She refreshed the eyes of a respectable burgess of sixty, a person so colourless that no one, after passing him, could have remembered anything about him except that he wore glasses and some sort of moustache; and to Cora’s vision he was as near transparent as any man could be, yet she did not miss the almost imperceptible signs of his approval, as they met and continued on their opposite ways. She did not glance round, nor did he pause in his slow walk; neither was she clairvoyant; none the less, she knew that he turned his head and looked back at her.
The path led away from the drives and more public walks of the park, to a low hill, thoughtfully untouched by the gardener and left to the shadowy thickets and good-smelling underbrush of its rich native woodland. And here, by a brown bench, waited a tall gentleman in white.
They touched hands and sat without speaking. For several moments they continued the silence, then turned slowly and looked at each other; then looked slowly and gravely away, as if to an audience in front of them. They knew how to do it; but probably a critic in the first row would have concluded that Cora felt it even more than Valentine Corliss enjoyed it.
“I suppose this is very clandestine,” she said, after a deep breath. “I don’t think I care, though.”
“I hope you do,” he smiled, “so that I could think your coming means more.”
“Then I’ll care,” she said, and looked at him again.
“You dear!” he exclaimed deliberately.
She bit her lip and looked down, but not before he had seen the quick dilation of her ardent eyes. “I wanted to be out of doors,” she said. “I’m afraid there’s one thing of yours I don’t like, Mr. Corliss.”
“I’ll throw it away, then. Tell me.”
“Your house. I don’t like living in it, very much. I’m sorry you CAN’T throw it away.”
“I’m thinking of doing that very thing,” he laughed. “But I’m glad I found the rose in that queer old waste-basket first.”
“Not too much like a rose, sometimes,” she said. “I think this morning I’m a little like some of the old doors up on the third floor: I feel rather unhinged, Mr. Corliss.”
“You don’t look it, Miss Madison!”
“I didn’t sleep very well.” She bestowed upon him a glance which transmuted her actual explanation into, “I couldn’t sleep for thinking of you.” It was perfectly definite; but the acute gentleman laughed genially.
“Go on with you!” he said.
Her eyes sparkled, and she joined laughter with him. “But it’s true: you did keep me awake. Besides, I had a serenade.”
“Serenade? I had an idea they didn’t do that any more over here. I remember the young men going about at night with an orchestra sometimes when I was a boy, but I supposed–-“
“Oh, it wasn’t much like that,” she interrupted, carelessly. “I don’t think that sort of thing has been done for years and years. It wasn’t an orchestra—just a man singing under my window.”
“With a guitar?”
“No.” She laughed a little. “Just singing.”
“But it rained last night,” said Corliss, puzzled.
“Oh, HE wouldn’t mind that!”
“How stupid of me! Of course, he wouldn’t.
Was it Richard Lindley?”
“Never!”
“I see. Yes, that was a bad guess: I’m sure Lindley’s just the same steady-going, sober, plodding old horse he was as a boy. His picture doesn’t fit a romantic frame—singing under a lady’s window in a thunderstorm! Your serenader must have been very young.’
“He is,” said Cora. “I suppose he’s about twenty-three; just a boy—and a very annoying one, too!”
Her companion looked at her narrowly. “By any chance, is he the person your little brother seemed so fond of mentioning—Mr. Vilas?”
Cora gave a genuine start. “Good heavens! What makes you think that?” she cried, but she was sufficiently disconcerted to confirm his amused suspicion.
“So it was Mr. Vilas,” he said. “He’s one of the jilted, of course.”
“Oh, `jilted’!” she exclaimed. “All the wild boys that a girl can’t make herself like aren’t `jilted,’ are they?”
“I believe I should say—yes,” he returned. “Yes, in this instance, just about all of them.”
“Is every woman a target for you, Mr. Corliss? I suppose you know that you have a most uncomfortable way of shooting up the landscape.” She stirred uneasily, and moved away from him to the other end of the bench.
“I didn’t miss that time,” he laughed. “Don’t you ever miss?”
He leaned quickly toward her and answered in a low voice: “You can be sure I’m not going to miss anything about YOU.”
It was as if his bending near her had been to rouge her. But it cannot be said that she disliked his effect upon her; for the deep breath she drew in audibly, through her shut teeth, was a signal of delight; and then followed one of those fraught silences not uncharacteristic of dialogues with Cora.
Presently, she gracefully and uselessly smoothed her hair from the left temple with the backs of her fingers, of course finishing the gesture prettily by tucking in a hairpin tighter above the nape of her neck. Then, with recovered coolness, she asked:
“Did you come all the way from Italy just to sell our old house, Mr. Corliss?”
“Perhaps that was part of why I came,” he said, gayly. “I need a great deal of money, Miss Cora Madison.”
“For your villa and your yacht?”
“No; I’m a magician, dear lady–-“
“Yes,” she said, almost angrily. “Of course you know it!”
“You mock me! No; I’m going to make everybody rich who will trust me. I have a secret, and it’s worth a mountain of gold. I’ve put all I have into it, and will put in everything else I can get for myself, but it’s going to take a great deal more than that. And everybody who goes into it will come out on Monte Cristo’s island.”
“Then I’m sorry papa hasn’t anything to put in,” she said.
“But he has: his experience in business and his integrity. I want him to be secretary of my company. Will you help me to get him?” he laughed.
“Do you want me to?” she asked with a quick, serious glance straight in his eyes, one which he met admirably.
“I have an extremely definite impression,” he said lightly, “that you can make anybody you know do just what you want him to.”
“And I have another that you have still another `extremely definite impression’ that takes rank over that,” she said, but not with his lightness, for her tone was faintly rueful. “It is that you can make ME do just what you want me to.”
Mr. Valentine Corliss threw himself back on the bench and laughed aloud. “What a girl!” he cried. Then for a fraction of a second he set his hand over hers, an evanescent touch at which her whole body started and visibly thrilled.
She lifted her gloved hand and looked at it with an odd wonder; her alert emotions, always too ready, flinging their banners to her cheeks again.
“Oh, I don’t think it’s soiled,” he said, a speech which she punished with a look of starry contempt. For an instant she made him afraid that something had gone wrong with his measuring tape; but with a slow movement she set her hand softly against her hot cheek; and he was reassured: it was not his touching her that had offended her, but the allusion to it.
“Thanks,” he said, very softly.
She dropped her hand to her parasol, and began, musingly, to dig little holes in the gravel of the path. “Richard Lindley is looking for investments,” she said.