Mrs. Thornton, who had been watching the unusual mobility of his face,
met his eyes with a satirical smile in her own, her thin red curling lips
drawn almost straight for a moment. She had played with the fancy, before
anger banished it, that if she had been twenty years younger.... Men had
fallen madly in love with her in her own day.... She detected the
symptoms in this man at once. Her savage will compelled her to accept
accumulating years without a concession. But she had forgotten nothing.
Ruyler may have read her thoughts.
"You know," he said, with an attempt at lightness, although the coast
wind tan, which was his only claim to coloring, had paled a little, "that
girl reminds me so much of you that I have made up my mind to marry her.
I don't care who she is. If you don't help me to meet her conventionally
I'll manage somehow, but I should hate to practice any subterfuges on the
woman I intend to make my wife."
For a moment he had the sensation of being pinned to the wall by that
narrow concentrated gaze. Then Mrs. Thornton swung on her heel. "I'll do
it," she said.
She walked across the room with the supple grace her slender figure had
never lost and sat down beside the older woman. In a moment the
astonished dowagers who had "suffered from her fiendish temper all
evening," saw her talking with spontaneous graciousness to both the
strangers. Madame Delano was at first more distant and reserved than Mrs.
Thornton had ever been, manifestly betraying all the suspicion and
unsocial instincts of her class; but she thawed, and the two women
chatted, while once more the girl's eyes wandered to the dancers.
When Mrs. Thornton had tormented Ruyler for quite fifteen minutes she
beckoned to him imperiously. A moment later he was whirling the girl down
the ball room and thrilling at her contact.
V
The wooing had been as headlong as his falling in love. Helene Delano had
a deep sweet voice, which completed the conquest during the hour they
spent in the grounds under the shelter of a great palm, until hunted down
by a horrified parent.
Helene talked frankly of her life. Her mother had been visiting relatives
in a small New England town--Holbrook Centre, she believed it was called,
but hard American names did not cling to her memory--she loved the soft
Latin and Indian names in California--and there she had met and married
her father, James Delano. They were on their way to Japan when business
detained him in San Francisco much longer than he had expected and she
was born. She believed that he had owned a ranch that he wanted to sell.
He died on the voyage across the Pacific and her mother had returned to
live among her own people in Rouen--very plain bourgeois, but of a
respectability, Oh, la! la!