He had not wanted to act as Lucille Masterson's escort on this occasion. His attendance had been skilfully compelled. But now he hated the duty so much that he was dangerously near rebellion. He hesitated on the threshold of the building, half inclined not to enter; to go, instead, to a telephone and excuse himself for desertion on some pretext.
It was too late. Already the door was held open for him by a footman whose discreetly familiar smile Adriance saw, and resented. He winced again when the elevator boy stopped at the Mastersons' floor without being told, implying the impossibility of Mr. Adriance's call being intended for any other household. He never had noticed these things before; now, he felt himself disgracefully exposed before these black men.
He was altogether in a mood of bitter exasperation, when he was ushered into Mrs. Masterson's little drawing-room. He recognized this condition with a vague sense of surprise at himself underlying the dominant emotion. All his life he had been singularly even-tempered. Now he combated a wish to say ugly, caustic things to the woman who had brought him here. He did not want to see her.
Yet she was very pleasant to see. Indeed, both the scene and his hostess were charming, as they met his view. Mrs. Masterson was standing before a long mirror, surveying herself, so that Adriance saw her twice; once in fact, and once as a reflection. Sunlight filled the room, which was furnished and draped in a curious shade of deep blue with a shimmering richness of color, so that the lady's gray-clad figure stood out in clear and precise detail. But Mrs. Masterson could bear that strong light, and knew it. Without turning, she smiled into the mirror toward the man whose image she saw there.
"How do you like the last Viennese fancy, Tony?" she composedly greeted him.
Her voice was not one of her good points. It was naturally too high-pitched and harsh, and although by careful training she had accustomed herself to speak with a suppressed evenness of tone that smothered the defect to most ears, there resulted a lack of expression or modulation perilously near monotony. Adriance listened now, with a fresh sense of irritation, to the fault he only had observed recently. Before answering, he surveyed critically the decided lines of the costume offered for his approval; its audacious little waistcoat of cerise-and-black checked velvet, the diminutive hat that seemed to have alighted like a butterfly on the shining yellow hair brushed smoothly back from Mrs. Masterson's pink ears, and the high-buttoned gray boots with a silk tassel pendant at each ankle. Those exquisite and costly boots taunted him with their sharp contrast to those he had studied an hour before; they spurred him on to rudeness as if actual rowels were affixed to their little French heels.
"The skirt is too extreme," he stated perversely.
"They are going to be so; this is quite a bit in advance," she returned. "Do you like it?"
"Not so well! It makes a woman look like a child; except for her face."
Lucille Masterson's tact was often at fault from her lack of humor. Instead of retorting with laughter or silence, she opposed offence to his wilfulness.
"Thank you," she answered freezingly. "I seem to have aged rather suddenly."
"You know well enough how handsome you are," he said, a trifle ashamed. "Of course I did not mean what you imply. But, after all, we are not children, Lucille, either of us. We are a man and a woman who are going——"
"Well?"
"To gather a rather nasty apple!" He forced a smile to temper the statement.
She slowly turned around and regarded him.
"What do you mean?" she demanded, lifting her narrow, arched eyebrows. "My costume trottoir, and apples——? Aren't you considerably confused, Tony?"
"Can't we at least face what we are doing?" he countered. "If we are able to do a thing, we ought to be able to look at it, surely. We can put through this thing, and our friends will think none the less of us; they are that kind. But they are not all the people on earth, you know. What the maid who brushes your gown or the man who opens the door for me says of us downstairs may come nearer the general opinion. Perhaps we would better have considered that. For I am afraid the majority of the white man's world cannot be altogether wrong."
There was a quality in his voice that alarmed her. He had flung himself into a chair beside her desk, and sat nervously moving back and forth the trinkets nearest his hand. She stood quite still, studying him before committing herself by a reply. This was a Tony Adriance strange to her.
"It seems very cowardly, to me, to be afraid of what people will say," she slowly answered. "And I will not have you speak to me as if I were a wicked woman, Tony. You know that I am not. You know I have borne with Fred's neglect and extravagance much longer than other women would."
He flushed dark-red at the taunt of cowardice, but he spoke doggedly, tenacious of his purpose.
"You could not give Fred another chance? You remember, he and I were friends, once. He has played too much with the stock market. Well, I might get my father to help him there; we might fix it so that he won sometimes, instead of lost. You do not know how hard it is for me to come into Fred's house this way."
A flash of blended anger and fear crossed Mrs. Masterson's large, light-colored eyes.
"Is it?" she doubted, cuttingly. "You have been coming here for a whole year, Tony."
She had found the one retort he could not answer. Adriance opened his lips, then closed them with a grim recognition of defeat. Who would believe he had come here innocently? How could he tell this beautiful and sophisticated woman that he had been vaguely, romantically charmed by her without ever dreaming of any issue to the affair or of letting her suspect his mild sentimentality? How could he hope she would credit the tale, if he did tell her?
She had been watching his changing expression; herself paled by a very genuine dread. Now, suddenly she was beside him, her hands on his shoulders.
"Don't you love me any more, Tony? You come in here to-day and rage at me——! Have you taught me for months to need you and count on you for all the future, only to leave me, now? Oh, I believed you were strong and true!"
A caress from her was so rare an event, so unfamiliar a concession, that her mere nearness fired Adriance. Her fragrant face was close to his; he looked into her eyes, like jewels under water, suffused by her terror of losing him.
His kiss was her victory. Instantly she was away from him; half across the room and sending furtive glances toward the curtained doorways, even toward the windows five stories above the street. The guilt implied in the action made it to Adriance as if a hand had struck the kiss from his lips.
"We must be careful," she cautioned. "Suppose someone were coming in? You didn't mean all that, Tony? You love me as much as ever?"
Adriance moved toward her.
"I won't answer that in Masterson's house," he said, his voice shaken. "Lucille, you have got to do now what I asked you to do weeks ago: you must leave here at once and marry me as soon as it can be done. Since we have begun this thing, we must carry it through as decently as possible. And it is not decent for you to stay here or for me to come here. If you come with me now, to-day, I will put you with someone who can act as chaperon until the divorce is obtained; one of my aunts, perhaps. If you do this, and help me to keep what honestly is left, I give you my word that I never will fail you as long as I live, come what may."
She drew back from his vehemence. Assured of herself and him, now, she permitted a frown to tangle her fair brow in half-amused rebuke.
"My dear boy, what a dramatic tirade! Of course I will come to you the first moment possible—but, to-day? And just now you were deprecating gossip! You must let me arrange this affair. I am not ready to leave Fred, yet. Do you not understand? I must wait until he makes another one of his scenes; I must have a fresh reason for going, not a past one already tacitly overlooked."
"You will