“Great riches!” she repeated. “Where could a person suddenly find great riches? The mining booms are over, and in California people don’t strike oil-wells in their gardens. I’m afraid it will have to be either begging, borrowing, or stealing. I wonder which I would succeed best in.”
With the last words she raised her bent head, and her eyes, diminished in size by her laughter, rested full on his. Their glance was clear, candid, and innocently mirthful as that of a merry child.
As he stared at her, almost vacantly, the notes of a clock, striking somewhere in the back of the house, fell with crystalline distinctness upon the silence.
“One—two—three—four—five,” she counted absently, with each number touching the table with a finger-tip.
Gault rose to his feet, remarking with unfeigned surprise on the lateness of the hour. She looked suddenly confused and annoyed at the realization of her unintentional rudeness, and asked him if he would not remain till her father’s return. But he pleaded an engagement he had made to attend the tea given that afternoon by Mrs. Jerry McCormick, and, with a hand pressure and the conventional words of farewell, brought his visit to a close.
Outside, he turned to the right and walked slowly forward toward where the rumble of traffic indicated one of the large and populous thoroughfares of the district. Before him, at the end of the street’s long vista, the sunset glowed pink, barred by a delicate scoring of telegraph-wires. Even as he looked it deepened and burned higher and higher up the sky, while at the far end of the vista it concentrated into a core of brightness, as though a conflagration were in progress there.
What was he to think? He felt his mind confused and full of warring images. He had been almost afraid of what she might say—she who was to him the ideal of all that was gentlest and truest and most maidenly. And yet what had she said to disturb or annoy him? It was only the foolish prattle of a girl who is happy and in high spirits. And even as he made these assurances to himself, sentences from the past interview surged up to the surface of his mind: “I’m afraid I’m mercenary, and it’s such a horrid fault to have.” “Where are my riches coming from? It will have to be either begging, borrowing, or stealing.”
Her mother had been an actress—one of the stars of San Francisco’s hectic youth. Dissimulation might be instinctive with a woman of Viola Reed’s heredity. It was the whole art of acting; it was in her blood. He thought of all he had ever heard of her mother, of her few years of fame and glory, so splendidly ended by her marriage to the bonanza millionaire. It had been a wonderful, glittering life, quenched in an early death. He had never heard anything against her character, but she had been an actress, the essence of whose art is the capacity to both conceal and assume emotion. And her daughter, in personal appearance at least, resembled her. He had heard that from the colonel himself.
A feeling of weariness and disillusion took possession of him, and in the sickness of heart that it brought he thought suddenly of Letitia. She was the one woman he knew that he could always rely on to be true and steadfast and genuine. Why had he not loved her—a woman a man could trust forever, and handsome enough to be the wife of a king? There would be no doubts nor difficulties in a life with her; it would be all kindness and cheer and sympathy. And even as he thus reflected, he knew that love for Letitia was as far from him as was indifference to the woman whom he mistrusted.
At the very hour that Gault was walking moodily across town from South Park, Letitia, the object of his thoughts, was rolling along the asphalted streets of the Western Addition in Mrs. Mortimer Gault’s coupé. Her sister was with her, and both ladies were dressed with a rustling splendor which betokened festal doings. For they, too, were en route to the McCormick tea. This was, in fact, a large reception given by Mrs. McCormick to little Prince Dombroski, a gentleman who had come from Russia to wed a Californian heiress, and was receiving a helping hand from the McCormicks, who on this particular afternoon had gathered together all maiden and widowed San Franciscan wealth for his inspection.