* * * * *
Evans Rutledge was in a fever of anxiety lest that name should get to the public. He was sure that he could not face Elise again if it did. Senator Ruffin's rebuke had sunk deep into his heart and he felt more guilty than Smith. He looked over the morning and evening papers very carefully to see whether they had discovered the young woman, before he finally decided to go to Senator DeVale's as he had promised Lola. When he arrived he found, beside Elise, only Alice Mackenzie, Hazard and young MacLane, an under-secretary of the British embassy. Others who were to come failed to appear.
Elise was not pleased with the situation. She was quite willing to be ordinarily civil to Mr. Rutledge, but she knew that nothing could separate MacLane and Alice Mackenzie, and that Hazard had known Lola so long and had proposed to her so regularly and insistently that he was for her or for nobody. It looked a little too much, therefore, as if she had chosen Evans for her very own for the evening. She did not want him to think such a thing possible. She remembered his point-blank editorial utterance that those small sentiments—loves and hates—melted away before exhibitions of social equality with negroes—so at least she construed it—and she could not but resent it, though she would not admit she troubled herself to do that.
"Now, young people," said Lola, "as the programme has been spoiled we will make this an evening of do-as-you-please."
"Good, very good," commented Hazard. "In that case you will please to come over here and take this chair and let's finish that conversation we were having last night when the unpronounceable Russian took you away from me."
"I am afraid that conversation is a serial story," she laughed, taking the chair he placed for her.
MacLane asked Alice Mackenzie some vague question about a song, which only she could interpret, and they by common impulse went through the wide door to the piano in the back parlour, where after she had hummed a short love ballad for him to piano accompaniment they dropped into a pianissimo duet of love without accompaniment.
Elise, feeling that she was being thus thrown at Mr. Rutledge's head, came to the mark with spirit and kept him guessing for an hour. She resented his possible inference that she had chosen him for an evening's tête-à-tête, and set about to show him that such was not the fact by a display of perversity and brilliance which dazzled while it irritated him. She would assume for a moment an intimately friendly, even confiding, manner that like the breath of the honeysuckle at his Pacolet plantation home would set his senses a-swim,—and in the next moment chill his glowing heart with the iciest of conventional reserve or answer his sincerest speeches with the light disdain and indifference of a mocking spirit. At one time she would kindle his admiration for her quickness of thought and keenness of repartee; and again appear so dull and careless that he must needs explain his own essays at wit.
Her caprices, so plainly intentional yet inexplicable, exasperated him almost to the point of open rebellion, and the more evident his perturbation became, the more spirit she put into the game. She won him back from a half-dozen fits of resentful impatience to the very edge of intoxication,—only to bait him again more outrageously.
Lola DeVale, perfectly familiar with the theme of Oliver Hazard's serial, found time even while admiring Hazard's ability to decorate his story in ever-changing and ever pleasing colours, to note that Elise was giving Rutledge a tempestuous hour.