Lady Luce came forward to him with both hands extended; and the "Drake,
thank God!" was perhaps as genuinely a devout an expression as she had
ever uttered. For it seemed to her that Providence had especially
intervened in her behalf and sent him to her side. We all of us have an
idea that Providence is more interested in us than in other persons.
Drake stood and looked at her for an instant with the same surprise
which had assailed him when he recognized her; then he took the small,
exquisitely gloved hands. How could he refuse them? As he had said, the
members of their set could not be strangers, though two of them had been
lovers and one had been jilted. They had to meet as friends or
acquaintances, as individuals of a community, which, living for
pleasure, could not be bored by quarrels and estrangements.
In the "smart" set a man lives not for himself alone, but for the other
men with whom he plays and shoots and jokes and drinks; for the women
with whom he drives and rides and dances. He must sink personal feeling,
likes and dislikes, or the social ship which he joins as one of the
crew, the ship which can sail only on smooth and sunlit waves, will
founder. So Drake took her hands and smiled a greeting at her.
"Why! To find you here! What are you doing here, Drake?" she said.
She had no right to call him "Drake"; she had lost that right the day
she had jilted him; but she called him "Drake," and the name left her
lips softly and meltingly.
"I might ask the same of you, Luce," he replied gravely, and unconscious
in the stress of the moment that he, too, had used the Christian name.
But, alas! Nell had heard it! She had, half mechanically, shrunk behind
the pedestal; she shrank still farther behind it as Drake spoke, and she
put up her hand on the cold marble as if for support. For she was
trembling in every limb, and a sensation as of approaching death was
creeping over her. The terrace and the two figures grew misty and
indistinct, the music of the band sounded like a blurred discord in her
ears, and the blood rushed through her veins like fire one moment and
like ice the next.
She would have rushed out of her hiding place and into the house, but
she could not move. Was she going to die? or was this awful, sickening
weakness only a warning that she was going to faint? She pressed her
forehead against the marble, and the icy coldness of the unsympathetic
stone revived her. She found that she could hear every word, though the
two had moved to the stone rail.