– hundreds and hundreds of dollars which he couldn't afford. Oh, she was glad that she hadn't followed her first fierce impulse, and been rude!
Garth had not accepted the invitation to sit down. He remained standing upright as a stick, and stolid as a stone, against the door. Evidently he stuck to his resolve to take himself away, and was delayed only by the mental puzzle of how best to do it. With a repentant throe the girl sprang up, light and lithe from among her cushions, holding out her hands.
"I do thank you!" she exclaimed. "And I want you to sit down."
Her look, her gesture, overcame him. He took a step forward, seized the offered hands, and almost crushed them in his. Marise was rather frightened, rather touched, but not too much moved to notice that he didn't know enough about behaviour to take off his gloves – his brutally new, gamboge-coloured gloves! Or else he was absent minded!
Partly because her one ring was pressing into her finger, partly because she wished for instant release, she gave a little squeak of pain. "Oh, my ring!"
Red blood poured up to the man's brown face. The pressure relaxed, but he did not let her hands go. He lifted them to his lips and kissed first one, then the other. His mouth was hot as a coal just dropped from the fire!.. That was her quick impression. She was not shocked, for her hands had been kissed a hundred times by sad, mad men – though not men like this. She said "Oh!" however, and gazed at him reproachfully, as "Dolores" gazed at the villain in "The Song."
The effect upon Garth was the same as if she had been sincerely offended. He let her hands fall, and stammered "Forgive me!"
Marise was beginning to enjoy herself a little, on the whole.
Of course the man was common and rough. What was it that Tony had called his despised brother officer? A "temporary gentleman!" Yes, that was it! And a "momentary gentleman" would be even more appropriate, she thought, because at an instant of deep emotion all decent men were raised to the heights of Nature's gentility. This fellow was as fine as any nobleman, for these few seconds of time, she realised, and it was worship of her which added the new decoration to his V.C.! Despite her disappointment, she felt that romance was not utterly lacking in the situation.
"There's nothing to forgive," were the obvious words her lips spoke: but the language of such eyes as hers could never be obvious. The soul of John Garth drowned in their blue depths. As dying men lose all care for conventions, so did he lose it while thus he drowned.
"I love you – I love you!" he faltered. "You know, don't you? From the first – from the first look!"
"Oh no, I don't know that," Marise soothed him. "But you've been so kind. Those wonderful presents! You ought not – "
"Thinking of them – sending them – has been the big joy of my life," he broke in. "I've been – drunk with it. I've never felt anything like this before. Why, I'd die for you; I'd sell my soul. Even that's nothing!"
"They're very great things," she assured him gravely, as she had assured other men of different types who had flung themselves on her altar as burnt-offerings. "Any woman would feel the same. But – "
"I don't care a hang what any other woman would feel. All I care for on God's earth is you – you. Couldn't you think of me – couldn't you, if I tried to make something of myself – ?"
Marise laughed a charming laugh. "Isn't it making something of yourself, to have won the Victoria Cross?" she challenged.
"Oh, that! That was an accident. I just got so mad I forgot to be scared for a minute or two, and went for a few Germans – "
"The newspapers compared you to Horatio keeping the bridge against an army."
"George! You remember that?"
"Women don't forget such things." (She would have forgotten if that clipping from the Daily Mail hadn't associated itself with Tony's onslaught upon the regimental hero. But she wasn't called upon to mention this.) "It was long before I saw you, that I read what you had done, and fixed your name in my mind," she went on. "Now I have my own special memories of you. I shall keep your gifts always. And I shall be prouder of them than ever, because they came from a hero – "
"You're breaking it to me that there's no hope," he cut in. The blood was gone from his face now. "Nothing I could do, or try to be, would make you like me well enough – "
"Oh, you are too impulsive!" she checked him. "You've seen me only twice – "
"I've seen you every night since we landed, and twice a week in the afternoon."
"What, you've come to the theatre for every performance, even matinées, just to – to – ?"
"Hear your voice and see your face. And hate that damned actor-chap who kisses you in the third act."
"He doesn't really kiss me," Marise hurried to explain. "He only seems to."
"God! He must be a stone image!"
"He is a gentleman," amended Marise. "Actors who are gentlemen don't kiss the actresses who play opposite parts, unless – unless it's absolutely necessary."
"Then if I played a part with you on the stage, I couldn't be a gentleman," Garth exploded. But even as he spoke he blushed darkly. "You don't think I am one off the stage," he added. "And you're right. I'm not what your friend Lord Severance calls a gentleman. I know what he does call me, and I am that, I guess, anyhow when he's within gunshot. He brings out all that's worst in me. There's a lot of it – so much, that if that thing on shipboard was to do over again, I'd do it without a qualm. I suppose there's where the 'cad' element he talks about in me shows up. If he was here now – "
"Ze Earl of Severance, Mademoiselle," announced Céline.
Whether Garth had meant to boast or belittle himself Marise would never know. Nor did she care. All her faculties concentrated upon how to account to Severance for the man. It was a suffocating moment. She feared a scene between the two. The situation called for a stroke of genius. Was she equal to it? She must be, for Garth's sake and for her own, even more than for Tony's, and what he would think.
Severance came in. Suddenly Marise felt as she had felt on the stage when something went wrong with the play. She had often had to save situations by sheer, quick mother wit. Never had she failed her fellow actors in a crisis. She ought to be ready for this!
Her nerves ceased to jump. She was calm and confident. As Severance's darkening gaze fell on Garth, she heard herself glibly explaining the latter, as if to an audience.
"Major Garth is a friend of Miss Marks, my secretary. She has gone out for a few minutes with mother, but he is waiting for her. She'll soon be back."
Speaking, she smiled at the V.C., and her eyes pleaded excuses for the fib. "It's only a white one," they said. "And it saves our secret. I know you'd hate me to tell him you'd sent the presents, and I never, never will. That is sacred, between us two. So is all the rest. And I'm trying to straighten things out for us both."
Garth appeared to be astonished, but not shocked. His silk hat (a size too small) lay on a table in a pool of water from an upset vase, he having flung it there to free his hands for hers. Now he made a move to retrieve his damaged property, but a second thought gave him pause. Marise read his mind as if it worked under glass. Her fib about Miss Marks had doomed him to the part of Casabianca, while the ship of his pride burned.
The "lion-look" she had seen in the man's eyes that day at sea was in them again. Poor brute
