第39章

STRAINING AT THE ANCHORS.

Gladys was now twenty-four and was even more anxious to marry than is the average unmarried person.She had been eleven years a wanderer; she was tired of it.She had no home; and she wanted a home.

Her aunt--her mother's widowed sister--had taken her abroad when she was thirteen.John was able to defy or to deceive their mother.But she could and did enforce upon Gladys the rigid rules which her fanatical nature had evolved--a minute and crushing tyranny.Therefore Gladys preferred any place to her home.For ten years she had been roaming western Europe, nominally watched by her lazy, selfish, and physically and mentally near-sighted aunt.Actually her only guardian had been her own precocious, curiously prudent, curiously reckless self.

She had been free to do as she pleased; and she had pleased to do very free indeed.She had learned all that her intense and catholic curiosity craved to know, had learned it of masters of her own selecting--the men and women who would naturally attract a lively young person, eager to rejoice in an escape from slavery.Her eyes had peered far into the human heart, farthest into the corrupted human heart; yet, with her innocence she had not lost her honesty or her preference for the things she had been brought up to think clean.

But she had at last wearied of a novelty which lay only in changes of scene and of names, without any important change in characters or plot.She began to be bored with the game of baffling the hopes inspired by her beauty and encouraged by her seeming simplicity.And when her mother came--as she said to Pauline, "The only bearable view of mother is a distant view.Ihad forgot there were such people left on earth--I had thought they'd all gone to their own kind of heaven." So she fled to America, to her brother and his wife.

Dumont stayed eight days at the Eyrie on that trip, then went back to his congenial life in New York--to his business and his dissipation.He tempered his indulgence in both nowadays with some exercise--his stomach, his heart, his nerves and his doctor had together given him a bad fright.The evening before he left he saw Pauline and Gladys sitting apart and joined them.

"Why not invite Scarborough to spend a week up here?" he asked, just glancing at his wife.He never ventured to look at her when there was any danger of their eyes meeting.

Her lips tightened and the color swiftly left her cheeks and swiftly returned.

"Wouldn't you like it, Gladys?" he went on.

"Oh, DO ask him, Pauline," said Gladys, with enthusiasm.Like her brother, she always went straight to the point--she was in the habit of deciding for herself, of thinking what she did was above criticism, and of not especially caring if it was criticised."Please do!"Pauline waited long--it seemed to her long enough for time to wrinkle her heart--before answering: "We'll need another man.

I'll ask him--if you wish."

Gladys pressed her hand gratefully--she was fond of Pauline, and Pauline was liking her again as she had when they were children and playmates and partners in the woes of John Dumont's raids upon their games.Just then Langdon's sister, Mrs.Barrow, called Gladys to the other end of the drawing-room.Dumont's glance followed her.

"I think it'd be a good match," he said reflectively.

Pauline's heart missed a beat and a suffocating choke contracted her throat.