Herold turned in his chair and glanced at her slim figure framed by the window. Then he went softly to her side.
“Stellamaris, you are dearer to me than anything on God's earth. Tell me what frightens you. Maybe I can help you.”
But Stella shook her head. She had been accustomed from childhood to lavish terms of endearment from her little band of intimates, and her woman's nature was as yet not enough awakened to catch the new and subtle appeal. A girl's pride froze her. The wounds that he had allowed her to receive she would cure by herself. She touched his hand, however, to show that she appreciated his affection. The touch sent a thrill to his heart.
“Stella, dear!” he whispered.
Then, as a note struck on a piano causes the harmonic on the violin to vibrate, so did his tone stir a chord in the girl's nature, occasioning an absurd little flutter of trepidation. She laughed, and threw wide the folding-doors that opened upon the lawn.
“Don't let us talk of bogies on such a beautiful day. I want to show you my crocuses.”
It was her sovereign pleasure to break off the conversation. He dared not press her. She took him out among her crocuses and daffodils, and became the Stella he had always known, with the exception that now she dwelt in a spring flower's bloom instead of in a bit of silver in the flying scud. They talked eternal verities concerning the souls of flowers.
After this unsatisfactory and, to, a certain extent, baffling visit, Herold went back to London with a heartache, which induced an unaccustomed moodiness. At the theatre that night, Miss Leonora Gurney took him to task. Now, Miss Gurney (Mrs. Hetherington in private life; she had divorced the disreputable Hetherington years ago, and had not remarried) was a very important and captivating person. She was a woman of genius, a favourite of the London public, a figure of society, in management on her own account, wherein she showed shrewd business ability, and very much in love with Walter Herold, wherein she showed much of the weakness of Eve. This season Herold was her leading man.
To say that Herold had wrapped himself up in his Joseph's garment (not the one of many colours, but the other one equally famous) during all his stage career would be mendacious folly. Many a ball had come to him at the bound, and he had returned it gaily. He had laughed an honest way through innumerable love-affairs—things of the moment, things of the fancy, things of no importance whatsoever. Many maidens, and some matrons, had wept for him, but none bitterly. He had established a reputation for lack of seriousness in matters of the heart. His bright, blue eyes would flash at you, and his low, musical voice would murmur no matter what, even were it the Lord's Prayer backward, and you caught your breath, and lost your head, and were perfectly ready to say if he asked you, and sometimes even if he did n't ask you: “Take me, I am yours.” But whatever he did, he never rose to the passionate height, or sank to the unromantic depth, of the situation. Which things were a mystery.
To qualify what might appear to be a sweeping proposition, it may be stated that there are certain phases in certain women's lives when they make straight for the mystery surrounding a man, as moth does for candle, and singe their wings in so doing. Thus singed were the chaste and charming wings of Leonora Gurney. Herold, no more aware of an aura of mystery than of a halo, received the lady's advances in his frank, laughing way. She had the raven hair, dark, blue eyes, and white skin of an Irish ancestry. She was exceedingly attractive. She played her love-scenes with him—his part in the piece was that of a broken-down solicitor's clerk who entertained an angel unawares—with an artistic sympathy that is the rare joy of the actor, when he feels, like one who has the perfect partner in a waltz, that he merges his own individuality into a divine union. At the end of the third act the curtain came down on the angel bending over his chair, her hand in his. It remained there, a warm and human thing, and her breath was on his cheek, for a long time, while the curtain went up and down. It was by no means disagreeable to hold Leonora's hand and feel her breath on his cheek, after the common emotion of the swinging scene. Hundreds of men would have given their ears to have done the same without any swinging scene at all.