She could not speak, her heart was in her throat; but the droop had gone from her lips, and her eyes were shining in the dark like velvet stars.
“When may I come to you! To-morrow?”
Her heart urged yes, but her brain remembered that to-morrow she must interview the famous singer. She would give it up, she thought swiftly, and let her newspaper go. But no! Perhaps, if she denied herself for a few short hours, the gods would remember, and make her reward the sweeter. She must make some sacrifice for this great happiness.
“No; Wednesday,” she whispered, and quickly, for fear she should revoke:
“Good-night.”
For a day of general rejoicing, as the twenty-fourth of May always is in the Colonies, Tuesday dawned drab and dreary.
Looking from her window in the early morning, Dolores could see the waves rushing and ravening wildly in the bay, and beating themselves in foamy fury against the embankment.
“They will have a dreadful day for their aquatic sports,” she thought, recalling a typed headline she had seen in the editor’s office the day before, and remembering how, on public holidays, everyone in Durban went on to the bay; but she did not care very much. The wind might blow and the sea might lash from that day forth for evermore, it would not matter to her. Nothing mattered but that the gods had relented. The gods! What gods? There was only one God. Cecil Scarlett’s God, and He was very good. He had forgiven her for her pagan heart, and the years of misery had dropped from her. Cecil Scarlett wanted her, and she was the King’s daughter among women. Life seemed worth the trouble again, and the joy of eventful living came back with the flush and swell of a tide.
She fell to mapping out her day so that every chink of it should be filled up until she saw him again. Her interview with Madame, the singer, at eleven; the afternoon to write it up, and to finish some other work for her editor; then the famous lady’s concert, which she must attend that night and criticise for her paper. And after? The thought came over her that she could not wait till to-morrow, she must see him before. She would go to the theatre after the concert, slip into her place in the stage-box, and he would see her and come to her afterwards. So it would come sooner after all. She would wear her primrose gown—years ago she had been beautiful in yellow—she would be beautiful again to-night for him (a wild-rose flush flew into her cheeks); no more black and white gowns for her. Ah! surely the day would be too long.