When Dita wakened the next morning, it was very late, almost noon. She came slowly to waking consciousness over wastes of apprehension, oppressed by some heavy sense of disaster. What had happened? Ah, she remembered it, it was last night. She squirmed uncomfortably and then lay gazing with somber and introspective eyes about the beautiful room. Slowly, the chaotic and uncomfortable thoughts which thronged confusingly in her mind resolved themselves into two or three distinct facts as scorching to her sensitiveness as if written in letters of fire. First, she had let herself go unwarrantably. An electric storm always exerted a sinister effect upon her, inducing a wildness, a recklessness at first, eventually followed by melancholy and culminating either in tears or temper. And she had yielded weakly to every phase of this storm-induced mood.

Why did events have to take the bits in their teeth and gallop madly along the road to ruin at the most placid and unexpected moments? Why should an electric storm have blotted the sky and flashed its jagged lightning over her nerves that especial evening? Why had she not mastered the sirocco, driven it off in its first stealthy approaches? But she melted to self-pity; Cresswell should not have taken her so seriously. He might have realized that the storm, and that tiresome dinner, and those tiresome people had goaded her unendurably. Grant them every virtue, every grace, admit that there might have been an attraction between herself and them in ordinary circumstances, but the fact that they were old friends of her husband changed the whole chemical situation. Attraction became repulsion, attempt to conceal the fact as she would. But self-pity ultimately merged into self-accusation. No matter what the causes, she had made a melodramatic scene. She had told a lot of bare truths, which, like all bare truths, were only half truths; about Eugene, for instance, practically admitting that she loved him.

Well, did she? She sat up suddenly in bed and pushed the hair back from her brow with both hands. She pondered intensely a moment. She didn't know. She really didn't know. Was it love, this feeling she had for him, had had for him ever since she had been a girl of fifteen? It was a powerful attraction anyway—a sympathy, an understanding.

And Cresswell had offered her freedom, freedom! What did it mean? Her heart began to beat quickly, excitedly. It meant the great adventure ... if one had the courage ... one need "mourn no joy untasted, envy no bliss gone by." She would throw off this ennui, this apathy which afflicted her. She was free, free to seek and meet the unexpected. The great adventure, a thousand adventures were before her. At last, she would live. Suddenly she remembered her amulet. She must get it. She gave this a moment's consideration, and then, before summoning her maid, she went quickly to the telephone in her sitting-room, and rang up Eugene Gresham's studio.

To her relief, he was there and answered the ring almost immediately.

"Are you there, 'Gene. I want to see you to-day, as soon as possible, within an hour or so. Will it be convenient for you?"

"Oh, perfectly. But," there was anxiety in his voice, "nothing is wrong, I hope."

"Oh, nothing much," she replied evasively, "only I want to talk to you—but not here."

"Why not take luncheon with me," he replied, "at half-past one and where?"

"Oh, not in any crowded restaurant," she answered a little impatiently. "At some quiet place. A tea-room—the Wistaria?"

"Very well. Then within an hour and a half."

"And, oh, Eugene," her voice detaining him, "I want the talisman. Do not fail to bring it. Do you understand?"

If Dita wore as a protecting disguise the simple and conventional dark gown which has been prescribed by certain unalterable rules of fiction as the proper costume for a lady hastening to a rendezvous, it failed of its effect, but served instead to accentuate her beauty; nor detracted in the least from her as an object of interest and comment.

And Eugene, with his fame, and his air, and his eyes, his lifted shoulder and his limp, the pointed laurel leaves seeming to gleam through his cloud of hair, handed her from her motor-car with the manner of courts, his hat in hand, to the admiration of the passers-by. The whisper ran: "Eugene Gresham and the beautiful Mrs. Hepworth." They passed through a gaping aisle. They entered the tea-room to the craning of necks. Poor souls! This was their measure of seclusion. Beauty and genius! Fame and wealth! It is a combination New York loves. She serves them up to her multitudes on a salver.

They were successful, however, in finding a remote table beneath swaying purple clusters of artificial wistaria and a dimly mellow light. And while Eugene ordered the luncheon, Dita glanced about her with a sensation of relief; new surroundings always seem to hold out the alluring if frequently vain promise of new thoughts and this was the beginning of adventure, of that new life of infinite variety she meant to live at last.

Eugene turned from the waiter, and leaning across the table narrowly observed her.

"A trifle pale," he remarked. "Mad Dita!" reproachfully and yet tenderly. "I hope all that atmospheric unpleasantness—mental, I mean, did not come boiling and seething to the surface after I left last night. I hoped the sirocco had spent itself before I left. But doubtless Hepworth understands how you are affected by a storm."

"I'm afraid I did make rather a scene," she admitted, her lashes on her cheek. "However, that is neither here nor there."

He drew a breath of relief.

"Then it is all over, the atmosphere cleared and we are to begin our sittings to-morrow." He smiled in anticipation and laughingly drew her picture upon the air.

"No," she shook her head, and spoke more reluctantly than before, "Cresswell has requested me not to have my portrait painted just now. He is kind enough," her smile was shadowy, "to think that there is no particular danger of an immediate waning of my beauty and he desires me to wait a few months."

"But that is impossible! Incredible!" he scowled with irritation and threw himself back in the chair. "Oh, what a sirocco, what a sirocco it must have been!" He shook his head back and forth and then dropped it in his hands, studying the pattern of the table-cloth as though it were the map of the situation. "To pass over my disappointment"—he lifted his head and mechanically pushed about some of the dishes the waiter placed before him on the table—"ignore it, let it go. I'm not going to press that now; but there are other things to be considered. It is known that I am to do your portrait. It was openly discussed last night. All this must be taken into account. That is for appearances as far as you are concerned. Then regarding me. I am not a paper-hanger or house painter to be engaged and then dismissed at the whim of a millionaire. I can not accept a commission from Hepworth and permit him to cancel it by a negligent message, sent through a third person. Absurd!" He frowningly bit a finger. "My plans and arrangements must be concluded for months ahead. They can not be thrown askew like this. Oh, Dita, what did you do, what did you say that brought this about? I worked like a Trojan last night to avert anything of the kind."

She did not answer, but sipped her tea with downcast eyes and he saw that the lashes on her cheeks were wet.

"Ah, Dita," his voice fell to a charming note of tenderness, a note to stir any woman's heart, with the purple and white of the wistaria clusters swaying above their heads and the mellow light reflected in his eyes, his eager eyes which pierced life's stained and sordid curtain and saw the wonder and miracle of beauty; and it was this power to discern the eternal vision which illuminated his ugly, irregular, fascinating face upon which work and dreams and experience had stamped their impress. "You can not fancy what it means to me to paint your portrait now. I've painted it before, crudely, in boyhood, and experienced then a casual delight in the effort to portray a beautiful thing, and wrest a few new secrets of art from the portrayal. That was all. But now," his voice without being raised, yet lifted exultantly, "but now—my heart is swept with insurgent seas at the thought of what it means. I am lover and artist, fused in a fire of white enthusiasm. The lover sees, divines what the artist can only guess at, and the artist offers to the lover a perfected technique. I feel the stirring of this power to catch your loveliness, Dita, and fix it on canvas imperishably. It would be the great achievement. That is in the background of every artist's thoughts. It is his pillar of cloud by day and his pillar of fire by night. The great achievement!" He dreamed over it a moment. "I would paint the South in you, Dita, 'warm and sweet and fickle is the South.' Ah! I thought I loved you then. I thought I loved you the evening we parted, but I know now that I have never really loved you before or I could not have given you up."

They were almost alone, nearly every one had left the room. A long trail of wistaria blew before her eyes. The light glowed through the silken, yellow shades. The South! She smelled roses and jasmine. It seemed to her for one bewildering moment as if her heart had indeed blossomed in purple and red. She smiled lingeringly, sweetly into his eyes.

"The portrait's only postponed, Eugene, look at it in that way." The words recalled her to herself with a start. This was paper wistaria and electric light. She was no longer a girl in a flower-scented, green old garden about to pose for a boyish and impatient artist. Here she was, in spite of all her vows to the contrary, yielding to Eugene's spell without a struggle. She was quite sure of his charm and magnetism, but what she doubted now was her own heart.

"'Ah, the little more and how much it is. And the little less, and what worlds away,'" she murmured beneath her breath, wondering unhappily if she were born to doubt everything.

"But I can't and I won't submit to a postponement." He was now both impatient and impassioned.

"It is not final," she explained. "Do take it as a postponement, nothing more. He has his reasons—oh, they are not what you suspect. He is not jealous. He is too big for that. It is something I can not go into now." Her sentences were disjointed. She seemed almost incoherent to him. "Let it be so for the present. I implore, no, I insist, that there be no explanations. But I must go, it is getting late," she started as if to rise; then sank back in her chair and held out her hand. "Oh, the amulet, Eugene."

"I haven't got it," he threw out both empty hands and looked up at her from under his brows with the expression of a naughty child. "Now listen, Dita, before you get angry, although you're so wonderful when you're angry that any one might be forgiven for tempting you into that state; but after you called me up, the Nasmyths, those English people you know, mother and daughter, were at the studio, and I was so intent on getting them away in time to meet you, the mother is the most interminable talker, that I finally bundled them out of the door and came with them, with never a thought of the amulet."

"'Gene, how like you!" Her face was full of dismay. "Cresswell especially asked me to get it to-day, and I don't think he believed for one moment that clumsy fib I told about having it mended."

"I'll go at once and get it, and bring it to the house," he said contritely. "You can make any explanation—"

"No, no more explanations," she said decisively. "They are perfect spider-webs, the most involving things any poor fly can tangle himself up in. They are, to mix metaphors, the quicksands of any situation. They make of the simplest matter a problem of complexities."

"What does that go for?" Gresham tilted his head on one side and studied her. "Does it mean that you and Hepworth quarreled about me, last night?"

She looked back at him in inscrutable pondering, as if considering the point, wondering, in fact, whether she and her husband really had quarreled about him.

"No explanations, Eugene, that's fixed."

"As you will," in careless assent. "But, Dita," again that ardent note of tenderness, warming his voice, and stirring her heart with all those intimations of romance which she had never known. "We might as well accept the inevitable, accept it with joy, face the light quite fearlessly. We might as well see clearly at last, what for years we should have known and believed and welcomed with all our hearts—that we belong to each other."

Her quickly lowered eyelids veiled the sudden glow of her eyes. "Perhaps," she whispered, "only I want time to think it out, to be sure of myself. I—I've grown cautious."

He looked at her with the smile that could say so many things and to her said but one. "Take time then, Dita, but permit me to pray that it will not be long. And I—I shall await with what patience I may that dazzling morning when you will open your beautiful, dreaming eyes, and know at once and for ever that you are at last awake. When you will say, 'This is my day of love, this is my hour and Eugene's! The world may go.' Take your days or months, Dita. I give them to you, for I know that every hour that passes will bring you nearer to me."

Famous artist, famous lover! Men saw his irregular, swarthy face, his lifted shoulder, his limp, and wondered. But women saw the experiences and aspirations and dreams that that face held, they saw the smiles which said so many things exquisitely, they felt the subtle, intuitive comprehension of every word, an understanding which held no condemnation, but was as warming and stimulating as sunshine. His love-making was as delightful and perfect as his art.

But again she threw off the sweet, poignantly sweet influence and strove to think clearly.

"You had your chance, Eugene, before I was married. I would have listened to you then, the night before you sailed for Europe, but you didn't believe in me, you showed it plainly." Angry tears glittered in her eyes at the remembrance.

"Ah, how could I?" His smile was at once cynical and tender. "I knew your temperament, that craving, artistic temperament. It is much like my own. We spring from the same stock, remember. You had all the inherited love of luxury and beauty as I told you then and you were starved, starved, Dita, and in a state of revolt. Your imagination was aflame with what Hepworth offered. And I—" he threw out his hands with a disclaiming gesture, "Where was I? My feet on shifting sands, I hadn't touched bedrock then. Ah, well, what's the use? The past is past. It's the future we face. My heaven, Perdita, what a future!"

His eyes held her, drew her. Involuntarily, she swayed toward him. Then, impatiently, as if resenting her own attitude, she rose to her feet.

Dita drove home, with the faint smile still lingering about her lips, still dreaming in her eyes. She drove through the park, green still in spite of frost. A mist palely irradiated by the sunshine it obscured enveloped the landscape in a sort of opaline enchantment and unsubstantiality.

It was with a sigh of regret that she entered her own house. She felt as if she had wilfully shut the door on the wooing and pensive autumn without and gone into the bleak and wintry atmosphere of regret and puzzle and doubt.

But as she moved listlessly across the hall a servant handed her a note from her husband.

She tore it open and read it. Then she read it again. It seemed to her that the rustle of the paper was like the crackle of thorns, and the fool's laughter associated with it. She had meant to manage this situation in her own way, to keep her hand well on the lever, and behold it was all arranged for her.

Very briefly the letter informed her that Hepworth's western interests would require his personal supervision for several months. That he hoped she would endeavor to make herself as comfortable and happy as possible and arrange her time in any way that best suited her. That was all. But as she walked to her own apartments it seemed to her that the air echoed and rang with the arid and mirthless laughter of fools.