“I wonder if that is the man I knew?” Lady Constance broke in. “He came over with an American polo team; he was a great friend of Lord Stanniscourt’s.”
“Same man,” said Van Tuyl, with a glint of admiration in his tone. “He was a capital polo player, and—yes, by Jove, a rattling good fellow in every way. It was a surprise to everyone when he went wrong.” He had been watching his daughter with no little anxiety. Now her colour was returning and her hands were in her lap.
“Yes, to everyone,” Mrs. Dickie volunteered, “the whole thing was simply astounding. He had a good business, hadn’t he? What do you suppose he wanted with that money?”
“Nobody was ever able to conjecture,” answered Frothingham, as he helped himself to some caneton.
“And he is really here in Paris?” queried Edson, twirling the long stem of a fragile wineglass between thumb and finger. “Where is he stopping?”
Hope Van Tuyl unconsciously leaned forward to catch the address.
“I don’t know. I never thought to inquire.”
From the violins of the tziganes glided the languorous strains of the “Valse Bleue,” and instantly all other sounds dwindled. Even the clatter of knives and forks seemed gradually to cease and the babble of tongues was vague and far away. Into the girl’s dark eyes came an expression of melancholy, and the corners of her red-lipped mouth drooped. The leaves of her calendar had been fluttered back a twelvemonth by the melody, and she was out under the stars with the cool breeze from the Hudson fanning her flushed cheeks. Through the open French windows of the clubhouse at her back the music was floating. Beside her, his arm girdling her waist, was the man to whom she had just promised her love and loyalty—the man whose name she would be proud to wear through all her days—Carey Grey. The ineffable joy, the blissful content of the moment were, in some mystic manner, reborn by the chords that sang and swelled and vibrated and whispered, and yet over all, mingling with the delicious, intoxicating happiness of this reincarnated experience, was an overpowering sense of loss—dire, monstrous, crushing.
“Hope, dear,”—it was her father’s voice that brought her back to the present. His anxious eyes had still been upon her. “Drink your wine, girl; you aren’t ill, are you? Mr. Edson has been speaking to you and I don’t believe you’ve heard a word.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon, Mr. Edson,” she ejaculated, recovering herself. “I fear for the moment I was very far off. Would you mind repeating what you said?”