"Did you? They do not bloom anywhere at this season, I imagine. But your effort to procure them was an evidence of thoughtful kindness beyond my expectation and desert. You do too much for me! I am humbled yet happy when I recount to myself your favors."
"Don't say 'favors!' If you knew—"
"Knew what?" queried Jessie, innocently, looking up. He held her eyes for a second by the irresistible magnetism of his, then, saying, with a short laugh that sounded like bitter self disdain—"What you will never hear from me!" commenced talking fast and gayly about other things.
Mrs. Baxter ran in, opportunely, to give Jessie time to collect her thoughts. Unobservant of the gravity of one of the parties to the broken dialogue, and the forced liveliness of the other, the hostess dashed into a profusely illustrated description of the contretemps that had detained her in her dressing-room. It was nothing less serious than the doctor's mistake, in taking from a closet a bottle of ink instead of the scented glycerine she asked him to get.
"For my tender skin (we Lanneaus are deplorably thin-skinned) is frightfully chapped this winter, and there is no better remedy for this affliction than bay-water and glycerine, as perhaps you know—you who are ignorant of nothing! 'Now, my dearest,' I said, 'may I trouble you to pour it upon my hands as I hold them over the basin? Gently, doctor, darling!' When, presto! down came an inky deluge!" screaming with laughter, as she had with alarm when the mischance had occurred. "I spent nearly an hour in endeavoring to efface the murky stains, and I shall be compelled to keep my gloves on the entire evening. Isn't it a pitiable predicament?"
The scarlet scarf was on duty again to-night, but now tied about her waist, the knot at the side.
"I never feel quite dressed unless I have a speck of scarlet artfully brought into my costume," she had said to Jessie, on the evening of her arrival. "It individualizes my attire. I should not know—should not be myself without it."
Jessie joined in her merriment over the catastrophe that would have angered a wife whose temper was less even, but her heart was beating hard and hurriedly with vague alarms. Orrin had altered inexplicably of late. His sudden alternations of spirits and mysterious allusions were more than an enigma—they were a distress to her.
"If I knew!" she repeated mentally. "What was he about to say, and why did he look at me so intently? Why did he refuse to finish the sentence? I have wounded or offended him—but how?"
Self-condemnation was her first impulse when she noted a change in the demeanor of those she loved. Orrin ridiculed it as a morbid trick of mind that might be cured by reproof or raillery. Roy bore with it patiently and hopefully, recognizing in it an hereditary strain of melancholy which she would conquer or outlive in time. Her eyes were darker, her voice a tone lower, her smile a trifle subdued all the evening, for the incident that preceded the festivities. Nobody complained of the change. She was new, handsome, and sprightly, a triumvirate of recommendations that would have made her a star of note among her associates had her "style" been less unique, her cast of thought and conversation as commonplace as it was original. She was surrounded continually, to-night, by a group of gentlemen—most of them young, while there were some whose attentions—paid as they were by men of mature years and high standing, intellectual and social—were a compliment of which the débutante might justly be proud.