“Iconoclast! Won’t you leave us the illusion of fame?” retorted Diane, laughing.
“It isn’t fame men want these days—it’s money!”
“Filthy lucre!” said the dean. “Don’t let that pessimist destroy your enjoyment of life, Diane. Send him off to play billiards with your father. I’ve got to take my girls home. I’ve an engagement for seven o’clock to-morrow morning, and I need rest.”
As he spoke, Mrs. Price came up and bestowed a flattering kiss upon Diane’s cheek.
“Good-night, dear! Don’t forget about that recipe for rolls,” she murmured.
Diane promised to remember, and went up-stairs to help the two women into their wraps. Fanny was still blushing and confused. She had been talking to Faunce, and her blue eyes shone like two radiant aquamarines.
“He’s so splendid, Di, isn’t he?” she whispered, as her cousin fastened her cloak for her. “And his eyes—there’s something wonderful about them. They haunt you!”
Diane laughed as she kissed her good-night, and watched the two cloaked and hooded figures marshaled out by the little dean in his long black coat and high hat. Standing in the open door, she saw the three familiar figures walking in single file down the long path to the gate, not one of them keeping step with the others, but each bobbing up and down at a different gait, as curiously bundled and indiscriminate in the darkness as so many Indian papooses suddenly set on their feet and compelled to toddle.
As she closed the door and turned back toward the drawing-room, she saw that Arthur Faunce was awaiting her there alone.
“I thought you were with papa and the doctor,” she said, apologizing for her neglect, as he drew a chair forward for her to sit again near the dying embers on the hearth.