Even had he had interests more absorbing than pastimes, display, and money-making by the "brace" game of "high finance" with its small risks of losing and smaller risks of being caught, even if he had been married to a less positive and incessant irritant than Theresa was to him, he would still not have forgotten Adelaide. Forgetfulness comes with the finished episode, never with the unfinished. In the circumstances, there could be but one effect from seeing her again. His regrets blazed up into fierce remorse, became the reckless raging of a passion to which obstacles and difficulties are as fuel to fire.
Theresa, once the matter of husband-getting was safely settled, had no restraint of prudence upon her self-complacence. She "let herself go" completely, with results upon her character, her mind, and her personal appearance that were depressing enough to the casual beholder, but appalling to those who were in her intimacy of the home. Ross watched her deteriorate in gloomy and unreproving silence. She got herself together sufficiently for as good public appearance as a person of her wealth and position needed to make, he reasoned; what did it matter how she looked and talked at home where, after all, the only person she could hope to please was herself? He held aloof, drawn from his aloofness occasionally by her whim to indulge herself in what she regarded as proofs of his love. Her pouting, her whimpering, her abject but meaningless self-depreciation, her tears, were potent, not for the flattering reason she assigned, but because he, out of pity for her and self-reproach, and dread of her developing her mother's weakness, would lash himself into the small show of tenderness sufficient to satisfy her.
And now, steeped in the gall of as bitter a draught as experience forces folly to drink anew each day to the dregs—the realization that, though the man marries the money only, he lives with the wife only—Ross had met Adelaide again. "I'll go to Chicago in the morning," was his conclusion. "I'll do the honorable thing"—he sneered at himself—"since trying the other would only result in her laughing at me and in my being still more miserable."
But when morning came he was critical of the clothes his valet offered him, spent an hour in getting himself groomed for public appearance, then appeared at the Country Club for breakfast instead of driving to the station. And after breakfast, he put off his departure "until to-morrow or next day," and went to see Mr. and Mrs. Hastings. And what more natural then than that Henrietta should take him to the Villa d'Orsay "to show you how charmingly Del has installed herself." "And perhaps," said Henrietta, "she and Arden Wilmot will go for a drive. He has quit the bank because they objected to his resting two hours in the middle of the day." What more natural than that Adelaide should alter her resolution under the compulsion of circumstance, should spend the entire morning in the gardens, she with Ross, Henrietta with Arden? Finally, to avoid strain upon her simple domestic arrangements in that period of retrenchment, what more natural than falling in with Ross's proposal of lunch at Indian Mound? And who ever came back in a hurry from Indian Mound, with its quaint vast earthworks, its ugly, incredibly ancient potteries and flint instruments that could be uncovered anywhere with the point of a cane or parasol; its superb panorama, bounded by the far blue hills where, in days that were ancient when history began, fires were lighted by sentinels to signal the enemy's approach to a people whose very dust, whose very name has perished? It was six o'clock before they began the return drive; at seven they were passing the Country Club, and, of course, they dined there and joined in the little informal dance afterwards; and later, supper and cooling drinks in a corner of the veranda, with the moon streaming upon them and the enchanted breath of the forest enchaining the senses.
What a day! How obligingly all unpleasant thoughts fled! How high and bright rose the mountains all round the horizon of the present, shutting out yesterday and to-morrow! "This has been the happy day of my life," said Ross as they lingered behind the other two on the way to the last 'bus for the town. "The happiest"—in a lower tone—"thus far."
And Del was sparkling assent, encouragement even; and her eyes were gleaming defiantly at the only-too-plainly-to-be-read faces of the few hilltop people still left at the club house. "Surely a woman has the right to enjoy herself innocently in the twentieth century," she was saying to herself. "Dory wouldn't want me to sit moping alone. I am young; I'll have enough of that after I'm old—one is old so much longer than young." And she looked up at Ross, and very handsome he was in that soft moonlight, his high-blazing passion glorifying his features. "I, too, have been happy," she said to him. Then, with a vain effort to seem and to believe herself at ease, "I wish Dory could have been along."
But Ross was not abashed by the exorcism of that name; her bringing it in was too strained, would have been amusing if passion were not devoid of the sense of humor. "She does care for me!" he was thinking dizzily. "And I can't live without her—and won't!"
His mother had been writing him her discoveries that his father, in wretched health and goaded by physical torment to furious play at the green tables of "high finance," was losing steadily, swiftly, heavily. But Ross read her letters as indifferently as he read Theresa's appeals to him to come to Windrift. It took a telegram—"Matters much worse than I thought. You must be here to talk with him before he begins business to-morrow"—to shock him into the realization that he had been imperiling the future he was dreaming of and planning—his and Del's future.
On the way to the train he stopped at the Villa d'Orsay, saw her and Henrietta at the far end of Mrs. Dorsey's famed white-and-gold garden. Henrietta was in the pavilion reading. A few yards away Adelaide, head bent and blue sunshade slowly turning as it rested on her shoulder, was strolling round the great flower-rimmed, lily-strewn outer basin of Mrs. Dorsey's famed fountain, the school of crimson fish, like a streak of fire in the water, following her. When she saw him coming toward them in traveling suit, instead of the white serge he always wore on such days as was that, she knew he was going away—a fortunate forewarning, for she thus had time to force a less telltale expression before he announced the reason for his call. "But," he added, "I'll be back in a few days—a very few."
"Oh!" was all Del said; but her tone of relief, her sudden brightening, were more significant than any words could have been.