“Well, I don't wonder! Here are all the women asking me who is that good-looking Mephistopheles, with the burning eyes, who is prowling around my rooms as if searching for a victim. Why, you're smiling for all the world like poor Jim when he used to do the Red Avenger.”
Susy's voice—and illustration—recalled him to himself.
“Furious I may be,” he said with a gentler smile, although his eyes still glittered, “furious that I have to wait until the one woman I came to see—the one woman I have not seen for so long, while these puppets have been nightly dancing before her—can give me a few moments from them, to talk of the old days.”
In his reaction he was quite sincere, although he felt a slight sense of remorse as he saw the quick, faint color rise, as in those old days, even through the to-night's powder of her cheek.
“That's like the old Kla'uns,” she said, with a slight pressure of his arm, “but we will not have a chance to speak until later. When they are nearly all gone, you'll take me to get a little refreshment, and we'll have a chat in the conservatory. But you must drop that awfully wicked look and make yourself generally agreeable to those women until then.”
It was, perhaps, part of this reaction which enabled him to obey his hostess' commands with a certain recklessness that, however, seemed to be in keeping with the previous Satanic reputation he had all unconsciously achieved. The women listened to the cynical flippancy of this good-looking soldier with an undisguised admiration which in turn excited curiosity and envy from his own sex. He saw the whispered questioning, the lifted eyebrows, scornful shrugging of shoulders—and knew that the story of his disgrace was in the air. But I fear this only excited him to further recklessness and triumph. Once he thought he recognized Miss Faulkner's figure at a distance, and even fancied that she had been watching him; but he only redoubled his attentions to the fair woman beside him, and looked no more.
Yet he was glad when the guests began to drop off, the great rooms thinned, and Susy, appearing on the arm of her husband, coquettishly reminded him of his promise.
“For I want to talk to you of old times. General Brant,” she went on, turning explanatorily to Boompointer, “married my adopted mother in California—at Robles, a dear old place where I spent my earliest years. So, you see, we are sort of relations by marriage,” she added, with delightful naivete.
Hooker's own vainglorious allusion to his relations to the man before him flashed across Brant's mind, but it left now only a smile on his lips. He felt he had already become a part of the irresponsible comedy played around him. Why should he resist, or examine its ethics too closely? He offered his arm to Susy as they descended the stairs, but, instead of pausing in the supper-room, she simply passed through it with a significant pressure on his arm, and, drawing aside a muslin curtain, stepped into the moonlit conservatory. Behind the curtain there was a small rustic settee; without releasing his arm she sat down, so that when he dropped beside her, their hands met, and mutually clasped.
“Now, Kla'uns,” she said, with a slight, comfortable shiver as she nestled beside him, “it's a little like your chair down at old Robles, isn't it?—tell me! And to think it's five years ago! But, Kla'uns, what's the matter? You are changed,” she said, looking at his dark face in the moonlight, “or you have something to tell me.”