The Streets of Ascalon Part 13

"Ultimately."

"And then?"

"Oh! Have you the effrontery to tell me to my face that you'll be in the same mind about me three weeks hence?"

"I have."

"Do you expect me to believe you?"

"I don't know--what to expect--of you, of myself," he said so quietly that she looked up quickly.

"Mr. Quarren! _Are_ you a sentimental man? I had mentally absolved you from _that_ preconception of mine--among other apparently unmerited ideas concerning you."

"I suppose you'll arise and flee if I tell you that you're different from other women," he said.

"You wouldn't be such an idiot as to tell me that, would you?"

"I might be. I'm just beginning to realise my capacity for imbecility.

You're different in this way anyhow; no woman ever before induced me to pull a solemn countenance."

"I _don't_ induce you! I ask you not to."

"I _try_ not to; but, somehow, there's something so--so real about _you_----"

"Are you accustomed to foregather with the disembodied?"

"I'm beginning to think that my world is rather thickly populated with ghosts--phantoms of a more real world."

He looked at her soberly; she had thought him younger than he now seemed. A slight irritation silenced her for a moment, then, impatiently:

"You speak cynically and I dislike it. What reason have you to express world-weary sentiments?--you who are young, who probably have never known real sorrow, deep unhappiness! I have little patience with a morbid view of anything, Mr. Quarren. I merely warn you--in the event of your ever desiring to obtain my good graces."

"I do desire them."

"Then be yourself."

"I don't know what I am. I thought I knew. Your advent has disorganised both my complacency and my resignation."

"What do you mean?"

"Must I answer?"

"Of course!" she said, laughing.

"Then--the Harlequin who followed you up those stairs, never came down again."

"Oh!" she said, unenlightened.

"I'm wondering who it was who came down out of that balcony in the wake of the golden dancer," he added.

"You and I--you very absurd young man. What are you trying to say?"

"I--wonder," he said, smiling, "what I am trying to say."

CHAPTER III

Suns.h.i.+ne illuminated the rose-silk curtains of Mrs. Leeds's bedroom with parallel slats of light and cast a frail and tremulous net of gold across her bed. The sparrows in the j.a.panese ivy seemed to be unusually boisterous, and their persistent metallic chatter disturbed Strelsa who presently unclosed her gray eyes upon her own reflected features in the wall-gla.s.s opposite.

Face still flushed with slumber, she lay there considering her mirrored features with humorous, sleepy eyes; then she sat up, stretched her arms, yawned, patted her red lips with her palm, pressed her knuckles over her eyelids, and presently slipped out of bed. Her bath was ready; so was her maid.

A little later, cross-legged on the bed once more, she sat sipping her chocolate and studying the morning papers with an interest and satisfaction unjaded.

Coupled with the nave curiosity of a kitten remained her unspoiled capacity for pleasure, and the interest of a child in a world unfolding daily in a sequence of miracles under her intent and delighted eyes.

Bare of throat and arm and shoulder, the l.u.s.trous hair shadowing her face, she now appeared unexpectedly frail, even thin, as though the fuller curves of the mould in which she was being formed had not yet been filled up.

Fully dressed, gown and furs lent to her something of a youthful maturity which was entirely deceptive; for here, in bed, the golden daylight revealed childish contours accented so delicately that they seemed almost s.e.xless. And in her intent gray eyes and in her undeveloped mind was all that completed the bodily and mental harmony--youth unawakened as yet except to a confused memory of pain--and the dreamy and pa.s.sionless unconsciousness of an unusually late adolescence.

At twenty-four Strelsa still looked upon her morning chocolate with a healthy appet.i.te; and the excitement of seeing her own name and picture in the daily press had as yet lost none of its delightful thrill.

All the morning papers reported the Wycherlys' house-warming with cloying detail. And she adored it. What paragraphs particularly concerned herself, her capable maid had enclosed in inky brackets. These Strelsa read first of all, warm with pleasure at every stereotyped tribute to her loveliness.

The comments she perused were of all sorts, even the ungrammatical sort, but she read them all with profound interest, and loved every one, even the most fulsome. For life, and its kinder experience, was just beginning for her after a shabby childhood, a lonely girlhood, and a marriage unspeakable, the memory of which already had become to her as vaguely poignant as the dull recollection of a nightmare.

So her appet.i.te for kindness, even the newspaper variety, was keen and not at all discriminating; and the reaction from two years'

solitude--two years of endurance, of shrinking from public comment--had developed in her a fierce longing for pleasure and for play-fellows.

Her fellow-men had responded with an enthusiasm which still surprised her delightfully at moments.

The clever Swedish maid now removed the four-legged tray from her knees; Strelsa, propped on her pillows, was still intent on her newspapers, satisfying a natural curiosity concerning what the world thought about her costume of the night before, her beauty, herself, and the people she knew. At last, agreeably satiated, she lowered the newspaper and lay back, dreamy-eyed, faintly smiling, lost in pleasant retrospection.

Had she really appeared as charming last night as these exceedingly kind New York newspapers pretended? Did this jolly world really consider her so beautiful? She wished to believe it. She tried to. Perhaps it was really true--because all these daily paragraphs, which had begun with her advent into certain New York sets, must really have been founded on something unusual about her.

And it could not be her fortune which continued to inspire such journalistic loyalty and devotion, because she had none--scarcely enough money in fact to manage with, dress with, pay her servants, and maintain her pretty little house in the East Eighties.

It could not be her wit; she had no more than the average American girl.

Nor was there anything else in her--neither her cultivation, attainments, nor talents--to ent.i.tle her to distinction. So apparently it must be her beauty that evoked paragraphs which had already made her a fas.h.i.+on in the metropolis--was making her a cult--even perhaps a notoriety.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Strelsa, propped on her pillows, was still intent on her newspapers."]

Because those people who had personally known Reginald Leeds, were exceedingly curious concerning this young girl who had been a n.o.body, as far as New York was concerned, until her name became legally coupled with the name of one of the richest and most dissipated scions of an old and honourable New York family.

The public which had read with characteristic eagerness all about the miserable finish of Reginald Leeds, found its abominable curiosity piqued by his youthful widow's appearance in town.