"Your first night?" He felt that their lives had been strangely divided of late, that he was looking out on her existence as through a floating veil, or as one looks from a tower on a windy world.

"Yes, to-night The Silver Poppy has its first performance--it's first performance in town, I mean."

He had forgotten it completely, shamefully. But it brought him a relieving touch of happiness; he understood now why she had elbowed into the background the thing that had stood out so important to him. He was trying to explain away his stupidity and to laugh away his absent-mindedness when Mrs. Spaulding's voice sounded in the hall.

Cordelia suddenly turned to him.

"You'll come with us to-night, of course?"

He tried to draw back.

"Do!" she pleaded. "I've been--been depending on you. I'd feel more confident if you were along with me. We have a lower box, and there'll be just the four of us. Do come."

"But are you sure you want an outsider along?" he asked dubiously, annoyed at his own pettishness.

"Quite sure," she said, and though his eyes avoided her own as she spoke those two monosyllables, he could guess from the vibrant tone of her voice just what expression she wore.

He agreed to go, then, gladly enough.

"And you deserve some fun, anyway," she said happily, "after being penned up this way."

"Yes, I'd like to drink in a little of the fulness and color of existence now, for a change. I feel like taking life down in gulps."

"Of course you do--then let's begin to-night. Is it a pledge?"

"It is. And here's to the fulness of life."

"The fulness of life--shake on it, as they say down in my country."

From that first-night performance of Cordelia's much-talked-of drama Hartley carried away many mixed feelings.

It was when the perfunctory applause that came at the end of the first act had died dishearteningly away that Cordelia had turned to him and confessed, as though acting under some sudden impulse, that the work of making the play from her book had not been performed by her alone.

"They insisted on having their own men do it," she explained. "They keep men under salary for just that sort of thing."

"But your name's on every spare fence-board in the city," almost gasped Hartley.

"Yes, I know; they _insisted_ that I should stand as both author and playwright. I fought against it from the first, but it was useless. They said it would be worth so much more to them that way."

She looked at him questioningly. "But it makes me feel like a thief,"

she sighed. She was hidden out of sight in a dusky corner of the box, and he could not see her face. He looked out at the audience and said nothing.

It was at the end of the third act that the first touch of enthusiasm fell on the house. Cordelia, bending forward with newly awakened interest, was listening to the continued applause abstractedly but eagerly, almost hungrily, Hartley thought.

It was then that Zillinger, the manager of the house, all but burst into the box, excited, hot, perspiring.

"They're calling for you, Miss Vaughan," he cried under his breath, holding the door for her. And listening, she could hear the distant insistent cry of "Author! Author!"

Cordelia hesitated a moment. Zillinger was motioning energetically toward the narrow little aperture that led back of the boxes into the stage. They were shaking the curtain to sustain the hand. Cordelia looked at Hartley with a mute question in her eyes.

"For G.o.d's sake, quick--they're _calling_ you!" cried Zillinger again, mopping his brow. Cordelia noticed Hartley's face--it stood out in the stronger glare from the footlights--and in it at that moment she seemed to read something for which she had been searching. She settled back in her chair.

"I can't come," she said simply.

Zillinger advanced as though to seize her bodily--he knew the pattering mult.i.tudinous voice of that vast stippled dragon and feared its caprices.

"They're keepin' it up for _you_--you _got_ to!" he cried in desperation.

"They can keep it up till morning for all I care--I shall not come!"

Zillinger threw up his hands and rushed away, mopping his face and m.u.f.fling his oaths with the same handkerchief.

Cordelia's hand sought Hartley's in the dusk of the half-lighted box.

"Bully!" was the only word he said, but she understood how much it meant, and it made her inordinately happy for all the rest of that night. She felt, in some way, that her life had approached its Great Divide.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE FULNESS OF LIFE

He, with his blithe young bosom warm, Quite mad as any hatter, Just pipes and jigs through every storm, So _what_ can winter matter!

JOHN HARTLEY, "The Robin in Winter."

A great man? Impossible; he hasn't a dozen enemies!--"The Silver Poppy."

Those should have been happy days for Hartley, yet they were not. As to just why they were not he had decided to hold question with himself no longer. He was persuading himself to pick the flower, distrustful of his to-morrow.

He and Cordelia saw a great deal of each other, though he was puzzled often by the Indian Summer mood of tranquillity which seemed to have settled down upon her. Though no lightest word of love pa.s.sed between them, she seemed to cling to him with a broken autumnal forlornness that touched him more than once as time went on.

Several days out of the week he dined with the Spauldings, and as the season advanced and the play-houses opened he saw himself more and more often a member of their merry little theater parties. They went once or twice to Cordelia's play, but her novel in its dramatized form was only a lukewarm success at its best, and was soon withdrawn. Yet going out "on the road" as "a New York triumph," it mysteriously took unto itself new life and prospered with sedate but substantial vigor.

Day by day Hartley's circle of acquaintances had enlarged--he became, in fact, a more or less popular young man--and he found it distinctly agreeable to catch an occasional smile from a carriage pa.s.sing in the Park or on Riverside Drive, and to bow now and then to a familiar face on the crowded Avenue--there is only one. It was pleasant, too, to hold the reins and have Cordelia at his side in the Spauldings' spider phaeton, driving quietly home through the waning autumnal evenings after happy afternoons in the sun and open air.

What pleased him most, though, were their early morning rides in Central Park. Mrs. Spaulding had gladly enough placed her horses at his disposal--it was only too good of him to exercise the overfed beasts--and many were his merry canters along the bridle-paths, from which now and then he could catch glimpses of the crowded city that elbowed in on his solitude and gave him a thin, fragmentary feeling of truancy, like a summer runaway who had wandered into sound of the familiar old admonitory school-bell. Cordelia soon formed the habit of joining him in these rides, though for a girl from Kentucky and one who had always made much of her love of horseflesh, she was not a good rider. She explained this by the fact that she had fallen out of practise, for one thing, and for another, that since Firefly, her old Kentucky thoroughbred, had run away with her at home she always felt more or less nervous in the saddle. Hartley took her in hand, accordingly, and coached her at great pains and with much patience, and as she learned to sit more comfortably on her mount her strange fear melted away. As she discovered, too, that the daily gallop in the morning air was bringing more vigor to her limbs and a fresher color to her cheeks, her Southern dislike for all such active exercise soon pa.s.sed away.

Under Hartley's influence she even took to walking, though her first lesson with that somewhat thoughtless instructor left her so fatigued in body and nerve, and with such sadly blistered feet, that she had to keep to her bed for the day following their tramp up and down the entire length of Riverside Drive. But of this Hartley knew nothing.

Besides these many hours in the open air together there was an occasional luncheon at Sherry's, and rustling, odorous, subdued _musicales_ and recitals at Mendelssohn Hall, and now and then a supper at the Waldorf after the theater, and a merry four-in-hand load or two during the month to Ardsley, and suburban automobile jaunts, and sufficient things of a like nature to cause Hartley to keep a judicious eye on his engagement list and to question himself no longer as to whether or not he was wringing the color out of life.

"Cordelia and you seem to be made for each other," said Mrs. Spaulding at supper one evening in her own dining-room, after a charity dance at the Waldorf. "At one time I actually thought the child would never care for anything but books or what the newspapers were saying about her."

Mrs. Spaulding had drunk of her third bottle of champagne, and her voice was not so carefully modulated as it might have been. Cordelia heard the speech with painfully flushing face.

"And some day she'll go back to her books again," she said as she swept from the room in a rage. Hartley was giving all his attention to his Madeira jelly. Mrs. Spaulding looked after her with blank and uncomprehending eyes.