The Danger Mark

He laughed, but continued standing after she was seated.

The air was heavy with the scent of rockets and phlox and ragged pinks and candy-tuft. Through the sweet-scented dusky silence some small and very wakeful bird was trilling. Great misty-winged moths came whirring and hovering among the blossoms, pale blurs in the darkness, and everywhere the drifting lamps of fireflies lighted and died out against the foliage.

The woman beside him sat with masked head bent and slightly turned from him; her restless hands worried her fan; her satin-shod feet were crossed and recrossed.

"What is the matter?" he asked.

"Life. It's all so very wrong."

"Oh," he said, smiling, "so it's life that is amiss, not we!"

"I suppose we are.... I suppose I am. But, Duane"—she turned and looked at him—"I haven't had much of a chance yet—to go very right or very wrong."

"You've had chances enough for the latter," he said with an unpleasant laugh. "In this sweet coterie we inhabit, there's always that chance."

"There are good women in it, good wives. Your sister is in it."

"Yes, and I mean to take her out," said Duane grimly. "Do you think I want Naïda to marry some money-fattened pup in this set?"

"Where can you take her?"

"Where I'm going in future myself—among people whose brains are not as obsolete as my appendix; where there still exist standards and old-fashioned things like principles and religion, and a healthy terror of the Decalogue!"

"Is anybody really still afraid of the Decalogue?" she asked curiously.

"Even we are, but some of us are more afraid of ennui. Fire and fear are the greatest purifiers in the world; it's fear of some sort or other, and only fear, that keeps the world as decent as it is."

"I'm not afraid," she said, playing with her fan. "I'm only afraid of dying before I have lived at all."

"What do you call living?"

"Being loved," she said, and looked up at him.

"You poor little thing!" he said, only partly in earnest.

"Yes, I'm sorry for the girl I was.... I was rather a nice girl, Duane. You remember me before I married."

"Yes, I do. You were a corker. You are still."

She nodded: "Yes, outwardly. Within is—nothing. I am very, very old; very tired."

He said no more. She sat listlessly watching the dusk-moths hovering among the pinks. Far away in the darkness rockets were rising, spraying the sky with fire; faint strains of music came from the forest.

"Their Fête Galante has begun," she said. "Am I detaining you too long, Duane?"

"No."

She smiled: "It is rather amusing," she observed, "my coming to you for my morals—to you, Duane, who were once supposed to possess so few."

"Never mind what I possess," he said, irritated. "What sort of advice do you expect?"

"Why, moral advice, of course."

"Oh! Are you on the verge of demoralisation?"

"I don't know. Am I?… There is a man–"

"Of course," he said, coming as near a sneer as he was capable. "I know what you've done. You've nearly twisted poor Grandcourt's head off his honest neck. If you want to know what I think of it, it's an abominable thing to do. Why, anybody can see that the man is in love with you, and desperately unhappy already, I told you to let him alone. You promised, too."

He spoke rapidly, sharply; she bent her fair head in silence until he ended.

"May I defend myself?" she asked.

"Of course."

"Then—I did not mean to make him care for me."

"You all say that."

"Yes; we are not always as innocent as I happen to be this time. I really did not try, did not think, that he was taking a little unaccustomed kindness on my part so seriously … I overdid it; I'd been beastly to him—most women are rude to Delancy Grandcourt, somehow or other. I always was. And one day—that day in the forest—somehow something he said opened my eyes—hurt me.... And women are fools to believe him one. Why, Duane, he's every inch a man—high-minded, sensitive, proud, generous, forbearing."

Duane turned and stared at her; and to her annoyance the blood mounted to her cheeks, but she went on:

"Of course he has affected me. I don't know how it might have been with me if I were not so—so utterly starved."

"You mean to say you are beginning to care for Delancy Grandcourt?"

"Care? Yes—in a perfectly nice way–"

"And otherwise?"

"I—don't know. I am honest with you, Duane; I don't know. A—a little devotion of that kind"—she tried to laugh—"goes to my head, perhaps. I've been so long without it.... I don't know. And I came here to tell you. I came here to ask you what I ought to do."

"Good Lord!" said Duane, "do you already care enough for him to worry about your effect on him?"

"I—do not wish him to be unhappy."

"Oh. But you are willing to be unhappy in order to save him any uneasiness. See here, Rosalie, you'd better pull up sharp."

"Had I?"

"Certainly," he said brutally. "Not many days ago you were adrift. Don't cut your cable again."

A vivid colour mounted to her temples:

"That is all over," she said. "Have I not come to you again in spite of the folly that sent me drifting to you before? And can I pay you a truer compliment, Duane, than to ask the hospitality of your forbearance and the shelter of your friendship?"

"You are a trump, Rosalie," he said, after a moment's scowling. "You're all right.... I don't know what to say.... If it's going to give you a little happiness to care for this man–"