She stood for a moment as motionless as one of the statues. Another woman would have started, would probably have shrunk back, with a cry of amazement or of joy; but she stood for just that instant, motionless and silent, and looking at him with her eyes dilating with surprise and delight. Then, holding out both hands, she moved toward him, murmuring:
"Drake! Thank God!"
CHAPTER XVI.
Lady Luce came forward to him with both hands extended; and the "Drake, thank God!" was perhaps as genuinely a devout an expression as she had ever uttered. For it seemed to her that Providence had especially intervened in her behalf and sent him to her side. We all of us have an idea that Providence is more interested in us than in other persons.
Drake stood and looked at her for an instant with the same surprise which had assailed him when he recognized her; then he took the small, exquisitely gloved hands. How could he refuse them? As he had said, the members of their set could not be strangers, though two of them had been lovers and one had been jilted. They had to meet as friends or acquaintances, as individuals of a community, which, living for pleasure, could not be bored by quarrels and estrangements.
In the "smart" set a man lives not for himself alone, but for the other men with whom he plays and shoots and jokes and drinks; for the women with whom he drives and rides and dances. He must sink personal feeling, likes and dislikes, or the social ship which he joins as one of the crew, the ship which can sail only on smooth and sunlit waves, will founder. So Drake took her hands and smiled a greeting at her.
"Why! To find you here! What are you doing here, Drake?" she said.
She had no right to call him "Drake"; she had lost that right the day she had jilted him; but she called him "Drake," and the name left her lips softly and meltingly.
"I might ask the same of you, Luce," he replied gravely, and unconscious in the stress of the moment that he, too, had used the Christian name.