Persis' training and her heart fought a duel in her quivering frame. Then she gained her self-control, turned to Willie, and murmured:
"Dinner."
The marvelously inappropriate word sent through him a shudder of nausea.
Persis appealed to his other self. "Must we take the servants into our confidence?"
"I think you may trust my breeding," he answered, frigidly. He stalked woodenly to the door, held back the curtain, and bowed with mechanical gallantry.
"Thank you!" she sighed. She wavered a moment and clutched at her throat. Then she flung her head high in that thoroughbred way of hers and walked steadily from the room.
And Willie followed in excellent form.
CHAPTER LXVII
IN the famous Enslee dining-room, where brilliant companies had gathered for a generation, giving and taking distinctions, and where Persis in her brief reign had mustered cohorts of pleasure that outgleamed them all, only two chairs were drawn up to the table; and that was contracted to its smallest circle. All the other chairs were aligned along the white marble walls with a solemn look as of envious, uninvited ghosts sitting with hands on knees and brooding. The walls were broken with dark columns like giant servants, and between them hung tapestries as big as sails. The tapestries told in a woven serial the story of "Tristram and La Beale Isoud."