Part 40

The mechanician slowly stiffened.

"Not precisely?" he refused credence.

"Oh, yes; for practice and testing, at first, and racing later. Until it is built I shall put him in training on one of the ninety Mercuries. He doesn't yet know anything about it, himself, and he isn't going to be told until I am ready. You are going to ride with him and break him in. He has to be taught a good deal to change him from a clever amateur to a professional driver."

"When I sit in a car beside Rose, it'll be because I'm taking him to be lynched," Rupert explicitly set forth.

"Really?"

"Yes, dearest."

Gerard rested his head against the cushioned chair-back and met the inflexible black eyes with the cool, mischievous resolution of his own regard, saying nothing at all.

SENTENCE OF ERROR

It was nearly twelve o'clock, that night, when Corrie arrived home. Flavia ran down the wide staircase to meet him, finger on lip; a childish figure in the creamy lace and silk of her negligee, with her heavy braids of shining hair falling over her shoulders.

"You are so late," she grieved. "And so cold! Come near the hearth--papa is in the library, still."

Corrie allowed her small urgent hands to draw him towards the fireplace that filled the square hall with ruddy reflections and dancing shadows. He was cold to the touch, ice clung to the rough cloth of his ulster, but there was color and even light in the face he turned to her.

"It is snowing," he recalled. "But I'm not cold. I am going to bed and to sleep. I want you to sleep, too, Other Fellow, because the worst of it all is over. I don't mean that things are right--they never can be that again, I suppose--but I see my way clear to live, now."

She gazed up at him attentively, sensitively responsive to the vital change she divined in him. Before he could continue or she question, Mr. Rose came between the curtains of the arched library door, a massive, dominant presence as he stood surveying the two in the fire-light. He made no remark, yet Corrie at once moved to face him, gently putting Flavia aside.

"I am sorry to be so late, sir; I have been arranging for my going away," he gave simple account of himself. "I should like to leave the day after to-morrow, if you do not object. I am going to stay with a western friend. I know you would rather not hear much about me or from me for a while, but I will leave an address where I can always be reached."

It is not infrequently disconcerting to be taken promptly and literally at one's word. Moreover, Corrie looked very young and pathetically tired, with his wind-ruffled fair hair pushed back and in his bearing of dignified self-dependence. A quiver passed over Mr. Rose's strong, square-cut countenance, his stern light-gray eyes softened to a contradiction of his set mouth.

"I'm not in the habit of saying things twice," he curtly replied. "I gave you leave to go when and where you pleased. To-morrow I'll fix your bank account so you can draw all the money you like."

"Thank you, sir," Corrie acknowledged.

"You've no call to thank me," his father corrected. "I guess that when I own millions you've got the right to all you can spend. It won't help anything for you to be pinched or uncomfortable. I've no wish to see it. I am going to take your sister to Europe for the winter, as I told her this evening, so we ourselves leave soon after you. Try to keep straighter, this time."

There was no intentional cruelty in the concluding sentence, delivered as the speaker stepped back into the inner room, but Corrie turned so white that Flavia sprang to him with a low exclamation of pain.

"It's all right," he reassured her. And after a moment: "Flavia, I am going with Allan Gerard, to work under him and help him in his factory."

"Corrie?"

"I have been with him to-night. I don't want father to know this because he wouldn't understand; he might even forbid me to go. Unless he forces an answer, I shall not say where I am to be. But Gerard said I must tell you everything and write to you often--I would have done that, anyhow. You won't mind my going away, now, when you know I am with him?"

She comprehended at last the change in him, the change from restless uncertainty to steady fixity of purpose, from an objectless wanderer to a traveller towards a known destination, comprehended with a passionate outrush of gratitude to the man who had wrought this in a generosity too broad to remember his own injury. The eyes she lifted to her brother's were splendidly luminous.

"No," she confirmed, in the exhaustion of relief. "I can bear to let you go from me, if you are to be with Mr. Gerard."

They nestled together--as each might have clung in such an hour to the mother they had left so far down the path of years--on the hearth from which one was self-exiled and the other about to be taken.

"Do you remember the story he told us?" Corrie asked, after a long pause. "About that Arabian fellow's vase and the pearls, you know? I--well, I meant what I said, about expecting to have lots of days like that, pearl-days. I couldn't see any farther than that! Yet that night--I don't expect now, what I did then; I've lost my chance for it. But I would like to do something for Allan Gerard before I die. I'd like to make all my pearls into one, and put it into his vase. Instead, he is doing things for me."

Her clasping arms tightened about him. Heretofore she always had turned a steady face to her brother, sparing him the reproach of grief, but now she helplessly felt her eyes fill and overflow. One comfort, one hope she had that he did not share. If he went with Allan Gerard, and if Gerard took home the wife he had seemed to woo, brother and sister would not be separated. Flavia Gerard would be in Allan Gerard's house, where Corrie was going.

Had Gerard thought of that, also? Dared she tread on this nebulous fairy-ground? Dared she lead Corrie to set foot there, with her?