The last words came on a breaking sob, and the handkerchief went up to her face. Mayer was frightened. A quick glance round the plaza showed him no one was in sight, and he threw him arm about her and drew the weeping head down to his shoulder. Though the green paradise plume was in the way and his fear of pa.s.sersby acute, he was still sufficiently master of himself to soothe with words of beguiling sweetness.

While he did it, his free hand holding the paradise plume out of his face, his eye nervously ranging the prospect, his mind ran over ways to meet the difficulty. By the time Chrystie had conquered her tears, and, with a creaking of tight-drawn silks, was sitting upright again, he had hit on a solution and was ready to broach it.

"Well, then, we'll rule out any more lies as you call them. You won't have to say another word to Lorry. We can go on just as we'd planned."

"How?" she asked, in a stopped-up voice, dabbing at her eyes with the handkerchief.

"You can leave on Tuesday afternoon at the same time and go to a hotel."

"A hotel!" She stopped dabbing, extremely surprised, as if he had suggested going to something she had never heard of before.

"Yes, not one of the big ones; a quiet place where you're not liable to run into anyone who may recognize you. I know of the very thing, not long opened, in the Mission. You leave for the train as you intended, but instead of going to the ferry, you go there. I'll take the rooms for you.

All you'll have to do will be to write your name in the book--say, Miss Brown--and go up to your apartment. Order your dinner up there and your breakfast the next morning. I'll have a cab sent round for you at half-past eleven that'll take you straight to the ferry, and I'll send your tickets and trunk check to your rooms before that. There'll be nothing for you to do but cross on the boat and go into your stateroom on the train."

This was all very smooth and clear. It was proof of Chrystie's unpractical trend of thought that her comment was an uneasy,

"A hotel in the Mission?"

"Yes, a new place, very quiet and decent. I heard of it from some people who are living there. I'll not come to see you, but I'll phone over in the evening and find out how you're getting on. And the next morning I'll be on the platform at Oakland, watching out for you."

"But you won't speak to me?"

"Not then. In the train we might meet--just accidentally run into one another. And you'll say, 'Why, there's Mr. Mayer! How odd. How d'ye do, Mr. Mayer.'" He bowed with a mincing imitation of Chrystie's best society manner. "'I didn't expect to see _you_ here.'"

She laughed delightedly, nestling against his shoulder.

"Will that be all? Can I say any more?"

"Not much. It will be only a greeting as we pa.s.s each other: 'So glad to see you, Miss Alston. Going up to Reno for a short stay. See you in town soon again, I hope.' And then you to your stateroom and me in my section, both of us looking out of the window as if we were bored."

They both laughed, lovers again. He was as relieved as she was. After all it might turn out the better plan. He could keep his eye on her, watch for signs of distress or mutiny and be ready with the comforting word. He had to take some risk, and it was better to take that of being seen than that of leaving her a prey to her own disintegrating musings. Chrystie thought it was a great deal better than the other way. She saw herself in the train, conscious of him, knowing he was there, and pretending not to care. She felt uplifted on the wings of romance, heard the air around her stirred by the beating of those rainbow pinions.

The thrill of it lasted until dinner, then began to die away. Her home and the familiar surroundings pressed upon her attention like live things insisting on recognition. The trivial talk round the table took on the poignancy of matters already in the past. The night before Fong, on his way back from Chinatown, had found a deserted kitten and brought it home announcing his intention to adopt it and call it George Washington. Lorry and Aunt Ellen made merry over it, but Chrystie couldn't. The kitten would grow from youth to maturity, and she not be there to see. It took its place in her mind as something belonging to a vanished phase, having the cherished value of a memory.

Finally, Lorry noticed her silence, and wanted to know if anything was the matter. She was pale and had hardly eaten a bite. Aunt Ellen arraigned the Spring as a malign influence, and suggested quinine.

Chrystie snapped at her, and said she wouldn't take quinine if she was dying. Thus warned away, Lorry and Aunt Ellen left her alone and made Summer plans together. Lake Tahoe for July and August was taking shape in Lorry's mind. July and August! Where would _she_ be? Boye had said something about Europe, and at the time it had seemed to her the _ultima Thule_ of her dreams. Now it looked as far away as the moon and as inhospitable.

The inner excitement of the next day carried her over qualms and yearnings--the beating of the rainbow pinions was again in her ears.

In the morning she went to the bank and drew five hundred dollars. She must have some money of her own, and when she reached New York she would want clothes. It was unfortunate that while she was making holes in her trunk to pack it, Lorry should have come in and seen more than half of it stacked on the bureau. That necessitated more lies, and Chrystie told them with desperation. It was to pay people, of course, milliners and dressmakers--she owed a lot, and as she was pa.s.sing the bank she'd drawn it in a lump.

Lorry was disapproving--her sister's carelessness about money always shocked her--and offered to take charge of it till Chrystie came back.

There had to be another crop of lies, and Chrystie's face was beaded with perspiration, her voice shaking, as she bent over her trunk. She'd lock it in her desk, it would be all right--and please go away and don't bother--the expressman might be here any minute now.

She had a hope that Lorry would go out in the afternoon, and she could get away un.o.bserved, but the faithful sister persisted in staying to see her off. That was dreadful. Bag in hand, a lace veil--to be lowered later--pushed back across her hat, she had tried to get the good-by over in the hall, but Lorry had followed her out to the steps. There in the revealing daylight the elder sister's smiles had died away, and scrutinizing the face under the jaunty hat, she had said sharply:

"Is anything the matter, Chrystie? You know, you look quite ill. Are you sure you feel well?"

It brought up a crowding line of memories--Lorry concerned, vigilant, always watching over her with that anxious tenderness. A surge of emotion rose in the girl and she s.n.a.t.c.hed her sister to her, kissed her with a sudden pa.s.sion, then ran.

"Good-by, good-by," she called out as she flew down the steps to the waiting carriage.

Her eyes were blinded, and she was afraid to look back for fear Lorry might see the tears. She waved a hand, then crouched in the corner of the seat and spied out of the little rear window. She could see Lorry on the top step watching the carriage, her face grave, her brows low-drawn in a frown.

The thrill came back when she dismissed the cab at the door of the hotel.

As she walked up the entrance hall it was as if she was walking into the first chapter of a novel--a novel of which she was the heroine. And as Boye had said, it was all very easy--she was expected, everything was ready. A bellboy s.n.a.t.c.hed her bag, and the elevator whisked her up to her rooms, suite 38, third floor rear.

They seemed to her very uninviting; a parlor with crimson plush furniture, smelling of varnish and opening into a bedroom. The blinds were down, and when the boy had left she went to the window and threw it up, letting light and air into the stuffy, unfriendly place. That was better and she leaned out, breathing in the balmy freshness, catching a whiff from gardens blooming bravely between the crowding walls.

She stayed there for some time, staring about, to the left where the bay shone blue beyond the roofs, to the right where on the flanks of the Mission hills she could see the city's distant outposts, white dottings of houses, and here and there the gleam of a tin roof touched by the low sun. The nearby prospect was not attractive--what one might expect in the Mission. Only a narrow crevice separated the hotel wall from the next house, whose yard stretched below her, crossed with clothes lines, the plants and shrubs showing a pale green, elongated growth in their efforts to reach the sunlight. Her down-drooped glance ranged over it with disfavor, and she idly wondered what kind of people lived there. It had once been a sort of detached villa; she could trace the remains of walks and flower beds, and the shed in the back had a broken weather vane on the roof--it must have been a stable.

She leaned out on her folded arms till the flare of sunset blazed on the westward windows, then sank through a burning decline into grayness and the night. The fiery windows grew blank and chains of lamps marked the lines of the streets. Then she turned back to the room, dark behind her, yawning like a cavern. She lighted the lights and sat in a stiff-backed rocking-chair, the hard white radiance beating on her from a cl.u.s.ter of electric bulbs close against the ceiling as if they had been shot up there by an explosion. It was half-past six, but she did not feel at all hungry. She felt--with a smothered exclamation she jumped up, ran to the telephone and ordered her dinner.

At eight o'clock Mayer's voice on the phone brought back a slight, faint echo of the thrill. What he said was matter-of-fact and colorless--he had warned her that it would be--just if she was comfortable and everything Was all right. She tried to answer it with debonair brevity; show the right spirit, bold and undismayed, of the dauntless woman to the companion of her daring.

Then came the slow undrawing of the night, the noises of the house dying down, car bells and auto horns less frequent in the streets below. The bedroom was at the back of the building, with windows that looked across a paved court to the rear walls of houses. There were lights in many of them, glimpses of bright interiors, people chatting in friendly groups.

The sight brought a stabbing memory of the drawing-room at home, and in the dark she undressed and slipped into bed.

But sleep would not come--her mind would not obey her; slipped and slid away from her direction like an animal racing for its goal. At home at this hour the door between her room and Lorry's would be open and they would be calling back and forth to one another as they made ready for bed. They had done that as far back as she could remember, back to the time when there had been a nurse in her room and Lorry had worn her hair in braids. She lay still, almost breathless, her eyes fixed on the yellow oblong of the transom, recalling Lorry in those days, in stiff white skirts and a wide silk sash, very grave, a little woman even then. She groaned and turned over in the bed, digging her head into the pillow and closing her eyes.

After an hour or two she rose and put on her wrapper and slippers. The turmoil within her was so intense that she could not keep still, and prowled, a tall, swathed form, from one room to the other. It seemed then that there never had been a thrill--nothing but this repulsion, this repudiation, nothing but a desire to be back where she belonged. She fought it, less for love of Mayer than for shame at her own backsliding.

She saw herself a coward, lacking the courage to take her life boldly, renouncing the man who had her promise. That held her closer to her resolve than any other consideration; her troth was plighted. Could she now--the wedding ring almost on her finger--turn and run crying for home like a child frightened of the dark?

But she didn't want to, she didn't want to! She seemed to see Mayer with a new clearness; glimpsed, to her own dread, his compelling power. He was her master, someone she feared, someone who could make her at one moment feel proud and glad, and at another small and trivial and apologetic. A majestic figure, a woman built on the grand plan, poor Chrystie paced through the silent rooms, weeping like a lost baby.

When the dawn began to grow pale she went to the bedroom window and pulled up the blinds. Like a place of dreams the city slowly grew into solidity through the spectral light. It was as gray as her mood, all color subdued, walls and roofs and chimneys an even monochrome, above them in the sky an increasing, thin, white l.u.s.ter. The air stole in chill as the prospect and from the street beyond rose the sound of a footfall, enormously distinct, echoing prodigiously, as if it was the only footfall left in the world and the sound of the others--refused individual existence--had concentrated in that one to give it volume.

Chrystie drew up a chair and sat down. There with swollen eyes and leaden heart she waited for the day.

CHAPTER XXIX

LORRY SEES THE DAWN

Chrystie's manner on her departure had disturbed Lorry. As she dressed for the opera that night she pondered on it, and back from it to the change she had noticed in the girl of late. She hadn't been like the old, easy-going Chrystie; her indolent evenness of mood had given place to a mercurial flightiness, her gay good-humor been broken by flashes of temper and morose silences.

Rustling into her new white dress Lorry reproached herself. She should have paid more attention to it. If Chrystie wasn't well or something was troubling her she should have found out what it was. She had been negligent, engrossed in her own affairs--thinking of a man, dreaming like a lovesick girl. That admission made her blush, and seeing her face in the mirror, the cheeks pink-tinted, the eyes darkly glowing, she could not refrain from looking at it. She was not so bad, dressed up that way with a diamond spray in her hair, and her shoulders white above the crystal tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of her bodice. And so--just for a moment--she again forgot Chrystie, wondering, as she eyed the comely reflection, if Mark would be at the opera.

But when she was finished and had called in Aunt Ellen to look her over, the discomforting sense of duties shirked came back. As she slowly turned under Aunt Ellen's inspecting gaze and drooped her shoulders for the blue velvet cloak that the old lady held out, her thoughts were full of self-accusal. On the stairway they took the form of a solemn vow to pledge herself anew to the accustomed watchful care. In the cab they crystallized into a definite resolution: as soon as Chrystie came back from the Barlows' she would have an old-time, intimate talk with her and find out if anything really was the matter with the child.

At the opera it was so exciting and so wonderful that everything else was wiped out of her mind. In the front of the box she sat--its sole ornament--against a background of Mrs. Kirkham's contemporaries, withered and sere in contrast with her lily-pure freshness. In the entr'actes the hostess recalled the opera house in its heyday when the Bonanza Kings occupied their boxes with the Bonanza Queens beside them, when everyone was rich, and all the women wore diamonds. The old ladies cackled over their memories, their heads together, forgetful of "Minnie's girl," who swept the house with her lorgnon searching for a familiar face.

Mrs. Kirkham was going to make a night of it, and afterward took her party to Zinkand's for supper. Here, too, it was very exciting, too much claiming one's attention for private worries to intrude. The opera crowd came thronging in, women in beautiful clothes, men one's father had known, youths who had come to one's house. Some of the ladies who had been Minnie Alston's friends stopped to have a word with Lorry and then swept on making murmurous comment to their escorts--the Alston girls were coming out of their sh.e.l.ls, beginning at last to take their places; it was a pity they went about with fossils of the Stone Age like Mrs.

Kirkham, but they had a queer, old-fashioned streak in them--ah, there's a vacant table!