With the departure of a third person the situation immediately changed complexion. It became more intimate and therefore more embarrassing. With Eugene had departed the audience and the stimulus of playing to it. The star and the stage manager were left alone. Untrammeled emotional expression no longer seemed an heroic necessity. Under the calm, unreadable, steady regard of her husband's eyes it held its elements of banality and of sensationalism, of pseudo-emotion. Dita became sullen. "I think I shall go to bed," she said abruptly and for the second time and then turned to the door.

"Wait a moment." His voice was courteous, pleasant, but it would have been a dull ear which could not have discerned the tone of command beneath its even modulations.

It was new to Dita and arresting, and she paused, wavered a moment and came back to the chair she had left and folding her arms upon its high cushioned back, stood with still, sullen mouth and downcast eyes, exhaling reluctance. She was feeling the reaction from her late mood of exaltation, of dramatic visioning of poignant past experiences.

He waited a second or so, and then said, "Your working girl was a far more dramatic conception than Gresham's. It might not lend itself so much to pictorial representation. It might be more literary." He appeared to give this question some consideration. "However," he dismissed it with a wave of the hand, "that is neither here nor there. What counts is this, were you the girl whose life you described so feelingly and dramatically?"

There was silence between them for a moment. Dita's first impulse was to maintain it indefinitely; ignore this question with barely suggested contempt; with a faint gesture of dissent, signify that she considered it a crudity, almost a vulgarity, and lightly, languidly, indifferently dismiss the whole subject and leave the room. She knew how, intuitively. Behind her were generations who understood how to flick an unpleasant situation from the tips of their fingers, who would ignore and dismiss with amused disdain an invitation to exculpate themselves or explain, when to explain meant practically to retract. But false as she felt, with waves of shame, she had been to her traditions and upbringing in revealing her emotion, she was no coward. She lifted her head and met his eyes. Gray eyes faced gray eyes—but with a difference. Hers were the passionate, emotional Irish gray—with black beneath them, and the long curling black lashes, but his were like mountain lakes, reflecting a gray and steely sky. Hers revealed all the secrets she might wish to hide; his concealed all his secrets admirably—discreet windows, revealing nothing but what their owner desired they should reveal.

"Yes," she said with defiant brevity.

He appeared again to give this reply due consideration. He had risen now and was walking up and down the floor. "What an impression it must have made on you!" he said at last, very gently.

She plaited the lace of her sleeve. "You knew about me before we were married," she said. "Why—?"

"Quite true, but sometimes something is said, it may be only a word, and one's eyes become, as it were, unsealed. One sees a perfectly familiar object or situation in an entirely new light. Your attitude now," he turned to her rather sharply, "is that I am about to blame you, to take you to task. Far from it. Why should I blame you for what has been beyond your power? Your words to-night have made me realize that it has been quite impossible for you to care for me, and that I have not been able to make you happy. Ah," lifting his hand as she was about to speak, "do not disclaim it. I know. You see, that very fact sends the whole house of cards tumbling. The bitterness with which you have spoken to-night would not have been in your mind, rankling, rankling all this time, if you had been a happy woman. It was bound to burst into flame sooner or later."

"Oh!" she broke out. "You have always won. You do not know what it is like to lose; but I—I missed every mark I aimed at. I came up from the South, so dead sure that I was a very gifted and accomplished person, and that all I had to do was to hold out my apron and all the beautiful and delightful things would tumble into it. But this great city surely taught me a lesson, and she's no very gentle teacher, either. And I used to sit up there in that tiresome little apartment among those candle-shades and cotillion favors and think how—how pretty I was," she flushed under his smile, "and rage, and get sick with disgust when I thought how I would look after about twenty years of that kind of life. I knew exactly how I'd look. I'd be one of those peaked, wistful-eyed old maids, with rusty black clothes turning green and brown, and a general air of apology for living. I could just see myself ironing out the ribbons of my winter bonnet with which to trim my summer hat, and then laundering my handkerchiefs and pasting them on the window-panes to dry. And life, life was like a great, wonderful river, flowing by and leaving me stranded on the shore. And then you came."

Hepworth laughed. "I don't wonder that you took the alternative. I'm conceited enough to think it better than those ugly pictures your young eyes were gazing at."

"Yes, they were ugly," she agreed. "Life just seemed like a dark, dreary, cobwebby passageway, but I always felt as if I might come to a door any minute and step through it into a beautiful garden. You seemed the door." She spoke the last words a little shyly.

He glanced at her again, inscrutable, unfathomable things in that gaze. "Ah, youth, youth and the waste of it!" There were tones in his voice that brought the tears to her eyes, but he did not see them. He was musing on the accident of her life, this flower of the dust, which he had taken from the dingy environment she loathed. He had lavished all the beauty and experience within his power upon her, and taken away perhaps the one thing that had redeemed her life. He had seen only the limitations and the makeshifts and how they had oppressed her dainty and fastidious spirit; but it had never struck him before that in lifting her away from them, above them, he had taken from her the one thing that might have glorified her life, that the sordidness and the scrimpiness were for her for ever haunted by the unexpected. That because she was young and beautiful and free, the dreariness must have been irradiated always by the rainbow tints of romance; and he had given her all the beauty and glitter his money could buy in exchange for the joy of a dream, and fancied that he had actually done something for her.

"Dita, forgive me," he murmured, a curiously bitter smile about his mouth.

"Forgive you!" she looked at him a little cautiously. She didn't understand the workings of his mind. He never gave her a hint either in eyes or expression that would seem as a clue for her to follow.

"Yes. You should." Again he smiled at her. "You didn't get a fair exchange. I see that very plainly now."

"You must not speak like that," she said quickly. "Believe me, it was a great deal more than a fair exchange and I have always regarded it so. Why do you think I have not been happy?"

"Because you have never really loved me."

"But I—I have always liked you," she cried quickly. "But," forlornly, "you knew the truth at the time. Even if I had not, I should have had to marry you anyway. I was so deep in debt I couldn't help it. I could not manage any more than I can speak Sanscrit. So you see that there is nothing to forgive. Believe me, I am always grateful, for before I married you, I thought and thought, but I could see no other way."

He laughed again. He couldn't help it. He had a sense of humor and he seemed to see, in a flashlight of vision, shocked Romance gather up her skirts and shake the dust of Dita's threshold from her winged shoes.

"You are so really fearless and honest, Dita, that I venture to ask the question." He put it with a rather diffident gentleness. "You have found it quite impossible to care for me?"

"Oh, no," impulsively. "I have always liked you. I am really very fond of you. But I am always tongue-tied before you. I never can think of anything to say to you and I always say foolish things." She regarded him with a wistful timidity.

He laughed ruefully. It was sorry mirth. "That is a proof of my stupidity, my child, not yours."

He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. Up and down the room he walked twice, three times, engrossed. Then having arrived at a decision, he put it into words. "Dita," he stopped before her and looked at her earnestly, "perhaps I am utterly rash and foolish, but will you answer me one question? But first get all melodramatic ideas of the state of my feelings out of your head." His smile was faintly cynical, obscurely so. "And believe me, that what really concerns me is your happiness. Are you in love with Eugene Gresham?"

She started, cast one quick glance at him, and then stared frowningly before her, but he noticed that her hand trembled on the back of the chair. "Why do you ask me that? I—I am married to you—I—" her voice faltered, broke.

"Oh, no conventional utterances, please," he cried quickly. "That is not worthy of you, not like you. There should be, there must be absolute sincerity between us now. Tell me, Perdita, are you in love with Eugene Gresham?"

"Ah, that I do not know." She looked beyond him and, still gazing, shook her head. "I do not know. I never have known, never been sure. We were boy and girl together, he a few years older. He is associated in my mind with the life of green old gardens and the smell of jasmine flowers. He lives in a wonderful world, a world of color that something in me always yearns toward. It seems to me sometimes as if I would rise to it, and my heart would blossom in purple and red. I seem doomed to talk foolishly to you," she exclaimed rather piteously, "but most people's hidden thoughts would sound foolish to others, would they not?"

"Go on, my dear." Then his controlled utterance gave way. "For heaven's sake, why should you not feel that you can say anything to me? What kind of an idea have I given you of myself? But tell me," quickly subduing his emotion, "what is it you feel?"

"As if—as if my heart were a flower which had never really bloomed—a cold, tightly folded bud, that yet held within the colorless outer leaves wonderful red and purple petals. All there, awaiting a sesame, and I sometimes dream that only Eugene can give me that sesame. But," the glow left her eyes, her head drooped, "I don't know, I don't know. I thought I was sure once that I loved him. I do not know now."

"Where was Gresham during the time you were struggling here?" he asked presently. And it struck her irrelevantly.

"In the East somewhere, I think. Doing his desert pictures. I used to hear from him once in a great while."

He said nothing. Then he came nearer and took both her hands in his.

"Dita, my clear, I'm going to be egotistical and talk about myself for a minute. Let me see if I can explain." Again that worn and flashing smile, with a deeper touch of cynicism, flitted over his arrogant face.

"Let us hope that it is not quite so bad as the last line infers; but it gives the idea, the picture. Well, Dita, I saw you, a beautiful flower, purple and red, if you will, although I do not think the combination of colors appropriate. And you were blooming in a tin can in a tenement window. It was insupportable, so I dreamed of transplanting the flower into its fitting surroundings, a marble court. That was what I crudely thought would mean your happiness. But I never secured the flower to adorn the marble court. Believe that. Above all, I wanted and I want its happiness. Dita, I'm weary-hearted, but I long—I long above all things—to make you happy. Take the poor surroundings that I can give you; but let your beauty have its meed, let your heart flower as it will. Feel free to meet, with outstretched hands, the romance your youth has dreamed of, for, Dita, I, who have only fettered you with jewels, am going to give you something really worth while, thanking God very humbly that it is in my power to do so, and the gift is freedom. You are free from now on."

She started back, looking at him in frowning bewilderment and yet he saw deep within her eyes a wild gleam of hope, of joy. "Free!" she repeated uncertainly, "Free! How can I be free when I am married to you?"