Flaming Youth

CHAPTER XIII

"I think not."

"Ah, do," she wheedled. "Just for a minute."

He turned to look at the broad, rambling house. A dim light burned in the library; a brighter one in Dee's room overhead. Constance's room was dark. He was vaguely glad of that.

"I haven't even thanked you yet," she observed.

"You needn't."

"Then you ought to thank me," she asserted daringly, "for taking Connie's place. Do come in. Perhaps I can find you a drink."

"I don't want a drink, thank you," he returned; but he followed her through the door.

"It's us, Dee," called the girl, projecting her voice up the stairway as she led the way to the library. "Mr. Scott and me."

"All right," Dee responded. "I'm in my nightie or I'd come down. Have a good time?"

"Gee-lorious!" said Pat. She took off her hat, fluffed up her short, heavy hair with a double-handed scuffle characteristic of her, and moved forward to the table.

In the diffused soft radiance of the one light, Scott stared at her. Her pose was languid, her eyes sombre[Pg 140] with the still passion of lovely sounds remembered. Slowly the lids drooped over them. She tilted her chin and in her effortless, liquid voice of song gave out the exquisite rhythm of a melody from the Tschaikowsky Fifth which they had just heard.

"Don't, Pat," muttered Scott.

"Don't you like it?"

"I love it. So—don't."

She moved toward him, her throat still quivering with the beauty of sound, and lifted her hand to the bright, curt waves of hair at his temple, brushing them lightly back. A dusky colour glowed in her cheeks. As the dim echo of the music died, she leaned to him. Her lips, light, fervent, cool, softly firm, met his, lingered upon them for the smallest, sweetest moment as a moth hovers in its flight from a flower. Then she, too, was in flight.

"Good-night," she whispered back to him from the doorway.

Pat's challenge to Stancia's supremacy gave Scott plenty to speculate about. His first sentiment was amusement that this daring child should have deliberately elected to enter the lists against her older and more beautiful sister. But what was Pat's interest in him? Flirtation? Evidently. He guessed that it was the dash of diablerie in her that had inspired the experiment. Nevertheless, he was conscious of a rather excited interest in and curiosity about her, not as a precocious child, but as a reckonable woman with distinct provocations of person and mind. In comparison with her, Scott reflected (and was shocked at his own disloyalty in so reflecting) Stancia was becoming insipid.

He discovered, in thinking it over, that there had grown up an impalpable embarrassment between Stancia and himself, and that it seemed to have been growing for some[Pg 141] time; an inexplicable thing between those two who had approached so near to embarkation upon the love-adventure perilous. Had she noticed it? He wondered. Had he been so bold as to put the query to her, she would have hardly known how to reply. She was conscious that at times she failed to hold his interest; that his mind seemed to wander away from her; but, in the self-sufficiency of her beauty, she set that down to a quality of vagueness in his character. He was unfailingly gentle, considerate, and helpful wherever, in her luxurious and hard-pressed life, she allowed him to help. And he asked nothing in return.

This piqued, even while it relieved her. For she was no longer adventurous. The layers of fat were insulating that soft and comfort-enslaved soul. Scott, striving to maintain the appearances of a loyalty which he did not really owe (how he thanked his gods for that now!) found her loveliness growing monotonous, her inertia of mind, irritant. "Nothing above the ears," Pat had said; wicked little Pat, whose vividness so far outshone the mere beauty of the elder. The harsh truth of the slang had stuck.