IV.
“You are a very lucky young man,” said Peggie Le Moyne to her cousin, when he had told her of the invitation. “Of course Jacqueline was cornered, and gave it perforce, but there is a potency in hospitality that works both ways. Besides, when a man has seen a woman in her home she can never be altogether formal to him again.”
“I feel as though I were sneaking in through the back door, all the same,” Merrington replied, more moodily than was his wont.
Notwithstanding his misgivings, Jacqueline met her guest with a graciousness that made her adorable in his sight. Driven from her vantage ground though she was by her cousin’s outspoken invitation to Merrington, there was no hint of anything but cordiality in her welcome.
It was her more strictly feminine side that she exhibited that evening. There was nothing about her save the delicate tan of her skin to remind Merrington that the girl of the surf and sun-flooded beach was one with the dainty and charming woman in the trailing muslin, with the soft masses of her hair dark above the small head.
“Why did you never mention to me your friendship with my cousin?” she asked him after dinner, finding herself for the moment alone with him in the dimly lit parlor. He answered with native frankness:
“You never encouraged me to talk about myself, and, to tell you the truth, I never thought of anyone when with you—except yourself.”
“Dick has been telling me of your long friendship.”
“It has never brought me anything that I would less wish to part with than this pleasure to-night.”
“I do not know,” she said, musingly, yet with a precision nearer akin to her former treatment of him than she had shown that evening, “that pleasures are what we should value most in our friendships. You remember what Burns says about them?”