Part 27

"Then Al-Mamoun drew back his foot and returned to the palace, knowing that from him the golden vase would claim no pearls."

"That is all?" Isabel asked expectantly.

"What more could there be, mademoiselle?"

"There might be a moral," Corrie suggested, leaning his folded arms on the table, his interested eyes fixed upon the story-teller.

"When I read the Arabian Nights, I found out that Oriental tales have no morals," dryly observed Mr. Rose. "A man who had been brought up with the Blarney Stone for a teething-ring once sold me an unexpurgated edition de luxe, with illustrations, so I ought to know."

"I never saw it, sir!"

"No, Corwin B., you did not. You can if you want to, by coming down to my office, where it is still lying in the packing-box it came in. I don't think you want to. Gerard's story isn't there."

"Its moral seems to be that women are a nuisance," Isabel commented, her manner injured.

"That would not be a moral, it would be a falsehood," Gerard demurred. "No, I fancy the moral might be, do not challenge Fate to a duel. Are you considering our nonsense, Miss Rose?"

"I was thinking of the story," Flavia amended. "I was wondering if the kings would not soon have filled the vase had they been content to mark each happy hour, and whether a wise treasurer of happiness would not find a vase filled with seed-pearls where they found a vase empty."

"Exactly! You have found the secret, no doubt. Moral: do not ask too much."

"A day too much?" marvelled Corrie. "Why, I expect a lifetime!" He flung back his head, looking around the smiling circle. "Well, why not? What's a lifetime, anyhow? Not half enough to get all the fun there is in living, as long as you do no harm by it. And who wants to do any harm when there is so much else to do? Not anyone in his right mind. Anyway, I've got to-day's pearl canned, and it can't get away. And I can think of lots of others I've had, if I could go back for them."

"Shall I guess the name of Al-Mansor's vase?" Flavia asked, as she rose. She was smiling, but her cheeks were flushed and her serious eyes caressed her brother. "It was Memory, I think. And, no, Corrie, the pearls put there cannot be lost."

The extreme warmth of the day had continued into the evening. As Isabel followed Flavia across the hall, Corrie overtook his cousin, wound a scarf around her bare shoulders and lured her out on the veranda. She yielded not unwillingly, contrary to her recent custom of neglecting him, and they disappeared together. Any such latent project of Gerard's was prevented by Mr. Rose's mood for chat, a mood not usual for him.

"You are not looking much like the driver I met on the way home, to-day," he informed his guest, surveying Gerard quizzically, when they were established in the drawing-room. "But I didn't recognize my own son, for that matter. He don't seem like mine, when he's out in those goblin clothes driving like Satan in a hurry. It's sensible enough for you, being in the automobile trade, but for him it's just fool play."

"He does it a little too well to call it that," Gerard returned seriously.

"Yes? Well, I've got money enough to pay for it--although it's the most expensive game he's found yet--or for anything else he fancies. I've told him to amuse himself for a while. He is too young to settle down to work, when there is no need for it. I never had any playing time, and I want to see him have his. And he has earned it, too; I suppose he told you he was through college?"

"Yes, and amazed me."

"He knew it had to be done, so he did it quickly and without any nonsense. It's an old theory that given liberty and money, a boy will go to ruin. I never believed it; I don't yet. And I never saw why I should make my son a different set of living rules from those I make for myself. Of course, I don't mean there was no law in the house; I don't think I spoiled Corrie. But I've left him pretty free, only bidding him keep straight. That I must have, and he knows it. He has got to keep straight."

A sudden grate like metal on metal roughened the deliberate speech with a suggestion of grim inflexibility. Flavia lifted vaguely startled eyes to her father.

"I don't believe you need to worry about that," reassured Gerard smiling. The echo of Corrie's fresh young tones was in their ears, as he disputed with his cousin, outside the windows at the end of the room.

"I guess not. He's too much like his mother." Mr. Rose dropped his hand on Flavia's, as she sat in her low chair beside him. "And she was what they call an aristocrat, nowadays, but I called a lady when I married her. Old family, gentle breeding, the society end, and good looks like my little girl's that seem too fine to touch; she had all and everything except money. And I gave her that."

Flavia leaned nearer to her father with the caressing confidence in mutual affection which marked all the household intercourse and pervaded the gorgeous pink villa like an actual fragrance of atmosphere.

"I gave her that. She liked to spend it. Not," his keen eyes suddenly sprang challengingly to the other man's, "Not that she married me for money. Don't think it. My wife loved me. I guess I struck her family like a cyclone; I was self-made and used to my own way, at thirty, and not uglier than my neighbors. Mrs. Tom Rose was a happy woman, until she died, when Corrie was two years old and Flavia four." He rose bruskly and crossed the room. "You don't smoke, Gerard? I always spoil a cigar when I talk."

"I don't unless there's something wrong," Gerard answered, tactfully casual. "A cigarette helps, then. But everything is very right, now. You know, these races are my holidays, although they are an important business feature, too. My factory affairs keep me hard at work most of the year. Then in the intervals I am designing and having constructed a genuine racing machine of my own, much more powerful than the ninety Mercury I'm driving now. I'm not an idle citizen, really."

Flavia's head drooped lower. He was telling her father these things as part of that steady purpose whose object she felt herself; she knew it, clairvoyantly acute.

"You get a lot out of living," commented Mr. Rose, coming back to his seat. "You enjoy it, I'm thinking."

"Yes, I do," Gerard replied candidly. "Why not?"