Affected eminence, wealth, sovereignty.’”
“Pshaw, you dreamer of dreams and painter of pictures; it’s a hollow show, an ugly travesty! What has a man like White to give such a woman? The husks of the prodigal!” Fox’s luminous dark eyes kindled with anger, “when I see him—” he checked himself abruptly and walked on rapidly, his long, easy stride carrying him ahead of Allestree. “Pearls before swine!” he muttered to himself after a moment, plunging his hands into his pockets and relapsing into an angry silence.
They walked on at a smart pace, having occasionally to thread their way single file through the increasing throng, as the long blocks slipped behind them and they approached the heart of business life near Fourteenth Street. When they came together again after such a separation, Allestree asked Fox if he could come home with him to dine but Fox declined rather curtly, pleading an early evening engagement, and Allestree said no more, having his own surmises as to the nature of that engagement, and being somewhat guiltily aware that he was not an entirely involuntary party to his mother’s conspiracy to draw Fox away from a dangerous attraction. Both men were, in fact, conscious that a discord had arisen in their usually confidential relations, and neither of them desired to broach any subject which would add acrimony to the conversation; with the usual masculine instinct of self-defense, therefore, they relapsed into silence. However, at the entrance of a large hotel on the corner, their hurried progress was interrupted to give way to a visitor who was crossing the wide pavement to her carriage, escorted by one of the attendants and a footman. The light from the lobby, brilliantly illuminating the space beneath the awning, outlined her as sharply as a silhouette against the darkness, and her figure,—she was a young and slender girl,—was thrown into high relief; the quiet elegance of her dress, the sables on her shoulders, as well as the large picture hat which framed her face, being merely superfluous accessories to beauty of a type at once unusual and spiritual.
Fox, startled out of a revery which was largely pervaded by the personality of another woman, could not but observe this radiant picture; there was a vitality, a power of expression in every feature of her face and every movement of her tall, lithe figure which at once specialized her. She seemed to belong to a different race of beings from those who were hurrying past her through the fog, whose figures lost themselves at once to vision and memory, dissolving into the masses of the commonplace, as completely as the individual sands at the seashore are lost in the larger sweep of the dunes.
She turned her head, saw Allestree and smiled. “How are you?” she said, with the easy manner of an old intimacy; “I hardly dare look at you—I know I broke the appointment and several of the studio commandments!”
Allestree had hurried forward at once, apparently forgetting his companion, and was helping her into her carriage. “You did,” he said, “and shamelessly; but you must come and make amends.”
She laughed, her hand on the carriage door, and her eyes, involuntarily passing him to Fox, were as quickly averted. “I will, on Saturday at twelve—will that do, Bobby? Don’t be too exacting. I’ve a dozen engagements, you know,” she added lightly, in a tone of careless propitiation.
Fox did not catch his cousin’s reply, it was too low spoken, and in a moment the horses started and the carriage passed him on its way to F Street. Secretly a little piqued at Allestree’s failure to present him, and yet amused at his discovery of his cousin playing knight-errant to a beauty, Fox walked on a few moments in silence, aware that the other was not a little confused.
But at last: “Who is she, Bob, wood-nymph, dryad, or Psyche herself?”
Allestree’s face sobered sharply. “It was Miss Temple,” he said, a trifle stiffly.