She shook the reins on her horse’s neck, and the big hunter jumped off in a fast canter. Power raced alongside, and the two struck into a byroad leading to Bellevue Avenue. Power was busying his brain to formulate some colorless phrase which would supply a natural-sounding comment by his mother on the fact that he had encountered an old friend in Newport. He knew well that he dared not tell her; for the tidings would distress her immeasurably. But he need not have troubled himself. Nancy never mentioned the matter again, for the very convincing reason that she did not believe him. Her allusion to Mrs. Power was one last turn of the screw. She was as certain that he could no more explain her presence to his mother than she could explain his to her father. Twice had she written his name in letters to Denver, and twice had she destroyed the letter. On the night she met Power she had dashed off a hot and impetuous note asking Willard why Derry’s letters had been withheld; but, in calmer mood, this dangerous query was given to the flames. On a second occasion, about a week later, Power’s name crept inadvertently into a description of some incident at the Casino, and the warm blood rushed to her face and neck when she found how near she was to committing the letter to the post without having read it.
All that day Power was puzzled by a new serenity shining in Nancy’s eyes. He could not guess that, more candidly analytical than he, she had looked fearlessly into the future and had discounted its agonies. She felt now that she had been tricked into a loveless marriage; that Marten had purchased her with exactly the same cold calculation of values which he would have applied to a business undertaking. Willard had proved as potter’s clay in his hands, and every turn and twist of the project was clear to her vision as though her husband, yielding to sardonic impulse, had set forth the unsavory story in black and white. But it was one thing to recognize how she had been duped, and another to strike out boldly for instant freedom. And in that respect the woman was braver than the man. Power was content to live in the golden present, to stifle the longings and plaints of silent hours; while the woman who loved him thought only of the end she now held firmly in view and recked little of the means whereby that end might be achieved.
Their unhappy plight was intensified by the fact that their characters had deepened and broadened alike during the years of separation. The boy and girl attachment of those heedless days in Colorado might not have withstood the strain of being thrown together again constantly after so long an interval, if the woman’s nature had not advanced step by step with the man’s. Experience of life, and the educative influences of foreign travel and good society, had done for Nancy what quiet study and seclusion from his fellow-men had done for Power. By such widely different paths they had reached a common standard of earnest purpose and high resolve, and Nancy, at any rate, was passionately determined not to sacrifice the remainder of her youth because of the unhallowed compact which sold her to gilded misery and robbed her of her one true mate in all the world.
As she did not blink the consequences, there remained but to carry through her desperate scheme as speedily and quietly as was compatible with no risk of failure. Her one difficulty lay with Power himself. She had first to break down his sense of honor, a task which could be accomplished only by making him see clearly that her life’s happiness was at stake. And she knew him, oh, so well—far better than he knew himself! Let Derry once find tears in her eyes, tears which he alone could dispel, and the seeming fortress of his self-control would crumble into dust. Let her once twine her arms around him, and what man-made laws would wrench them apart? For, by her reasoning, the solemn ordinances which govern frail human nature were wholly on her side. If marriage were, indeed, a divine institution, its very essence was profaned when Hugh Marten laid his sorry plan and made it effective by sheer force of money. She, the woman, would be called on to pay for her liberty in the coin minted of ill-repute, that base metal for whose currency her sex was mainly responsible. But those friends whom she valued would hear the truth, and they would rally round her, never fear! Why, in this delightful island, where pain and anguish seemed to be banished by the imperious ukase of deities presiding over the revels of the rich, people recognized as leaders of society had passed already through a furnace of scandal and scathing exposure such as she and her lover would never be called upon to face.
And that was why Power was at once bewildered and raised to the seventh heaven by her confident, contented smile when they met among the crowd of merrymakers on the yacht, or exchanged a few commonplace words when doing the round of Narragansett Bay and at dinner that evening in one of Newport’s summer palaces.
As his dog-cart was in waiting, he had no excuse to escort her home, but, in saying goodnight, she contrived again to perplex and delight him by a whispered request.
“Derry,” she murmured, “make no outside engagement for tomorrow evening. If you are already booked up, cry off. I want to dine with you in some quiet place—I suppose there is some hotel or café in Newport where none of our friends go. Find out, and send me a note, telling me the time and place. I shall come in a hired carriage, and quietly dressed—not in dinner clothes, I mean—and you must do the same. I must have a long talk with you, wholly independent of our servants, you understand.”
“I shall obey, at any rate,” he said, with a smile that failed to conceal the unbounded surprise in his eyes. “May I put a question?”
“No, not now. Full details later, as people say in telegrams.”
They parted, and he was so plagued by foreboding that he would have driven past the Ocean House had not the horse turned in at the gateway of its own accord. If Nancy’s manner during the day had shown the least trace of worry or annoyance, he would have attributed her strange request to a desire to take him into her confidence. It was possible, for instance, that some busybody had warned her that a too marked preference for the society of one man among the many in Newport would probably reach her husband’s ears; but, in that event, her outraged pride could never have been veiled by such a mask of unsullied cheerfulness. If any more drastic explanation of the next day’s meeting suggested itself to his troubled mind, he crushed it resolutely. In his present mood, the slightest hint of scandal associated with Nancy’s winsome personality due to their friendship was anathema. He would have endured any loss, fortune, even life itself, to save her name from besmirchment.