"Thank you—but no," as Edith rose. "I don't care for them. I—I have given them away."
Eliot had heard distinctly the question and answer; but there was no time for comment. Ida Hayes sailed in—a bisque doll in Nile-green silk and velvet, with Eliot's roses pinned among the laces of her V-shaped corsage.
"And to think that I went without cigars two days to buy Ida Hayes a corsage bouquet!" he said, ruefully, to himself.
But the loss of the cigars was the least part of his mortification.
He had fancied he was winning his way to his girl-bride's heart. This little incident showed him clearly his mistake.
"She is not learning to love me. Perhaps she never will," he thought, gloomily.
Ida Hayes, with the best grace in the world, sat down on the tête-à-tête beside him. She was a belle and a beauty—had been for seven years, ever since she left the school-room at eighteen—and she could have been married well long ago, but she had seen no one she fancied until she met Eliot Van Zandt at her sister's wedding three years ago. Since then her heart, as well as Sylvie's, had been set on an alliance with him, and his marriage had been a bitter blow to her self-love.
But she was a society woman. She did not wear her heart on her sleeve, and in the clear, pale-blue eyes upraised to his Eliot Van Zandt read no sign of her disappointed hopes.
"I see you looking at my flowers. That dear little thing, your wife, gave them to me," she said, carelessly.
He answered as carelessly: