Part 24

"My wedding cards ain't paining me bad just now."

"Well, but suppose the case."

The black eyes lifted for a moment from the task in hand.

"I guess I'd be sport enough for one house," Rupert impassively pronounced. "I hate a crowd."

Gerard nodded to the boy across the garage, his face gleaming into mirth.

"Coals to Newcastle," he signified. "Everyone doesn't like to live shop."

There was the splashing thud of an overturned bucket. As Gerard passed out the door, Corrie overtook him.

"Gerard," he panted, "Gerard, you said that purposely! You meant to tell me that--that Isabel--that you----"

Gerard regarded him quietly, a little smile curving his lips.

"You meant to tell me that I needn't worry about you and Isabel; that you've seen I want her, and you won't cut in? You meant that?"

The smile crept to Gerard's eyes, but he remained mute. With a quick breath Corrie grasped his companion's hand and squeezed it ardently.

"You're big, Allan Gerard. And kind. For I've been watching, these ten days, and you could get her if you tried."

He turned back into the building before contradiction was possible. After a moment, Gerard went on down the path between the althea bushes.

The "flowing arbor" of Corrie's description was a decorative masterpiece of Mr. Rose's own design; a large, pink marble fountain, surrounded by a pink-columned arcade strewn with rugs and cushions. Whatever its architectural faults, it was a fairy-tale place of gurgling water and soft shadows, shot through with the tints of silver spray, rosy stone and deep green turf. Flavia was seated here, in the summer-warm sunshine of early October that had succeeded the storms of the previous week, a long strip of varicolored embroidery lying across her lap and the overfed Persian kitten nestling against her light gown.

"Corrie is home," Gerard announced, pausing in one of the arched openings. "But I suppose you saw him come in, from here."

The young girl lifted to him the frank welcome of her glance and smile, with their pathetic shade of hostess dignity.

"I saw you both come in," she confirmed. "One sees a great deal from this watch-tower. But it is good of you to tell me; you know how glad I am when he is back. Will you not rest before you go into the house? Corrie always comes here first; to gather strength, he says, to climb the terrace steps."

"I am not fit," he deprecated. "I would soil your purple with my dust and poison, your Venetian atmosphere with gasoline fumes."

"Corrie does it."

"Corrie is privileged. The first time I ever saw you, you were watching Corrie. You made me feel that I lived in a barn."

"A----"

"A blank, impersonal, vacant set of rooms. A house where, if I were brought in on a shutter, there would be no one except the undertaker to pull down the shades."

Flavia winced, shocked out of her calm.

"Please do not! I--please do not say those things."

"There, you see. I do not even know how to talk to you properly. It doesn't worry me to think about just dying and I forgot that other people dislike the subject. Now, it was living that made me envy Corrie and feel melancholy."

Flavia drew the silk thread with slow accuracy. Her pulses were commencing to beat heavy strokes, she dared not raise her troubled eyes to the dominant, self-possessed man opposite. There was a pause.

"In novels," Gerard mused, "when a man sees the woman who locks the wheels of his fancy, he drops everything else and follows her until he gets--his answer. But in real life we're pretty stupid; we let circumstances interfere, or we don't quite realize what has happened to us, we don't do the right thing, anyway. Sometimes we're lucky enough to get another chance. If we do----"

The gush and ripple of the fountain, the rustle of the broad-leaved lilies as the changing breeze sent the spray pattering across them; filled pleasantly the lapses of his leisurely speech. Flavia was acutely conscious of his steady gaze upon her bent head, and the unhurried certainty with which he was moving toward his chosen goal. Only, what was that goal? She remembered Isabel's sureness of her own attraction, Isabel's deliberate monopoly of Gerard's attention whenever possible during the last ten days, and Corrie's assertion that his cousin was "just the kind of girl Gerard would like." Yet, he was saying this to her, Flavia. And suddenly she was almost sure of what she never had dared imagine.