The music swept the rest away, but not the look of blinding reproach he gave her that made her heart throb wildly as she glided on.

The last note of the quadrille slipped into a waltz dreamily slow, and Valiant put his arm about Shirley and they floated away. Once before, in the moonlighted garden at Rosewood, she had lain in his arms for one brief instant; then she had seemed like some trapped wood-thing resisting. Now, her slender body swaying to his every motion, she was another creature. Under the drooping tawny hair her face was almost as pale as the white satin of her gown; her lips were parted, and as they moved, he could feel her heart rise and fall to her languorous breath.

There was no speech between them; for those few golden moments all else vanished utterly, and he guided by instinct, as oblivious to the floor-full as if he were drifting through some enchanted ether, holding to his breast the incarnation of all loveliness, a thing of as frail enchantment as the glow of stars upon snow, yet for him always the one divine vision!

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

BY THE SUN-DIAL

Eyes arched with fan-shielded whispers, and fair faces, fore-shortened as they turned back over powder-white shoulders, followed their swallow-like movement. From an ever-widening circle of masculine devotees Katharine Fargo watched them with a smile that cloaked an increasing and unwelcome question.

Katharine had never looked more handsome; a critical survey of her mirror at Gladden Hall had a.s.sured her of that. Never had her poise been more superb, her toilet more enrapturing. She was exquisitely gowned in rose-colored mousseline-de-soie, embroidered in tiny brilliants laid on in Greek patterns. From her neck, in a single splendid loop of iridescence against the rosy mist, depended those fabulous pearls--"the kind you simply _can't_ believe," as Betty Page confided to her partner--on whose newspaper reproduction (actual diameter) metropolitan shop-girls had been wont to gaze with glistening eyes; and within their milky circlet, on her rounded breast, trembled three pale gold-veined orchids.

Watching that quadrille through her drooping emerald-tinted eyes, she had received a sudden enlightening impression of Shirley's flawless beauty. At the tournament her fleeting glimpse had adjudged the other merely sweetly pretty. The Chalmers' surrey had stopped en route for Shirley, but in her wraps and veil she had then been all but invisible.

This had been Katharine's first adequate view, and the sight of her radiant charm had the effect almost of a blow.

For Katharine, be it said, had wholly surrendered to the old, yet new, attraction that had swept her on the tourney field. This feeling was no less cerebral and intellectual than it had been: she was no Galatea waiting her Pygmalion. But it was strong for all that. And what had lain always in the back of her mind as a half-formed intention, had become a self-admitted purpose during the motor ride. So as she watched them in the waltz, seasoned artificialist as she was, Katharine for a breath had had need of all her address to keep the ball of conversation sparklingly a-roll. Her natural a.s.surance, however, came quickly to her aid. She had been an acknowledged beauty too many seasons--had known John Valiant, or believed she had, too long and too well--to allow the swift keen edge of trepidation that had touched her to cool into prescience.

In another moment the waltz fainted out, to be succeeded by a _deux-temps_, and presently the host, in his crimson cloak, was doffing his plumed hat before her. Circling the polished floor in the maze, there was something gratefully like former days in the a.s.sured touch, the true and ready guidance. The intrusive question faded. He was the John Valiant she had always known, of flashing repartee and graceful compliment, yet with a touch of dignity, too--as befitted the lord of a manor--which sat well upon him. After a decorous dozen of rounds, she took his arm and allowed her perfect figure to be conducted through the various rooms of the ground floor, chatting in quite the old-time way, till a new gallant claimed her.

The mellow strings made on their merry tune, and at length the _Washington Post_ marched all in flushed unity of purpose to the great muslin-walled porch with its array of tables groaning under viands concocted by Aunt Daphne for the delectation of the palate-weary: layer-cakes, furry-brown with chocolate, or saffron with orange icing; fruit-cake richer than an Indian begum; angel-cake as white (as the major was to remark) as innocence and almost as sweet as the lady upon whom he pressed it at the moment; yellow jumbles, kisses that crumbled at a touch, and all nameless toothsome inventions for which new-laid eggs are beaten and golden citron sliced.

And then once more the waltz-strain supervened and in the yellow parlor joy was again unconfined. Among the masculine contingent, perhaps, the same catholicity of age no longer prevailed, certain of the elders showing an inclination toward one end of the front porch, now hazing with the fragrance of Havanas. But the dowagers' fans plied on, the rose-corners echoed their light laughter and the couples footed it as though midnight was yet unreached and dawn as far afield as Judgment Day.

Again Valiant claimed Katharine and they glided off on _The Beautiful Blue Danube_. Her paleness now had a tinge of color but nevertheless he thought she drooped. "You are tired," he said, "shan't we sit it out?"

"Oh, do you mind?" she responded gratefully. "It _has_ been a fairly strenuous day, hasn't it!"

He guided her to a corridor, where branches of rhododendron screened an alcove of settees and seductive cushions. Here, her weariness seemed put to rout. There was no drooping of fringed lids, no disconcerting silences; she chatted with ease and piquancy.

"It's like a fairy tale," she said at length dreamily,--"this wonderful life. To step into it from New York is like coming out of a hot-house into the spring out-of-doors! It makes our city existence seem so sordidly artificial. You have chosen right."

"I know it. And yet two months ago a life a hundred miles from the avenue would have seemed a sad and sandy Sahara. I know better now."

"I have been listening to paeans all the evening," she said. "And you deserve them. It's a fine big thing you are attempting--the restoring of this old estate. And I know you have even bigger plans, too."

He nodded, suddenly serious and thoughtful. "There's a lot I'd like to do. It's not only the house and grounds. There are ... other things. For instance, back on the mountain--on my own land--is a settlement they call h.e.l.l's-Half-Acre. Probably it has well earned the name. It's a wretched collection of hovels and surly men and drabs of women and unkempt children, the poorest of poor-whites. Not one of them can read or write, and they live like animals. If I'm ever able, I mean to put a manual-training school up there. And then--"

He ended with a half laugh, suddenly conscious that he was talking in a language she would scarcely understand--in fact, in a tongue new to himself. But there was no smile on her lips and her extraordinary eyes--cool gray, shot through with emerald--were looking into his with a frankness and sympathy he would not have guessed lay beneath her glacial placidity.

To Katharine, indeed, it made little difference what philanthropic fads the man she had chosen might affect as regarded his tenantry. Ambitions like these had a manorial flavor that did not displease her. And the Fargo millions would bear much harmless hammering. A change, subtle and incommunicable, pa.s.sed over her.

"I shall think of you," she sighed, "as working on in this splendid program. For it _is_ splendid. But New York will miss you, John."

"Ah, no. I've no delusions on that score. I dare say I'm almost forgotten there already. Here I have a _place_."

Her head, leaned back against the cushion, turned toward him, the pale orchids trembling on her bosom--she was so near that he could feel her breath on his cheek. A new waltz had begun to sigh its languorous measures.

"Place?" she queried. "Do you think you had no place there? Is it possible that you do not understand that your going has left--a void?"

He looked at her suddenly, and her eyes fell. No sophisticated blushing this, though it was by such effective employment of her charms that her wonderful body and pliant mind had been drilled and fashioned from her babyhood. Katharine at the moment was as near the luxury of real embarra.s.sment as she had ever been in her life.

Before he answered, however, the big form of Major Bristow appeared, looking about him.

"It has--left a void," she said, her eyes still downcast, her voice just low enough, "--for _me_."

The major pounced upon them at this juncture, feelingly accusing John of the nefarious design of robbing the a.s.semblage of its bright and particular star. When Katharine put her hand in her cavalier's arm, her eyes were dewy under their long shading lashes and her fine lips ever so little tremulous. It had been her best available moment, and she had used it.

As she moved away, her faint color slightly heightened, she was glad of the interruption. It was better as it was. When John Valiant came to her again....

But to him, as he stood watching her move lightly from him, there was vouchsafed illumination. It came to him suddenly that that placidity and hauteur which he had so admired in the old days were no mask for fires within. The exquisite husk was the real Katharine. Hers was the loveliness of some tall white lily cut in marble, splendid but chill.

And with the thought, between him and her there swept through the shimmering candle-lighted air a breath of wet rose-fragrance like an impalpable cloud, and set in the midst of it a misty star-tinted gown sprayed with lilies-of-the-valley, and above it a girl's face clear and vivid, her deep shadow-blue eyes fixed on his.

The music of a two-step was languishing when, a little later, Valiant and Shirley strolled down between the garden box-hedges, cypress-shaped and lifting spire-like toward a sky which bent, a silent canopy of mauve and purplish blue. The moon drowsed between the trees like a great yellow moth, and the shadows of the branches lay on the ground like sharp bluish etchings on light green paper. Behind them Damory Court lay a nest of woven music and laughter. The long white-muslined porch shimmered goldenly, and beside it under the lanterns dallied a flirtatious couple or two, ghost-like in the shadows.

Peace brooded over all, a vast sweet silence creeping through the trees--only here and there the twitter of a waking bird--and around them was the glimmer of tall flowers standing like pensive moon-worshipers in an ecstasy of prayerless bloom.

"Come," he said. "Let me take you to see the sun-dial now."

The tangle had been cut away and a narrow gravel-path led through the pruned creepers. She made an exclamation of delight. The onyx-pillar stood in an oasis of white--moonflowers, white dahlias, mignonette and narcissus; bars of late lilies-of-the-valley beyond these, bordered with Arum-lilies, white clematis, iris and bridal-wreath, shading out into tender paler hues that ringed the spotless purity like dawning pa.s.sion.

"White for happiness," he quoted. "You said that when you brought me here--the day we planted the ramblers. Do you remember what I said? That some day, perhaps, I should love this spot the best of all at Damory Court." He was silent a moment, tracing with his finger the motto on the dial's rim. "When I was very little," he went on,--"hardly more than three years old, I think,--my father and I had a play, in which we lived in a great mansion like this. It was called Wishing-House, and it was in the middle of the Never-Never Land--a sort of beautiful fairy country in which everything happened right. I know now that the Never-Never Land was Virginia, and that Wishing-House was Damory Court. No wonder my father loved it! No wonder his memory turned back to it always! I've wanted to make it as it was when he lived here. And I want the old dial to count happy hours for me."

Something had crept into his tone that struck her with a strange sweet terror and tumult of mind. The hand that clutched her skirts about her knees had begun to tremble and she caught the other hand to her cheek in a vague hesitant gesture. The moonflowers seemed to be great round eyes staring up at her.

"Shirley--" he said, and now his voice was shaken with longing--"will you make my happiness for me?"

She was standing perfectly still against the sun-dial, both hands, laced together, against her breast, her eyes on his with a strange startled look. Over the hush of the garden now, like the very soul of the pa.s.sionate night, throbbed the haunting barcarole of _Tales of Hoffmann_:

"Night of stars and night of love--"

an inarticulate echo of his longing. He took a step toward her, and she turned like one in sudden terror seeking a way of escape. But he caught her close in his arms.

"I love you!" he said. "Hear it now in my bride's garden that I've made for you! I love you, I _love_ you!"

For one instant she struggled. Then, slowly, her eyes turned to his, the sweet lips trembling, and something dawning deep in the dewy blue that turned all his leaping blood to quicksilver. "My darling!" he breathed, and their lips met.

In that delirious moment both had the sense of divine completion that comes only with love returned. For him there was but the woman in his arms, the one woman created for him since the foundation of the world.

It was Kismet. For this he had come to Virginia. For this fate had turned and twisted a thousand ways. Through the riot of his senses, like a silver blaze, ran the legend of the calendar: "Every man carries his fate upon a riband about his neck." For her, something seemed to pa.s.s from her soul with that kiss, some deep irrevocable thing, shy but fiercely strong, that had sprung to him at that lip-contact as steel to magnet. The foliage about them flared up in green light and the ground under her feet rose and fell like deep sea-waves.

She lifted her face to him. It was deathly pale, but the light that burned on it was lit from the whitest altar-fires of Southern girlhood.

"Six weeks ago," she whispered, "you had never seen me!"