Dita's fears calmed by Mrs. Wilstead's essentially common-sense point of view, her confidence was further restored by Eugene's evident ignorance of any plots and plans on Mr. Cresswell Hepworth's part of bringing this triangular situation, involving himself, his wife and the other man, to a fiction-hallowed and moss-grown conclusion.

It was therefore without particular apprehension, at any rate apprehensions of the kind nourished by Mr. Hewston, that she dressed for the dinner en tÊte-À-tÊte with her husband. It was rather with a sense of mounting interest, even excitement.

She wavered in her choice of a gown, scanning with hypercritical eye a dozen or more. White savored of a school-girl simplicity and disarmed her if she chose to be subtle. Blue was unbecoming; sufficient taboo. "Green's forsaken and yellow's forsworn," she murmured ruefully. Black remained, thin, soft-falling gauze, distinguished, distinctive, exquisite in design and effect; above its shadow rose her neck of cream, her hair was the dusk shadow of copper, her eyes were darkly brilliant.

She hesitated at jewels. He had given her so many. Which would go best with her gown? Then she turned away from even the mental contemplation of them with a feeling of distaste. She could not, even to please him, wear his jewels when he and she were almost strangers, when but the details of their final parting remained to be settled. And yet would it not look a bit odd to appear without any ornaments whatever?

She considered the matter a moment, and then smiling a little, she opened the box which Gresham had given into her hands that morning, and which lay upon her dressing-table.

She turned over this old trinket in her hand, and gazed at it, forgetful of the passing time. How impressive Eugene had been when he had returned it to her!

"I am only lending it to you, remember that, for you will give it to me with your heart's love, Dita, and soon."

She was roused from her reverie by the sound of a motor stopping without. Her maid waited to place a black and gold wrap about her shoulders. "One moment," said Dita. Quickly she slipped the amulet on a thin, old-fashioned gold chain and fastened it about her throat. Then she went downstairs to greet her husband.

Commonplaces of the most conventional and banal order they talked. Nothing else on the drive to the restaurant, nothing else on first taking their seats at the table on one side of the great garish room. There were many curious eyes on them, necks craned, the incredulous whisper ran:

"Mr. and Mrs. Cresswell Hepworth actually together! What does it mean!"

The stereotyped babbling went on intermittently, until dinner had been ordered and the earlier courses come and gone, and then Dita suddenly awoke to the fact that her husband had taken the conversation into his own hands and was actually talking to her. Oh, of course, he had often talked to her before, arranged new amusements for her, discussed what jewels she would like, what plays she would care to see, what people interested her most, what journey she would enjoy.

But now, she almost caught her breath at the surprise of it, he was talking to her as if she were a man, or at least an intelligent human being and not just merely—a pretty woman.

He was talking straight ahead, discussing business matters, several interesting problems which had come up in his affairs during his recent western sojourn. He did not pause to explain anything to her, quite took it for granted that she would understand. He did not apparently stop to consider whether she was interested or amused, and that pleased her enormously. She began to ask questions, and he answered them fully, even pondering some of them carefully before replying. One he considered for a moment or so and then said: "Do you know, I had not thought of that before, that puts a new phase upon the whole situation." Her strand of rubies had never given Dita such a glow of pride and pleasure.

"Ah, why have you never talked to me like this before?" she asked naÏvely. "Think of all the stupid dinners we've eaten together when you treated me like a tiresome little girl who had to be continually amused, and I was one, too; as tongue-tied and missish as anything, because you took it for granted that I was."

"No one could accuse you of being either tongue-tied or missish to-night. You are quite matronly in that black gown."

"Oh, I love to hear about the big things that go on," she said enthusiastically, if irrelevantly, "but men will never talk to me about them. All my life, whenever I'd try really to talk sense to a man, he'd say, 'What wonderful eyes you have,' showing that he hadn't heard one word I'd been saying. They always seem to think that I expect them to tell me how lovely I am. It's the curse of the pretty woman."

"Oh, well, console yourself," he said carelessly. "There are prettier women in the world than you, quantities of them!"

"I—I—suppose so." Dita had rarely been so taken aback. She looked at him a moment like some insulted queen. His eyes, however, were discreetly downcast. "Oh, of course," she said as quickly as she could recover her breath, "of course," her laugh was forced and rang hollowly.

"Oh, yes, don't let your beauty get on your nerves. The world is full of beautiful women. My new amulet—I told you that I had a new one, did I not?—was given me by one of the most beautiful women I ever saw. I have her picture somewhere. I must show it to you."

Mr. Cresswell Hepworth was entirely without design in his choice of topics. He had spoken of some of his great western enterprises because his mind had been more or less occupied with them during the day, and had been so surprised and pleased that these subjects had gained his wife's interests that he had continued the discussion of them. Again, in his seeming disparagement of her beauty, he had merely thought to console her for what she regarded as the constant belittling of her mental endowment, evidently a sore spot in her consciousness.

Dita played with her fork a moment without answering his last remark. She had no right to feel either resentment or irritation. Her sense of justice assured her of that, but she suffered a twinge of both emotions, nevertheless.

"Wallace Martin tells me that good old Hewston made an awful scene when those distorted pictures of Fuschia Fleming and myself appeared in the paper." Hepworth laughed more heartily than usual.

"Oh, do not mention that unspeakable old creature!" she cried petulantly. "Tell me of more interesting things."

"Dita," he spoke to her more earnestly, more self-revealingly she felt than he had ever done before, "I am going to tell you something. When I went west last winter, it was not alone because I was called thither by various business affairs, but because, after thinking the matter all over, I definitely decided that the only thing for me to do was to relieve you of my presence. I was convinced that, although you might not be fully conscious of it, still in the depths of your heart you really loved Gresham. I was also convinced that I loved you infinitely, and that it was quite beyond my power to interest you. But since my return I find myself at sea. The moment I saw you I saw the difference in you, the change that made me revise my former crude, stupid estimates of you. I realize that you are the sort of woman who must have an object, a purpose in life, an expression; in fact, that you set little store by the beauty others praise extravagantly, because it has always been yours. You value it no more than one values the sun and wind. It is achievement that fascinates you, isn't it?"

"Ah, yes, but I had failed, you know, and I was afraid to try again. I knew that you were doing big things, but you never would talk of them to me, and I thought that you considered me too stupid to understand them."

"Dita, how blindly we have misunderstood each other. Is it too late?" He whispered the words as he put her wrap about her shoulders, his voice ardent, impassioned as she had never heard it.

She cast one astonished, almost frightened glance upon him. Then, as in a daze, a dream, walked down the room, never seeing the admiring eyes that everywhere met her. She might have been in the desert, as far as they were concerned.

As the door of the motor closed on them a panic of shyness seized her. "You, you spoke of your new amulet," she said, snatching at a topic. "Have you it with you?"

"Yes. But I do not know whether you can get a very good idea of it in these shifting lights."

He took the case from his pocket and, lifting out the ornament, gave it into her hands. It was fashioned of half a dozen uncut diamonds in a setting of the most delicate and exquisite filigree.

"Old Spanish, you see," he said.

"Beautiful!" she exclaimed, turning it over and looking at it more closely. But the attention she was bestowing upon it was a mere seeming. She was thinking, or rather attempting to think, but her heart was fluttering wildly, her whole impulsive nature seemed to impel her to the action she was meditating.

"Cresswell," she lifted a face white as a snowdrop to his, "will you make an exchange with me? Will you give me this amulet and take mine?"

"Perdita!" he cried, "you do not—" his voice broke.

"Yes, I do," she exclaimed, "it is not a wild whim, a caprice on my part. I have been thinking about it all day, ever since this morning."

"This morning!" sharply; looking at her keenly, quickly. "Ah," with a long breath, "it was this morning that Hewston drove poor Isabel to your house to prevent the duel between Gresham and myself." He laughed, but it was dreary mirth. "Hewston is a most imaginative fellow. I have a railway deal on which I spoke of to him as a duel. And so, you were going to sacrifice yourself in order to make quite sure that I would spare Eugene. Oh, rest content, Perdita. He is quite safe from my poignard or pistol. Never fear."

It seemed to her that the satire in his voice bit into her soul. With a great gasp of relief she realized that the car had stopped before her door. "Oh, take your amulet," she cried, "since you will not have mine." She almost threw it at him.

He thought that she was angry and sullen as she walked up the steps and into the house without a word to him, and with the barest inclination of the head. In reality, she was striving hard to control her sobs.