"Is this Mr. Gerard the real Gerard, the Gerard who races cars?" the examination commenced, as soon as the cousins were alone.
"He is Allan Gerard," Flavia stated. "Did you have a nice game, this afternoon?"
The distraction was put aside.
"Oh, pretty fair. I walked home across the links and left the runabout at the club. Did you ever meet Mr. Gerard before? You seem to know each other pretty well."
Flavia's delicate color flushed over her face; for an instant she again felt Gerard's firm arm around her and encountered his concerned eyes bent upon her own, as they stood on the stairs of the grand-stand. Truthfulness was the atmosphere of the household, the truthfulness born of fearless affection and cordial sympathy of feeling, but now she used an evasion, almost for the first time in her life.
"It is Corrie who knows Mr. Gerard, Isabel," she explained, a trifle slowly. "You remember that race when he helped Corrie, last summer? To-day Corrie saw him playing ball, and brought him to meet us."
"Oh! Yes, I remember the race, of course; I was there. But I did not know Allan Gerard was—well, looked like that. How long will he be here?"
"Papa and Corrie asked him to stay until the Cup race is over."
There was a pause. Isabel walked over to one of the long mirrors and studied her own vigorously handsome image, then turned her head and regarded Flavia with the perfect complacency and mischievous malice of a young kitten.
"Good sport," she anticipated.
Flavia carefully laid her brush upon the dressing table and proceeded to gather into a coil the shimmering mass of her fair hair. Suddenly she was afraid, quiveringly afraid of herself, of Gerard and the next two weeks, but most afraid of showing any change in expression to Isabel's sharp scrutiny.
III
THE HOUSEHOLD OF ROSES
"If there is one thing meaner than another, it's rain," Corrie announced generally. "I'm going out. Won't you come, Gerard?"
"If rain is the meanest thing there is, it shows real sense to go out in it," Isabel commented, from the window-seat opposite. "That is just like you, Corrie Rose. When I ask you to take me out on a perfectly fair day, you won't do it."
"I?" stunned. "I ever refused——"
"Yes. Yesterday, when I asked you to take me just once around the race course, while the cars were out practising. You know you would not. If it is safe for you, it is safe for me. But never mind; your old pink car won't win, anyhow. He hasn't a chance with the professional drivers, has he, Mr. Gerard?"
"A chance?" Gerard gravely echoed. "Why, several of our best drivers are thinking of withdrawing, since he is entered, because they feel it's no use trying to win if he is racing."
"Oh, you're making fun! But I mean it; I could race that car he is so vain of, with my own little runabout machine."
Corrie dragged a mandolin from beneath his chair and tinkled the opening chords of a popular melody.
"Get on your little girl's racer,
And I'll lead you for a chaser,
Down the good old Long Island course.
And before you're half through it,
Your poor car will rue it,
And you'll trade in the pieces for a horse."
The provoking improvisation ended abruptly, as Isabel's well-aimed sofa-pillow struck the singer.
"Do you call that a ladylike retort?" Corrie queried, freeing himself from the silken missile. "Tell her it isn't, Flavia."
"I am afraid," Flavia excused herself. "There are more cushions on that window-seat."
"It was a soft answer, at least," Gerard laughed. "And a good shot."
"Oh, I taught her to pitch, myself. Now I'm sorry," deplored her cousin.
"Too late," Isabel returned complacently. "I called that a cushion carom, Corrie. And my car would not fall to pieces. Flavia, he is feeding candy to Firdousi."
Flavia looked over with the warm brightening of expression Allan Gerard had learned to watch for when she regarded her brother, and which never failed to stir in him the half-wistful envy of the first day when he had seen her so gazing at the driver of the pink racing car.
"If Corrie can teach a Persian kitten to eat candy, he probably can teach it to digest candy," she offered serene reply. "Besides, he loves Firdousi, as much as I do."
"I only gave him some fruit-paste to see his jaws work," the culprit defended. "He needs exercise. And so do I."
"Not that kind, yours work all the time. It is only an hour since breakfast and you have talked ever since," corrected his cousin.
"I haven't!"
"You have."
Corrie ran his fingers through his heavy fair hair, carefully set the purring kitten on the floor, and stood up.
"All right, if you say so," he submitted gracefully. "What you say, I stand for."
The argument was pure sport, of course. But with that last playful sentence, Corrie suddenly turned his dark-blue eyes upon Isabel with an expression not playful, as if himself struck by some deeper force in the words.
"What you say, I stand for," he repeated, and paused.
Flavia and Gerard both looked at him. All the fresh ardor of first love, all the impulsive faith of eighteen and its entire devotion invested Corrie Rose and illumined the shining regard in which he enveloped his cousin. There was in him a quality that lifted the moment above mere sentimentality, a young strength and straightforward earnestness at once dignified and pathetic with the pathos of all transient things that must go down before the battery of the years.
It would have been difficult to encounter a more enchanting family life than that into which Allan Gerard had been drawn. The Rose household was as redolent of simple fragrance as a household of roses, in spite of its costly luxury, its retinue of servants and lavish expenditure. Thomas Rose's wealth had been made so long since, before the birth of the younger generation, that to one and all it was merely the natural condition of affairs, not in the least affecting them personally. Money was very nearly non-existent to them, since they never were obliged to consider its lack or abundance. They spent as they desired, precisely as they ate when hungry or drank according to thirst, without either stint or excess. It was Arcadian, it was improbable, but it was so. And the guard-wall that encircled their gilded Arcadia was a strong mutual affection not to be overthrown from without. Only by internal treason could that domain fall.
It was not in one day that Gerard had come to understand this in its fullness; he had learned bit by bit. For there was nothing at all angelic about the gay family. But now he first realized, as he watched Corrie, that Isabel Rose was placed here by circumstance and not by fittedness. She was too earthen a vessel, however handsome and wholesome, to contain that fine sun-shot essence distilled from the fountain of youth which her cousin poured out for her taking. Gerard knew it, as he saw her matter-of-fact acceptance of the gaze that should have moved even a woman who did not love Corrie.
Yet, they would probably marry one another, he reflected. There was nothing to interfere, if she consented. He felt an elder brother's outrush of impatient protection for the boy; involuntarily he turned to Flavia with a movement