“Take me away,” she gasped, “into the air.”
He drew her arm quickly through his and led her to a seat in a bay window, screened from the rest of the room by curtains.
Dick stood over her, breathing quickly. “I never thought it would be like this,” he said, brokenly. “I fancied I should never see you again, and that in time I would get over it, like other men who have lived down their sorrows. But coming upon you unexpectedly like this takes it out of me. Look up,” he begged; “let me see your eyes, and try if I cannot find there some trace of the old affection. When I see you in the flesh I forget your cruelty, your unkindness—how you have made me suffer. I can only remember the happy days when you were loving and affectionate, and wanted me by your side. Have you forgotten? Tell me that, Katherine, have you? To think that, after all your vows of love, you should have grown tired of me!”
Katherine dared steal a look at him. Reproach met her view.
Yet this was the man who had made life so unbearable that she was forced to appeal to the courts for relief! Strangely enough, she could only remember his faults in the vaguest way, and it did not seem at all incongruous that he should be reproaching her. Never was his fascination more dangerously potent, his charm of person more alluring.
“Forgive me, Dick,” she found herself murmuring.
She held out her hands, and he drew them to his breast.
She did not know what might have followed had not the voice of Billy Wesley’s butler, announcing dinner, fallen upon her ear at the moment.
“After dinner,” whispered Dick, with significance; then offering her his arm, they emerged from their retreat with assumed sang-froid.
“Been kissing and making up?” asked Mrs. Billy, with frank indelicacy; but she was not indelicate enough to place them together at dinner, although her decadent ideas made her quite capable of things of the sort. Instead, she had separated them by the entire length of the table. But over the orchids and the electric bulbs, with the glint of glass and silver between, Katherine could feel Dick’s eyes upon her, and her flesh warmed beneath that gaze as Galatea’s when her sculptor breathed life into her with the passion of his glance. It was when the glass bells were brought in that she caught his eye fully and realized with a thrill that he had not forgotten her relish for champignons under glass.