"Naturally I do!" exclaimed Pauline, as she nodded to the servant who now announced that the carriage was in readiness. "I am going to have a fresh, genuine sensation. I am going to emancipate myself—to break my tether, as it were. I've been a prisoner for life; I don't know how the sunshine looks, or how it feels to take a gulp of good, free air."
He watched her puzzledly until the outer darkness obscured her face, and they entered the carriage together. She mystified him while she talked on, buoyant enough, yet always in the same key. He was not sure whether or no her sparkling manner had a certain sincere trepidation behind it. Now and then it seemed to him as if her voluble professions of anxiety rang false—as if she were making sport of herself, of him, or of the projected diversion.
"Do you really take the whole matter so much to heart," he presently said, while the vehicle rolled them along the wintry, lamplit streets, "or is this only some bit of dainty and graceful masquerading?"
"Masquerading?" she echoed, with a shocked accent.
"Oh, well, you are accustomed to meeting all sorts of people. You can't think that any human classes are so sharply divided that to cross a new threshold means to enter a new world."
She was silent, and he could see her face only vaguely for some little time; but when a passing light cast an evanescent gleam upon it he thought that he detected something like a look of delicate mischief there. Her next words, rather promptly spoken, bore with them an explanatory bluntness.
"I am convinced that if everybody else disappoints me Miss Dares will not."
"Miss Dares?" he almost faltered, in the tone of one thrown off his guard.
"Miss Cora Dares," Pauline continued, with a self-correcting precision. "The younger of the two daughters, the one who paints. Oh, you see," she continued, after a little laugh that was merry, though faint, "I have forgotten nothing. I've a great curiosity to see this young artist. You had not half so much to tell me about her as about her mother, and yet you have somehow contrived to make her quite as interesting."
"Why?" Kindelon asked, with a soft abruptness to which the fact of his almost invisible face lent a greater force. "Is it because you think that I like Cora Dares? I should like to think that was your reason for being interested in her."