Part 28

"You're right. Now, I want to tell you about a deal I put through in the Street, to-day."

Flavia moved to the piano and began to touch the keys. She knew there would be only men's talk for a while, and from this place she could watch Gerard unseen. In all the previous days she had avoided this, refusing to take cognizance of the physical beauty upon which Isabel dilated, half-unconsciously defending herself from an undefined danger. She commenced to play pastel-toned bits of Nevin and Chaminade, her clear eyes delighting in free vision.

Out on the veranda, Corrie was sustaining a defense of his own. Upright against a column, scarlet with determination, Isabel pursued the wilful desire she had voiced at the dinner-table.

"That Frenchwoman was around the course with her husband, yesterday," she urged. "Other women have done it before. Why won't you take me?"

"You might get hurt. Father never would let you."

"He needn't know, stupid. You don't want to, that's all. I'll ask Mr. Gerard; he'll like to take me."

The poison had been drawn from that sting, but Corrie winced, nevertheless.

"I want you, Isabel. I love you."

"You're a boy; I'm a year older than you."

"Eleven months!"

"Anyhow, I'm a woman. I do what I choose, while you're afraid to move for fear uncle will catch you. What would he do, ferule your little palms?"

Furious, Corrie sprang across and dropped his hands on her shoulders with the freedom of their life-long intercourse.

"I'd like to ferule yours," he gritted between his set teeth. "I'm as much a man as you are a woman. You haven't any sense. And there's no use of your dangling after Allan Gerard, for he don't want you--he said as much. I'm going in, and I won't take you around the course."

Gasping, Isabel let him reach the French windows of the drawing-room before recovering herself. Then she rushed in pursuit, tripping impatiently over her long chiffon skirts.

"Corrie--wait! Corrie!"

He turned sullenly, secretly aghast at his own temerity. But Isabel laid her hand on his sleeve without anger.

"You're more man than I thought," she breathed. "I always liked you better than anyone else, anyhow. Corrie, if you'd take me around the course, early in the morning when no one here knew, I believe you'd be almost grown up enough to--to--be engaged."

"Isabel!" he cried, fire kindling in his face. "You would? You would?"

"If I get my ride----"

He seized her, boy-clumsily, and boy-like lavished his impetuous kisses.

"You'll get anything," he promised, half-choked by excitement. "And everything. Oh, Isabel!"

Flavia's delicate music flowed on and on. Before Mr. Rose had finished his discussion, Corrie and Isabel entered the room, and the evening ended without any possibility of Gerard's resuming the theme commenced in the fountain arcade.

When the group separated for the night, Corrie detained his sister at the foot of the wide, gleaming stairs.

"Don't rise early in the morning to give me my coffee, Other Fellow," he said. "I shan't be starting for the course at the usual time. I have been working pretty steadily and I need to rest for the race itself, day after to-morrow."

She leaned across the bannister to him; the two young faces framed in young ripples of bright hair resembled each other very strongly in their twin moods of exaltation and radiant, half-incredulous happiness.

"You do not feel unwell, dear? You have not driven too much?"

"Not a bit. But I'm sleepy," he caught a frond of a tall Madeiran fern that was placed in its jardiniere on the step opposite him, winding the satin-green strip over his finger, "honestly, all in with sleepiness, and I'm going to sleep to-night as if it was the last quiet night's sleep I'd ever get. See you to-morrow, kid sister."

"Good-night, dearest."