The dinner given by Cornelius Blunn was the most talked-of function of a very brilliant Riviera season. The writing room on the left of the lounge at the Hotel de Paris had been transformed into a private banqueting apartment, at one end of which a small stage had been erected for artists who came from Nice and even Cannes to entertain the guests, and whose fees were a record in munificence. Despite the slight formality of the opening stages of the gathering, owing to the presence of the Scandinavian monarch, the keynote to the whole party seemed to be set and adequately maintained by Blunn himself,—reckless, brilliant lightheartedness. Gertrude sat on his right, jealously watched from across the table by her husband. Grant, with curious disregard for precedence, was seated at her other side. On Blunn’s left was a lady of royal birth, whose exploits had been the talk of Europe,—a woman still beautiful and witty, who was supposed to be devoting the remainder of her years and a portion of her colossal fortune to the entertainment of the monarch who sat on her left. Lord Yeovil, persuaded to be present with great difficulty, at the last moment, was in the vicinity, with the Princess Lutrecht for a neighbour. Several of the Monte Carlo notables in addition to the originally invited guests were present. There was no one there who did not acknowledge the genius of Blunn as a host. Europe had been sought for gastronomic delicacies. Wines were served which had become little more than a memory. The greatest violinist known lifted them all, for a moment, into the rare atmosphere of the world to which he held the pass-key. The most popular humourist in Paris offered the wittiest creations of his brain. The only person who seldom smiled was Gertrude. She had already been accepted in the little principality as the reigning beauty of the season, but her appearance to-night had created a positive sensation. She had justified to the fullest extent the old contention that beauty is not a permanent and unchanging thing, but an effect of chance, an evanescent quality, possessed one minute and gone the next. This might have been the moment of her life. She seemed to carry with her a nameless and unanalysable perfection of grace, of figure,—all those nameless qualities which come so wonderfully to the aid of features not really perfect in form. The violet of her eyes was distracting. Even the slight fatigue which was sometimes apparent in her languid tones seemed to bring her distinction. Susan, at the first sight of her, and more than once since, had been conscious of a little sinking of the heart. It seemed impossible that any man could look at her without desire.
Grant himself was moved by the unfamiliar side of her beauty,—the beauty which, for this one evening, seemed to have taken to itself a certain appeal, a helplessness, a demand for something which perhaps no one else but he could realise. Once or twice, at a whispered word from her, he had felt his pulses leap as in the old days, had felt, indeed, some touch of the old folly back again,—the folly of which he had deemed himself purged. He had permitted himself to think for one moment of a few nights ago when she had stood on the edge of the quay, looking down to the yacht, looking wistfully at the gangplank, passage across which he had so strenuously forbidden. It had been comparatively easy then. He wondered whether any man in the world would have found it easy now.
“Are you quite at your best to-night, Grant, or is it my fancy?” she asked, during a pause in the conversation.
“If I am not,” he rejoined, “it is because you surpass your best.”
Almost for the first time, she laughed happily. There was real meaning in his tone and it was the sort of speech for which she craved.
“You really think that I am looking well to-night? You see, I never know where I am between the two extremes. Ottilie declared that I was a vision of delight. Otto snarled out some-thins: about the Montmartre.”
“It is a most unfortunate circumstance,” Grant declared, “that every day I am learning to dislike your husband more.”
“You may hate him if you want to,” she replied. “I shall not quarrel with you.”
“Well, I hope he is much kinder to you at home than he appears to be in public. I can’t stand the man who scowls at his wife’s beauty because it naturally attracts admiration and doesn’t himself endeavour to offer her his homage.”
“Otto is thoroughly German,” she replied. “Some Englishmen are the same, they say. They buy their wife with their name or money or simulated affection, and when they have her it is finished. She is their chattel, she is their singing bird or dancing girl, to perform for their pleasure. There are times, nowadays,” she went on, “when such methods fail, and they bring disaster. But even then the man is generally selfish and brutal enough to see that some one else shares that disaster.”
Cornelius Blunn leaned a little forward in his place with uplifted glass.
“Before I forget it—Bon Voyage, Mr. Slattery,” he said. “May your trip across the Atlantic provide you with as much amusement as our recent cruise. And may its result be as satisfactory.”
Grant bowed pleasantly and drank.
“I shall miss you all,” he acknowledged, smiling.
Grant saw the white shoulder, so close to him, quiver for a moment,—a queer little habit of hers in times of emotion. She remained silent, however, for some time. Perhaps she knew that her husband’s eyes were upon her, as well as Blunn’s. Under cover of a great chorus of laughter, evoked by one of the latter’s stories, she turned at last to Grant.
“That is just one of the sweet little stabs,” she confided, “which I have learnt to expect. Cornelius has been saving that up for me. I think that you might have spared me the shock.”
“I only made up my mind twelve hours ago,” he assured her. “I can’t imagine how he knew.”
“I’m glad to hear that. I think that I should have been the first to be told.”
“You probably would. Next to the Yeovils, of course.”
“Lord Yeovil or Lady Susan?”
“They are equally my friends,” he replied.
“Are you in love with Lady Susan, Grant?”
He was a little startled, both by the question and the thrill which it brought.
“I happen to be thirty-one years old,” he reminded her. “Lady Susan is nineteen.”
“That is rather a recognised standard,” she remarked, “according to present ideas. The older a man gets the more he leans towards the kindergarten. In any case it doesn’t answer my question.”
“I have no time to be in love with any one just at present,” he said. “I have work to do.”
“You men and your work!” she exclaimed bitterly. “You drag it around with you like a closet of refuge, into which you can step whenever you are hard pressed. Honestly I can’t imagine why there are any good women in the world. There certainly is no encouragement for them. When do you sail. Grant?”
“To-morrow or Thursday.”
“Are you going straight to New York?”
“I may stay at Gibraltar to coal,” he replied. “I shall probably have to.”
She turned a little towards him. She had a trick of dropping her voice almost to a whisper. Her little question barely reached his ears.
“Are you taking me with you?”
“I can’t do that, Gertrude,” he said firmly, “neither would you come. And it isn’t a fair question to ask me when you know that you are looking more adorable than you ever looked in your life.”
“I tried to make myself look nice to-night because I wanted to ask you that question, or something like it. Isn’t it terrible, this gift of frankness I have developed? I think out a course of complete dissimulation and I find myself suddenly the very personification of candour. Why won’t you take me. Grant? Are you afraid of Otto? He is a very small man and not very strong. And duels have gone out even amongst us now.”
“I thought,” he remarked with a smile, thankful for the note of banter in her tone, “that your beloved young Prince was trying to bring them in ............