Someone drew a deep breath. It was I, perhaps.
Bill looked over at me, shaking the ash from his cigarette. And for a moment I forgot the feud between us: forgot that we were very soon to go our separate ways: forgot a number of things that I had known and I remembered only the songs that Richard Warren had sung for the world.
"It was a dream, too," said Mercedes, "which made Cuba free!"
We were grave, as, together, we four had never been through the sunny, idle days. I had the oddest feeling that between us all lay something unspoken, unnamed, intangible, as if, too, for the moment, we were closely knit together, completely en rapport.
"Well," said Wright easily, swinging the conversation back to its starting place, "It's all very well to talk. And perhaps you are more serious than I, Bill. Mind, I don't altogether admit it—but you tune your lyre to a deeper key than I do mine. I can't claim to be a poet: a versifier, yes...."
"You do yourself an injustice," I said warmly, for Wright's somewhat exotic pen-name had long since come into my knowledge and I had seen some of his magazine verse.
"You've a gift," said my husband, "not lightly to be disregarded. But you're too versatile—you paint better than you write, and there's a lot in the old parable of the talents. And, by George, you've no honest right to your talent if, in some way, you do not use it for the good of your fellow-men."
"That's what I tell him," broke in Mercedes, in a little earnest note, and blushed a rosy red.
The links were almost deserted, and the tea-hour long past. Realizing that it would be late before we reached home, I rose, reluctantly. For there had been a spirit around the table which could not easily be recaptured—and I regretted its passing.
"The tourists have practically all left," said Mercedes, on the way to the car. "Very few are here still. And the residents have already begun to go North."