"Oh, don't go yet!" they cried, and Marice Hading looked at him chidingly. But he had no heart for their gay arrangements, and took himself off after finally hearing that the date was fixed for two nights later, all cars to be at the "Falcon" at eight o'clock in the evening and the start to be made from there.
Only a legitimate reason would have kept Gay away from a jolly given in Druro's honour. But she expected to have that reason in the indisposition of her father, who had been ailing for some time. She was not sorry, for she felt a shrinking from what the picnic might bring forth, just as she had felt on the night of Mrs. Hading's dance.
However, fate was not inclined to spare her anything that was due to her. Colonel Liscannon was so much better that he could easily be left, and, moreover, an old crony had come in from the country to spend a couple of days with him. So there was no chance of Gay's evasion without a seeming rudeness to Druro. But she was very late in arriving at the "Falcon," where she was to be a passenger in Tryon's car.
At the last, it was a matter of ordering something at the chemist's for her father and sending off a telegram that detained her, and she did not reach the hotel until nearly a quarter to nine. Long before she got there, she saw that all the cars were gone except one which she easily recognized as Tryon's.
"Dear old Dick! He is always to be relied on," she said, and had a half-finished thought that she would rather be with him that night than any one, except——
Then she went quickly into the lounge, where, no doubt, he would be waiting, and found him indeed, but sitting around a little table with coffee and liqueurs in the company of Druro and Mrs. Hading, the latter looking none too pleased.
"Ah," said she, with acerbity, as Gay came in, "at last! We were beginning to think you were never coming."
"But why did you wait for me?" inquired Gay, politely bewildered. "I thought Dick——"
"Some idiot has walked off with my car," explained Druro. "So Tryon is taking us all."
"And we are waiting for petrol as well as you," smiled Tryon; "so sit down." He put a chair for her next to Mrs. Hading, but that lady, after a swift glance into a mirror on the wall, skilfully manoeuvred her seat until she was opposite instead of next to the girl. Gay, in a little white frock of soft mull, with a cascade of lace falling below her long, young throat, resembled a freshly-gathered rose with all the fragrance and dewiness of the garden of Youth upon her. When Marice looked at her, she felt like a Borgia. She would have liked to press a cup of poison to the girl's curved red lips and force her to drink. In that glimpse in the mirror, she had seen that her own face, above a delicate shroudy scarf with long flying ends, rose like some tired hothouse orchid, beautiful still, but fading, paling, passing; and she hated Gay's youth and freshness with a poignant hatred that was like the piercing of a stiletto. She wondered why she had been such a fool as to wear that gown of purplish amethystine tulle tonight. It was a colour that made her face look hard and artificially tinted. True, her bare neck and shoulders, which were of a perfection rarely seen outside of an art gallery, showed at their best through the mazy shroudings, and her throat looked as if it had been modelled by some cunning Italian hand and sculptured in creamy alabaster. Her throat, indeed, was Marice Hading's great beauty, and her pride in it the most sinful of all her prides. She spent hours in her locked room massaging it and smoothing it with soft palms, working snowy creams into it, modelling it with her fine fingers, as though it were of some plastic material other than flesh and blood. She watched for the traces of time on it and fought them with the art and skill of a creature fighting for its life. Indeed, when a woman makes a god of her beauty, it is her life for which she is fighting in the unequal battle with time.