For one virtue alone Cordelia Vaughan was looked on as a rare acquisition by Mrs. Alfred Spaulding. That virtue was her young ward's punctilious attention to all those social duties with regard to which she herself was prone to be deplorably careless. With the accession of Cordelia, therefore, she reveled in a vicarious ceremoniousness that wiped out many discomforting memories, ranging all the way from forgotten dinners to neglected dentist's engagements.
It was but a little after eleven, on the morning following Repellier's birthday gathering, when Cordelia Vaughan alighted from the Spauldings' brougham and once more climbed the long stairs to the old artist's studio. Both she and Mrs. Spaulding had begged to come and help Repellier "clear up." Mrs. Spaulding, however, no longer dazzled by the glow that radiated, to her eyes, from the brow of that great artist, found in the depths of a soft pillow and a darkened room that the spirit was willing but the flesh lamentably weak. She told Cordelia to run along by herself; she had a headache to sleep off.
And as Cordelia mounted lightly to the upper regions of Repellier's workrooms she felt in no way sorry for the promise. Some rudimentary simplicity in her character could always blithely sweep away the cobwebs of either propriety or impropriety—cobwebs so potentially tantalizing to one less ingenuous. Her late hours, too, seemed to have left no depression of spirits, no reaction of ennui, and she floated in before Repellier bright, buoyant, smiling, like a breath of the open morning itself, a confusion of mellow autumnal colors in her wine-colored gown and hat of roses and mottled leaves.
But before she had so much as drawn off her gloves—and they were always the most spotless of white gloves—she glanced about in mock dismay and saw that the last of the righting-up had already been done. There was not even a book for her to replace, or a plaque to tuck away. She pouted at this, prettily and girlishly; she had hurried away from her coffee and rolls just to help him.
Repellier, in his lighter moods, had an affectionate and quite fatherly way about him that was all-conquering. He penitently pinned a long-stemmed American Beauty rose on her wine-tinted gown, and shaking his head dolefully over the color combination, replaced it with a cluster of gardenias. She fluttered femininely to a mirror, to view the result of the added touch, and then bowed her gratitude with arch solemnity. She was not slow to realize the lighter mood in Repellier, and was glad of it. Then, talking the while of the night before, she went over to his book-table, and hovered restlessly over the different volumes scattered about, scarcely knowing just how to wear the conversation through its tides of change into that particular slip where it was to be hawsered. To Repellier she seemed like a humming-bird darting about a little high-walled garden, ready to be off like a flash when the last flower had been rifled.
He watched her, smiling, while she hovered on from topic to topic, looking up at him now and then; now and then nervously turning over the books on the table before her, and wondering within herself just why it was this man had always vaguely intimidated her. She was about to open her lips when he suddenly stopped her.
"Did you know that that's Hartley's book you have there?"
For one quick, searching second she looked up at him, and then casually opened the little volume upon which her hand had fallen by accident. Repellier had once thought her the sort of woman that never blushed.
"'Atalanta and Other Poems, by John Hartley,'" she read aloud idly, with raised eyebrows. "And a dedication as well: 'To C. M.' Did he leave it last night, or is he the kind that always sends them round next day?"
"Hartley's not that sort at all."