Part 33

The amber eyes re-opened in answer, to meet the fixed gaze of the eager men who waited opposite.

"Yes," gasped Gerard, casually definite. "What else? Corrie, leave me your smokes, they're a better brand----"

If there had been any doubt left the witnesses, that comrade request beat it down. The surgeon flung out his hand in a sweeping gesture of dismissal, as he sprang toward his fainting patient. Gerard had finished.

Mr. Rose went out with the other men. Some of his florid color had come back, he walked more firmly and his face had relaxed to naturalness. On the narrow porch the referee from the racing association held out his hand with frank congratulation.

"Glad poor Gerard set matters right before they got any further, Mr. Rose. It sounded nasty, for a while. The mechanician struck his head in the upset, I fancy; I've seen a man run half a mile across country, crazy as a loon, after being pitched out on his head in a sand-bank. They'd better get Jack Rupert into bed and keep him quiet; he'll wake up to-morrow sane as ever. Nice way your son took it."

"Oh, Corwin B. is straight," declared Mr. Rose, proudly self-contained in his relief. "I guess there wasn't much need to worry about that part. I'll wait here and take him home with me, now; he's had about all of that room he ought to stand, fond of Gerard as he is."

"He looked done up, yes. Well----"

A long shout sounded down the course, a clamor of excited speech. A troup of men appeared, running toward the house in the wake of a chauffeur who held up some object that glittered in the sun.

"I've got it!" the leader called ahead. "I've got it where he said, beside the road!"

The thing in his hand was a small, heavy nickel wrench. The men on the porch and the men in the yard stared at each other, mute. After a moment Mr. Rose drew out his handkerchief, passed it across his forehead and lips, then went down to his limousine, got in and sank back against the cushions.

"Home," he issued his order.

"Mr. Corwin is not coming, sir?"

"Home."

VII

"THE GREATEST OF THESE"

It was nearly two hours after the Mercury car had crashed into ruin under the aromatic apple-trees, before knowledge of the disaster came to Flavia. Breakfast was over, at least the breakfast of Mr. Rose and his daughter; no other member of the family had appeared. A maid reported that Isabel had ordered her horse and had departed on an early ride to the neighboring golf club, where she was engaged to play with an equally athletic college girl, that morning. There was nothing to disturb the customary pleasant routine or to suggest uneasiness. At the usual hour Mr. Rose left for the city; he was on his way to New York when he first caught the rumor that sent him instead to the farmhouse at Westbury.

Flavia, roseate, softly irradiated, moving in an atmosphere of undefined expectation as difficult to breathe calmly as the rarefied air of a mountain-top, had held herself to the accomplishment of her daily charges. She was seated at her little white-and-gold desk in her white-and-gold study, setting the household affairs in order for the day with the dainty precision of all her methods, when Isabel came into the room and stopped upright and rigid, near the door.

"You had better hear it now," the younger girl dully announced. "There has been an accident on the course."

Flavia's hands flew over her heart, the room blackened.

"Corrie----" she gasped.

"No; Mr. Gerard. He is alive, that's all I know."

The scent of the yellow roses Flavia had put in her hair dilated to a stifling heaviness that hindered breath; she covered her eyes with her small cold fingers, seeking the dark, mute under torture. He was alive--that niggard concession was made to Allan Gerard, whose rich fullness of vigor and dominant presence last night had seemed the one firm reality in a world of pleasant vagueness. Weak, conscious of nothing but what her inward vision showed, she lay in her chair; questioning no more, making no sign.

Suddenly Isabel, the self-assured, evenly poised Isabel, was on the floor at her cousin's knees, burying her face in Flavia's pale-yellow dress and sobbing in frantic hysteria.

"Flavia, Flavia, I can't bear it! I am afraid, I am afraid--if he should die----"

Shocked back into strength, Flavia bent over her, soothing and caressing with soft touches and inarticulate phrases of affection.

"Hush, dear, hush! Put your head here. Let me call Martha; you frighten me, Isabel!"

The tempest did not last long. As abruptly as she had lost self-command, Isabel regained it. Rising to her feet, she swept back the disordered auburn curls from her flushed face and stood silent beside the desk, in a state approaching exhaustion. She was wearing a dark riding-habit soiled with dust and stained in several places with oil or grease, her high-laced boots were scratched and sand-covered. But Flavia was beyond notice of costume and saw only her cousin's sullen misery of expression.

"Dear, you loved him," escaped her, in her double compassion for the woman whom Gerard had not chosen.