Part 68

"When I see you in the lace gown, I am going to kiss you," he stated firmly. "I do not care how many people are present or where it is. So you had better come down early to the fountain arcade, where I have pictured you more often than you will ever know. Will you, flower-lady?"

"Perhaps," she doubted. "If I think of it."

"Heartsease for thought," said Gerard, and kissed her dimpling mouth.

On the stairs a few minutes later, Corrie overtook his sister and caught her in his arms.

"I need a bath and some fresh rags and--well, everything," he laughed. "I'm not fit to touch--do you mind?"

She clasped her arms around his neck, nestling her soft cheek against the rough, grimy cloth of his driving-suit.

"I love you! Oh, my dear, my dear, if mamma had lived, this year could never have happened! Not to you, nor to me."

He looked into her upturned face, realizing with her the difference that might have been wrought by a mother's clairvoyant tenderness and the link of a wife's understanding between her husband and her children. No, without this lack in the household the year's deception could not have endured. If the chain of Roses had not once been broken, it could not have come so near this later destruction.

"Flavia, you know I feel how good they have all been to me? You know what nonsense it was for Allan--he tells me I can't call my own brother 'Gerard'--what nonsense it was for him to suggest that I ever could blame anyone but myself for what I had to stand?"

"I know you feel it so, Corrie."

"Then, I want to say there was only you, Other Fellow, who never hurt or made it harder."

"Even--Allan?"

"I think there never was a man so generous as Allan--but, only you. I," he drew a breath of inexpressible content, "I see a bully good life ahead, but I don't see any woman in it, unless I find one like you. And from what I overheard Allan saying, just now when I passed you both at the alcove, he's secured the only perfect angel-girl----"

Laughing, warmly flushed, she put her hand across his lips.

But it was that evening, in the glowing richness and repose of the dining-room in the pink marble villa, now reinvested with the dignity of a home, that the core of the late situation was touched.

Once more Allan Gerard was intent upon the study of Flavia's young beauty as she sat near him in the lace gown, this time with his ring flaunting conquest on her fragile hand. Mr. Rose was leaning back and idly watching the ice dissolve in his glass, when Corrie broke the pause, resting his arms on the table and lifting his gay, mirthful face to the man behind his chair:

"Take away those oysters, Perkins! I want my soup right off, and a lot of it. I'm about starved----" He stopped, himself struck by the words.

The evoked recollections of that last dinner together were too much. Mr. Rose carefully put the glass down, his strong jaw setting. Flavia's large startled eyes flashed wet as they went to her brother.

"Corrie, Corrie, I can understand how you began," escaped Gerard impulsively. "But how could you carry it on month after month?"

The ruddy color ran up to Corrie's forehead, he looked down at the table, sobered.

"It didn't take me long to see I made an awful bungle of things," he confessed, half-shy and hesitant. "And it got worse and worse as I saw what I had done to you people. Yet I'd given my word. I guess you'll understand a lot more than I can say; as Allan will understand, now, why I couldn't help knocking down that tramp who wanted money because I belonged in prison and wasn't there. It was all too much for me to think out! But--isn't there something said about a fellow who puts his hand to the plough not taking it off? I used to say that over to myself, when--well, at night, for instance. I might have been a chump, but it seemed up to me to keep on with the work I had started, and--and not to flinch."

"Dear, if you had only spared yourself what you could," Flavia grieved. "You could have said it was an accident, at least; that you never meant to hurt Allan."

Corrie's violet-blue eyes laughed out of their eclipse and sought his father.

"Not much, Other Fellow! No tricks for mine; I had to tell just the truth or shut up. No, sir, whatever he looked like, Corrie Rose had to plough a straight furrow."

"Straight furrows lead home," said Allan Gerard, not sententiously, but musingly.

He also looked toward Mr. Rose, and the senior nodded slow agreement.

"They do, Gerard. And we get more, sometimes, than we've any right to expect from anything we give. Where we spent this summer, Flavia and I liked the people. What we did for them didn't cost us much; we were not looking for any returns. But the news of it got out, somehow, and was cabled to New York days before we arrived here. One of the journals got the story and worked up a Sunday article about what an American millionaire had done for Val de Rosas, and interviewed a certain Luis Cárdenas and his wife, Elvira, whom Flavia had brought together--it seems they are happy and prospering well, my girl--and printed the whole thing along with a photograph of Corrie in his racing clothes, as my son. New York papers go everywhere. The Southerner whom Isabel was in love with brought that article about her family to her, as an excuse for an early call, the morning he asked her to marry him. She says, herself, it was the picture of Corrie in the motor dress she last had seen him wear on the day of the accident, that broke her up so, and when her lover proposed she told him the whole truth. If I hadn't paid the taxes for Val de Rosas, Corrie would have been bearing a false charge yet."

The silence held many thoughts; a silence broken by Corrie himself.