“Here are the notes,” said Delilah’s voice at his shoulder, and her eyes added, wistful and submissive: “And here am I.”
O’Hara took them in silence, his fingers folding them mechanically, measuring, weighing, appraising. The envelope could have held them easily——
She turned from him with a little cry.
“Oh, you are cruel, cruel!”
He stood staring at her for a moment—at the small, desolate figure with its bowed head, one arm flung across her eyes like a stricken child—and suddenly his heart melted within him. She was weeping, and he had made her weep. He took a swift step toward her, and halted. In the mirror at the far end of the room he could see her, dimly caught between firelight and candlelight, shadowy and lovely—in the mirror at the far end of the room she was smiling, mischievous and tragic and triumphant. He stared incredulously—and then swept her to him despairingly, burying his treacherous eyes in the bright hair in which clustered the invisible violets.
HER GRACE
The first time that the Black Duke saw her she was laughing—and the last time that he saw her she was laughing, too.
He and a ruddy-faced companion had fared forth doggedly into the long summer twilight in quest of some amusement to dispel the memory of the extravagantly gloomy little dinner that they had shared at the club, followed by a painful hour over admirable port and still more admirable cigars. It was August, and London was empty as a drum of the pretty faces and pretty hats and pretty voices that made it tolerable at times—it was as dry and dusty as life itself, and John Saint Michael Beauclerc, ninth Duke of Bolingham, tramping along the dull street beside a dull comrade, thought to himself with a sudden alien passion that youth was a poor thing to look back on, and age an ugly thing to look forward to, and middle age worse than either. He scowled down magnificently from his great height at the once-gregarious Banford, whose flushed countenance bore the consternation of one who has made a bad bargain and sees no way out of it—no duke lived who was worth such an evening, said Gaddy Banford’s hunted eyes. This particular duke eyed him sardonically.
“Close on to nine,” he said. “Well, then, what time does this holy paragon do her turn?”