Flaming Youth

CHAPTER XIX

"Oh, very well! I don't have to marry the bird, do I?"

Dee laughed. "You might do worse. He's got lots of money and you could manage him like a lamb."

"I don't want a lamb. I don't want anything yet but to have a good time."

"Shoot along and have it, then."

Thus it was that Cary Scott was mulcted of several expected dances with no other explanation than a whispered "I'll tell you why later," which, however, left him not ill-content. Just before the bridal couple left he got his first private word with the busy maid-of-honour. They stood together on the tile of the loggia, now a bower of greenery and a narrow thoroughfare for the guests going outside to smoke. Pat's first words were:

"Oh, Cary; did you see Dee's face?"

"Yes." He did not need to ask her when.

"What did it mean?"

"I don't know. Nothing probably."

"You know it did!" Her confidence in his understanding, her appeal to him in this, the most intimate of family matters, thrilled him with a new sense of their rapprochement, was stronger testimony to his claim upon her inner self than a thousand kisses. "You're fond of Dee, aren't you?" she pursued.

"I'd be fond of her anyway, aside from her being your[Pg 203] sister and the person closest to you in the world. She is, isn't she?"

"But she doesn't know as much about me as you do," murmured Pat. "In some ways she does, though. After all, you're only a man.... But Dee's a wonder, isn't she?"

"She is a fine and high personality."

The jealous coquette in Pat asserted itself. "Finer than I am?"

"Much." His answer was grave and sincere. Pat made a little face at him.

"I don't think it's nice of you to think anyone is nicer than I am."

"I love you, Pat." She quivered a little with delight of the words. "It would make no difference if another woman were as far above you in character as the stars are above the earth; it would still be you and no one else in the world for me. Is it enough? Or do you want rather to be flattered?"

"No," she breathed softly. "I want you to—love me." There was the faint hesitancy over the committing word which she always evinced. "Just your own way. But Dee—— Oh, Bobs!" she exclaimed as the doctor entered the place. "Come here."

"Hello, Bambina. Ah, Cary." Osterhout's face was moody.

"What's on your mind?" demanded Pat. "You look grouchy as a bear."

"Nothing," he disclaimed.

"Did you notice Dee, in church?"

Osterhout's heavy gaze lifted to study Pat's face, then passed to that of Scott. "Did you see it, too?" he muttered.

"Bobs, what was she looking for?"

[Pg 204]
"What could she have been looking for?" he fenced.

"It was so helpless, so hopeless," went on the girl; "and yet as if she had one hope left and weren't going to give up without—without looking."

Osterhout had his own private interpretation of that last, long quest of the bride's eyes before she turned them to her bridegroom, but he was not going to betray it. "All of us are a little high-strung," he opined. "Imagining a vain thing. Dee's all right."

He passed on his way. As if by thought transference there flashed into Scott's mind the strange passage between Dee and the electrical repair man, his old acquaintance, Stanley Wollaston, at the famous Dangerfield "swim au naturel," and the memory of her possessed, dream-haunted face. Could T. Jameson James ever evoke that yearning? Scott knew that he could not, and a great pity for Dee filled him.