Cora did not reply for several seconds. She had begun to put little touches upon her canvas again--or to seem as if she were so putting them.

"It's not good enough to be called anything," she presently replied.

"I want it," said Pauline. She was looking straight at the picture--a small square of rather recklessly rich color. "I want it very much indeed. I ... I will give you a considerable sum for it."

She named the sum that she was willing to give, and in an admirably cool, loitering voice. It was something that surpa.s.sed any price ever proposed to Cora Dares for one of her paintings, by several hundreds of dollars.

Cora kept silent. She was touching her canvas. Pauline waited. Suddenly she turned and regarded her companion.

"Well?" she said.

Cora flung aside her brush. The two women faced each other.

"I think you are cruel!" cried Cora. It was evident that she was nearly in straits for speech, and her very lovely blue eyes seemed to sparkle through unshed tears. "I--I told you that I did not wish to sell the picture," she hurried on. "I--I don't call it a picture at all, as I also told you. It--it is far from being worth the price that you have offered me. It ... it ... And," here Cora paused. Her last words had a choked sound.

Pauline was looking at her fixedly but quite courteously.

"It is Ralph Kindelon's portrait," she said.

Cora started. "Well! and if it is!" she exclaimed.

Instantly, after that, Pauline went over to her and took one of her hands.

"My dear Miss Dares," she said, with that singular sweetness which she could always throw into her voice, "I beg you to forgive me. If you really wish to retain that picture--and I see that you do--why, then I would not take it from you even as a voluntary gift. Let us speak no more on the subject."

Cora gave a pained, difficult smile, now. She looked full into Pauline's steady eyes for a brief s.p.a.ce, and then withdrew her own.

"Very well," she almost faltered, "let us speak no more on the subject...."

"I have been horribly merciless," Pauline told herself, when she had quitted Cora Dares's studio about ten minutes later. "I have made that poor girl confess to me that she loves Ralph Kindelon. And how suited they are to each other! She has actual genius--he is br.i.m.m.i.n.g with intellectual power. I have made a sad failure in my visit to Cora Dares.... I hope all my vain exploits among these people, who are so different from the people with whom my surroundings of fortune and destiny have thus far brought me into natural contact, will not result so disastrously."

Her thoughts returned to Kindelon, as she walked homeward, and to the hostile terms on which they had parted but a few hours ago.

"My project begins badly," she again mused. "Everything about it seems to promise ill. But it is too late to draw back. Besides, I am very far from wishing to draw back. I am like an enthusiastic explorer; I want to face new discoveries in the very teeth of disaster."

On reaching home she had scarcely time to take off her bonnet before the name of her cousin Courtlandt was brought to her by a servant. She went down into the little reception-room to meet him, with rather lively antic.i.p.ations of being forced to put herself on the defensive. Her sensations had not been unlike those with which we regard the lowering of the mercury in a thermometer, while ordering extra fuel so as to be on guard against a sudden chill.

Courtlandt was standing before the silver-grated hearth-place; he watched the black, tumbled blocks of coal with eyes bent down upon their snapping and crackling flames as Pauline appeared. He did not immediately raise his eyes as her entering step sounded. But when he did raise them, she saw that he was clad in his old impregnable calm.

She sank into a chair, not far from the fire. "Well," she said, with an amused smile playing about her lips, "I suppose you have come to scold me dreadfully."

"What makes you suppose so?" he asked.

"You darted away, there at the Battery, as if you were fearfully shocked."

"I don't think I darted away."

"Oh, well, we won't split hairs. You wouldn't stay, and you might easily have stayed. You pleaded stress of business, and you hadn't any, or this appearance up-town at so early an hour couldn't have taken place."

"It is remarkable," said Courtlandt, with his gravest serenity, "how you pierce through people's pitiful disguises. You make me feel conscience-stricken by a realization of my own deceit."

"That is fortunate," said Pauline, with a slight, curt laugh. "For then you will, perhaps, express your disapprobation less impudently."

"I might speak pretty plainly to you and yet not be at all impudent."

Pauline threw back her head with a defiant stolidity. "Oh, speak as plainly as you please," she said. "I shall have my own views of just how impudent you are. I generally have."

"You did something that was a good deal off color for a woman who wants herself always regarded as careful of the proprieties. I found you doing it, and I was shocked, as you say."

Pauline straightened herself in her chair. "I don't know what you mean,"

she replied, a little crisply, "by 'off color.' I suppose it is slang, and I choose, with a good reason, to believe that it conveys an unjustly contemptuous estimate of my very harmless act. I took a stroll along that beautiful Battery with a friend."

"With an adventuring newspaper fellow, you mean," said Courtlandt, cool as always, but a little more sombre.

Pauline rose. "I will stand a certain amount of rudeness toward myself,"

she declared, "but I will not stand sneers at Mr. Kindelon. No doubt if you had met me walking with some empty-headed fop, like Fyshkille, or Van Arsdale, you would have thought my conduct perfectly proper."

"I'd have thought it devilish odd," said Courtlandt, "and rather bad form. I've no more respect for those fellows than you have. But if you got engaged to one of them I shouldn't call it a horrible disaster."

Pauline smiled, with a threat of rising ire in the smile. "Who thought of my becoming 'engaged' to anybody?" she asked. And her accentuation of the word which Courtlandt had just employed produced the effect of its being scornfully quoted.

He was toying with the links of his watch-chain, and he kept his eyes lowered while he said: "Are you in love with this Kindelon chap?"

She flushed to the roots of her hair. "I--I shall leave the room," she said unsteadily, "if you presume to talk any further in this strain."

"You are a very rich woman," pursued Courtlandt. What he said had somehow the effect of a man exploding something with a hand of admirable firmness.

Pauline bit her lips excitedly. She made a movement as if about to quit the chamber. Then some new decision seemed to actuate her. "Oh, Court!"

she exclaimed reproachfully, "how can you treat me in this unhandsome way?"

He had lifted his eyes, now. "I am trying to save you from making a ridiculous marriage," he said. "I tried once before--a good while ago--to save you from making a frightful one. My attempt was useless then. I suppose it will be equally useless now."

Pauline gave an agitated moan, and covered her face with both hands....

Hideous memories had been evoked by the words to which she had just listened. But immediately afterward a knock sounded at the partly closed door which led into the hall. She started, uncovered her face, and moved toward this door. Courtlandt watched her while she exchanged certain low words with a servant. Then, a little later, she approached him, and he saw that her agitation had vanished, and that it appeared to have so vanished because of a strong controlling effort.

"Mr. Kindelon is here," she said, in abrupt undertone. "If you do not wish to meet him you can go back into the dining-room." She made a gesture toward a _portiere_ not far away. "That leads to the dining-room," she went on. "Act just as you choose, but be civil, be courteous, or do not remain."

"I will not remain," said Courtlandt.

He had pa.s.sed from the room some little time before Kindelon entered it.

"You did not expect to see me," said the latter, facing Pauline. His big frame had a certain droop that suggested humility and even contrition.

He held his soft hat crushed in one hand, and he made no sign of greeting with the other.

"No," said Pauline softly, "I did not expect to see you." She was waiting for the sound of the hall-door outside; she soon heard it, and knew that it meant the exit of Courtlandt. Then she went on: "but since you are here, will you not be seated?"

"Not until you have forgiven me!" Kindelon murmured. Between the rich, fervent, emotional voice which now addressed her and the even regularity of the tones she had just heard, what a world of difference lay!

"You were certainly rude," she said, thinking how chivalrously his repentance became him, and how strong a creature he looked in this weaker submissive phase. "You know that I had only the most friendly feelings toward you. You accused me of actual hypocrisy. But I will choose to believe that you did not mean to lose your temper in that positively wild way. Yes, I forgive you, and, in token of my forgiveness there is my hand."