"And forget the stage--?"

"I don't know--I'll try, Jack."

"You must, dear one."

It was not a time for disagreements. Joan clung more closely to him. The issue languished in default, was forgotten for the time....

Transports ebbed: the faintest premonitory symptoms of a return to something resembling sanity made their appearance; of a sudden Matthias remembered the hour.

"Do you know," he said with tender gravity, having consulted his watch, "it's after eleven?"

"It doesn't seem possible," she laughed happily.

"And I'm hungry," he announced. "Aren't you?"

She dared to be as frank as he: "Famished!"

"Come along, then! Run, get your hat. It gives us an excuse for at least two hours more...."

By the time she had repaired the damage this miracle had wrought with her appearance, Matthias had walked to the Astor and brought back a taxicab. The attention affected Joan with a poignant and exquisite sense of happiness.

It was only her second ride in a motor vehicle. The top being down, they sat very circ.u.mspectly apart; but Matthias captured her hand and eye spoke to eye with secret laughter of delight, each reading the other's longing thought. The speed of the cab and its sudden slackening as it picked its path down Broadway, the flow of cool air against her face, the swimming maze of lights through which they sped, the sense of luxury and protection, added the last touch of delirious pleasure to Joan's mood.

Matthias had chosen the cafe of "Old Martin's," at Twenty-sixth Street, the first place that suggested itself as one where they could sup without the girl being made to feel out of place in her modest work-a-day attire; but his thoughtfulness was misapplied: Joan was exalted beyond such annoyances; and those feminine glances which she detected, of pity, disdain, and jealousy, she took complacently as envious tributes to her prettiness and her conquest.

From a seat against the wall, in a corner, she reviewed the other patrons of the smoke-wreathed room with a hauteur of spirit that would have seemed laughable had it been suspected. She thought of herself as the handsomest woman there, and the youngest, of Matthias as the most distinguished man and--the luckiest. The circ.u.mstances of the place and her partner enchanted her to distraction.

The food Matthias ordered she devoured heedlessly; but there was a delicious novelty in the experience of sipping her first gla.s.s of champagne. It was, for that matter, the first time she had ever tasted good wine, or any kind of alcoholic drink other than an occasional gla.s.s of lukewarm beer, cheap and nasty to begin with and half-stale at best, and that poisonous red wine of the Italian boarding-house to which Charlie Quard had introduced her. She had never dreamed of anything so delicious as this dry and exhilarating draught with its exotic bouquet and aromatic bubbles.

With a glowing face and dancing eyes she nodded to Matthias over the rim of her goblet.

"When we are rich," she laughed softly, "I'm never going to drink anything else!"

He smiled quietly, enjoying her enjoyment; but, when emptied, the half-bottle he had ordered was not renewed.

There was without that enough intoxication in his fondness, in the simulacrum of gaiety manufactured by the lights, the life, the laughter, and in the muted, interweaving strains of music. Joan felt that she was living wonderfully and intensely, a creature of an existence transcendent and radiant.

It was after one when another taxicab whisked them homeward through the quieting streets. She sat as close as could be to her lover and would not have objected on the grounds of "people looking" had he put an arm round her. Though he didn't, she was not disappointed, sharing something of his mood of sublimely sufficient contentment. But when he bade her good night at the foot of the stairs in the deserted and poorly lighted hallway, she gave herself to his caresses with a pa.s.sion and abandon that startled and sobered Matthias, and sent him off to his room and bed in a thoughtful frame of mind.

Lying awake in darkness until darkness was dimly tempered by the formless dusk that long foreruns the dawn, he communed gravely with his troubled heart.

"Things can't go on this way--as they've started. There's _got_ to be sanity.... It's myself I've got to watch, of course," he said with stubborn loyalty to his ideal. "I mustn't forget I'm a man--nine years older--nearly ten.... Why, she's hardly more than a kiddie.... She doesn't _know_.... I've got to watch myself...."

And in her room, four floors above, Joan sat as long before her bureau, chin cradled on her slim, laced fingers, eyeing intently the face shown her by gas-light in the one true patch of the common, tarnished mirror.

When at length she rose, suddenly conscious of a heavy weariness, she lingered yet another long moment for one last fond look.

"It's true," she told herself with a little nod of conviction; "I am beautiful. _She_ said I was ... he thinks I am ... I must be...."

XIX

For a long time Joan lay snug between the sheets, staring wide-eyed into the patch of l.u.s.trous blue morning sky framed by the window, reviewing this new and wonderful adventure of her heart from a point of view remote, detached, and critical. Thoughts recurred that in the excitement and ardour of the night had been pa.s.sed over and neglected; and from them she derived a new, strange, and intoxicating sense of power.

Her first waking thought was as her last before sleeping: _I am beautiful_.

Her second, not _I love him_, but _He loves me_.

And her third grew out of the second: _I can make him do what pleases me_.

Yesterday a lowly supplicant at the shrine of love: today Love's very self, adored and desired by an erstwhile divinity now humbled to the level of humanity!

A fit of petulance, beauty in tears, a whispered word of pa.s.sion: strange and strangely simple incantation to have turned a world upside down! How easily was man suppled to the spell!

The sense of power ran like wine through her being: she felt herself invincible, an adept of love's alchemy; she had surprised its secret, and now the world of man's heart lay open to the practices of her disastrous art. For a moment she experienced an almost terrifying intimation of empires ripe for conquest that lay beyond Matthias; but from this she withdrew her troubled gaze; nor would she look again; not yet....

She considered his mad extravagance of last night--taxicabs, champagne, tips! Was he, then, able to afford such expenditures? In her understanding they went oddly with his pretensions to decent poverty. Or had he merely lost his head under the influence of her charms? This last theory pleased her; she adopted it with reservations: the question remained one to be cleared up.

He disapproved of a career upon the stage for her?... Joan smiled indulgently: that matter would be arranged in good time. She meant to have her way....

At a tap on her door she changed suddenly from the aloof egoist to a woman athrill before the veil of portentous mysteries. She sat up in bed, called out to know who was knocking, gave permission to the chambermaid to enter, and received a note in the hand of Matthias.

"_Past twelve o'clock_," she read, "_and still no sign of you, sweetheart. I give you thirty minutes to dress and come to me. If you don't, I'll come for you. After breakfast, we'll run out of town for the day--our first day together!_ MATTHIAS."

Half wild with delight, she hurried through her toilet and ran down-stairs to find her lover waiting in the hallway, watch in hand.

He closed it with a snap, and made her a quaintly ceremonious bow. "In two minutes more--!" he observed in a tone of grave menace. "But before we go out, have the kindness to step into my humble study. I have somewhat to say to you."

She appeared to hesitate, to be reluctant and preoccupied occupied.

"What about?" she demanded distantly.

But her dancing eyes betrayed her.

"Business," he said, sententious. His gesture indicated a vigilant universe of eavesdroppers. "n.o.body's but our own!"

Nevertheless, there was none to spy upon them as he drew her gently by the waist, down the hall and into the back-parlour. She yielded with a charming diffidence.

In his embrace the sense of power slipped unheeded from her ken; returned the deep, obliterating rapture of over-night. Lips that first submitted, soon gave in return, then demanded....

She clung heavily to him, a little faint and breathless with a vague and sweet and nameless longing....

At breakfast in a neighbouring restaurant, Matthias disclosed his plans for the day, involving a motor trip down along the north sh.o.r.e of Long Island, dinner at Huntington, a return by moonlight. Joan, enchanted by the prospect--the sum of whose experience outside Manhattan Island was comprised in a few trips to Coney Island--consented with a strange mingling of eagerness and misgivings; the thought of the cost troubled a conscience still haunted by memories of last night's prodigality.

"I didn't know you had an automobile."