vigorously. He could feel life pulsing dominatingly through him, and some mysterious back-wash of that wave of joyous intoxication which earlier had taken possession of Cordelia now seemed sweeping in turn through him.
"The queen can do no wrong!" he cried, looking down into the unnatural brightness of her face that gleamed like a flower in the half-light. Then something transient, fugitive, inscrutable, something that crept up into her eyes, drove the careless smile from his lips, and they looked at each other, man and woman.
"Stevens," she said, turning to the servant who had answered her ring, "I am at home to no one this evening! Remember, Stevens, to no one!"
She had replaced her dark-green riding-habit by a loose, heavily pleated robe of bebe blue, lined with the palest of yellow satin. Its sleeves hung loosely about her white arms, which they left partly unconcealed, as though by accident. Her even whiter throat, too, was left bare. She seemed suddenly converted from a child of alertness to a woman of languor. Hartley did not go out of his way to analyze the mystery of that sudden alteration by means of a mere change of raiment. But it seemed as if some magical breath of enchantment had blown away the fragile petals from the blossom of youth and left in its place the mellowed and rounded fruit of womanhood.
As he gazed across the table at her during that strangest of dinners she seemed to take on a warm maturity and a vitality quite new to her. The heavier shadows, caused, no doubt, he thought, by mere weariness of body, that seemed to dwell under the arch of her eyebrow, again and again suggested to him the picture of her as a young mother, saddened with the burden of her first maternity.
"Do you know," she said to him suddenly—they had been talking but little that night—"I have never yet once called you by your Christian name! John! How that sounds like you: substantial, solid, dignified! No; I have never dared. I believe I am still afraid of you—John!"