The hour which Dita had set for her appointment with Cresswell Hepworth was twelve the next morning, consequently she was not only surprised but perturbed when Eugene's name was brought to her a little after eleven.

He looked haggard, she thought, as if he had not slept, but his eyes were brighter than usual.

"Good morning, Queen of the May," he cried, coming forward to take both her hands in his as she came through the doorway. "Did you know, by the way, that this is May day? Ah," his eyes fastening themselves on the crystal amulet gleaming against her white gown, "you have it still. That was what disturbed me and drove slumber from my eyelids during the long night. He is a strong man, a very able and masterful man and he wants that amulet and you, Dita, and I feared—oh, you know how things appear in the dead of night, what monstrous and fantastic ideas come to one."

"You might have saved your fears and your fancies," she answered with a delicately ironical smile. "He does not want me. He would, I think, like the amulet. Nevertheless, he declined it."

"Then you offered it to him? Really!"

"Yes," the irony still in her voice. "You were a better prophet than you dreamed, Eugene, you predicted exactly what happened. I offered it to him and he declined." Her voice faltered.

"Naturally," laughing, "what else could he do under the circumstances? Even he, with all a collector's greed, would hardly care for a gift which is supposed to be invariably accompanied by the heart's love of the donor. He knew, poor wretch, that all he was getting was the bit of glass, while the heart's love was mine, for ever and ever mine."

His voice sank to those musical cadences which ever prove so enthralling to the ear. And Dita, who loved music and beauty and romance, smiled dreamily. But doubt, like a shadow, lay in her eyes and about her mouth.

"No," she cried, "oh, I do not know, Eugene. When I am with you, you throw a glamour over me. I believe that I am just on the eve of loving you—that any minute you will say the word which will make me fully realize that I do, but as soon as you leave me, Eugene, the moment passes."

"It is because you are perplexed, worried about this other matter, that is all, dearest. When that is settled and you are free, then I will sweep away at once and for ever all these doubts in your mind, sweep them away as if they were cobwebs."

"Will you? Perhaps," but she shook her head as if only half convinced. "Hush! What is that! I think it was the bell of the outer door. You must go at once, Eugene. Cresswell was to be here at twelve o'clock. It must be quite that now."

"And I have no desire to meet him." He picked up his hat. "I will step through the little back room into the hall, and thence out. I dare say you and he have some final arrangements to make. Is that it, eh?"

She nodded, but without looking at him. Her face had grown very pale and the hand which she placed on the tall back of a chair to steady herself trembled a little.

Her ears had not deceived her, it was Hepworth's ring—and the echo of Eugene's retreating footsteps had barely died away before a maid drew a curtain and Hepworth crossed the threshold.

If he upon his arrival had at once noticed a subtle but marked change in Perdita, she now was struck by an equally vital and informing alteration in him. He had always seemed to her before as one who leaned back in an automobile and merely dictated the directions the chauffeur was to take, but now he was the man who was driving his car himself, at unlawful speed, and keeping quite cool and collected during the performance.

He took the chair opposite the one in which she had seated herself, and she noticed a flicker of a smile across his face as his eye caught the amulet hung about her neck, a tender, humorous, sad little smile.

"Yes, I am still wearing it," she said, as if in answer to some question of his, "and I have had the box containing the others brought down here. It is there on that table in the corner." She spoke with a bravado which only half concealed her embarrassment.

He glanced toward it indifferently. "Then we will fasten my new one in the space left vacant by yours," his swift, delightful smile came and went, transforming his face for the moment like a gleam of sunlight, but although brilliant, it was sad, sad as all regret, and Dita, seeing it, felt some wild, momentary impulse to beseech forgiveness, she could not tell exactly for what.

The amulet, her old bit of crystal, was swinging at the end of a long chain, and, a little embarrassed, she lifted it in her hand and gazed at it mechanically, turning it this way and that to catch the different reflections of light.

"Did you know that we are lawbreakers, you and I, Dita?" asked Hepworth with another smile, "meeting to discuss the details of a properly arranged divorce? Well, my dear, it will not rest particularly heavy on my conscience if it makes things easier for you in the least degree. Your lawyers will instruct you just what to do, but there is one matter which I wish to discuss with you personally, and that is some settlements.

"Why, Dita," breaking off sharply and starting to his feet, "what is the matter? Are you ill?"

Indeed he was justified in thinking so. She had grown white as snow. The color had left even her lips.

"No," she spoke with an effort, but she lifted her head, as if by main strength of will. "No," and he was infinitely relieved to see a bit of color creep back into her lips, but the eyes she courageously raised to his were dark with an emotion which he could only translate as fear or horror, he could not tell which.

"Have I offended you, then?" he murmured. "Believe me—"

"No, no," she insisted so definitely that he was forced to believe her. "It was something quite different. Something, something I just remembered."

She was manifestly so confused and disturbed that he did not press the point. It would have seemed both unkind and unwise to do so, and then, although her eyes still retained that curiously shocked, almost horror-stricken expression, the color had returned to her cheek.

"You were saying?" she began, her voice steady enough now. "Oh, yes, I remember, about the money." Those deep vibrations of emotion thrilled her tones. "Well, I won't have it. Won't touch it. I will not hear of settlements. I can make enough for my needs."

He lifted his eyes and looked at her quickly and then the eyelids almost closed. Perdita was under very close observation.

"Naturally, I do not for a moment dispute that. It is a fact already proven, but it is my wish to remove the necessity from you. Your occupation will then continue to be a source of amusement, of interest to you, but you will not feel that it is your sole dependence."

She shook her head with a sort of irrevocable gentleness with which he could not fail to be struck.

"No," she said, "it is really quite useless to discuss the matter. Truly, Cresswell, I will not even consider it."

"But, Dita," he began, then paused a moment as if to make a choice of arguments, desirous of using at once the most potent and evidently preparing to undermine and break down the barriers of her decision if it took a month.

She forestalled him, however, with a quick flank movement. She rose to her feet. "Cresswell," she said, "I promised you last night that I would discuss this matter with you this morning, but now," there was the least hesitation in her voice, "I am going to ask a favor. I dined with you last night, now will you dine with me to-night? Will you? There will only be Miss Fleming and her father, and she will just sit at the table a few minutes, she never dines before playing; Wallace Martin and Maud, and they are going somewhere, so you and I will have the leisure of a long evening to discuss all the pros and cons of this question, your side and mine. Will you come?"

She was looking at him so earnestly, there was something so strange in the depths of her dark eyes, that he felt tempted on the moment to beg an explanation of this postponement. Then, as quickly he relinquished it.

"I shall be delighted to come," he said heartily. "And if to-night you are in no mood to talk over dry details, we will put it off again until a more convenient season."

"No." Her tone was positive. "I am quite sure that we will come to one decision or another this evening. Good-by."

When the curtain at the door had fallen behind him, Dita sat down again. She did not seem to be thinking or mentally engaged in any way whatever. On the contrary, she seemed to be waiting, two or three minutes passed, five. Still she waited. Ah, a bitter smile hovered for one moment around her lips. Her whole tense figure relaxed a little as if the moment which she had so confidently expected had come.

There was the sound of the shutting of the outer door in the small room to the left, then a halting step across the bare and polished floor. Eugene's step. He paused a moment in the doorway leading into the larger room, but as Dita did not turn nor give any sign whatever of having heard him, he came on.

"Back again, you see," he said. "I saw Hepworth leaving the house just as I came about the corner up here, so I knew the coast was clear. May I sit down?"

For the first time Dita looked at him. He was unmistakably not of the same temper in which he had left her an hour before. The buoyancy and spring of him had vanished. His eyes were clouded, his mouth depressed, certain lines on his brow and about his mouth stood out more markedly than usual. In fact, he seemed to have halted midway in some mood between dismay and anger. And as Dita observed this, there again played about her mouth for one instant that same, sad, bitter, secretive smile.

She had leaned back in her chair as if prepared to remain some time, but she made no effort whatever to carry on a conversation or even to embark on one.

The frown deepened on Eugene's brow. This attitude on her part was evidently irritating to him.

"Everything settled, Dita, and satisfactorily?"

"What do you mean by satisfactorily?" she asked, letting a moment or two lapse between his question and her answer.

"I mean everything arranged in your favor," he replied with a short laugh. "He is rather sure to do that, you know. He likes to do things with the grand air."

"Oh, no, Eugene, it is you who like to affect the grand air. With him it is natural."

He looked up at her quickly. "It sounds, it sounds," he said, "as if you might possibly be on the verge of a sirocco. Don't Dita, I implore you. I am off the key myself."

"Why?" she asked.

He lifted his shoulders. "Ah, that I do not know."

"I refused any alimony, Eugene," she said abruptly.

"What! Oh, Dita, you must not! Why, it is the height of folly! My dear child, it is quixotic to the verge of idiocy." All his moodiness had vanished. He was arguing her case fervently enough now. "You have had your head turned by the success you and Maud have enjoyed in this venture this winter, but that is purely ephemeral. You were a fad, a novelty. How long do such things last in New York? And here is Hepworth willing and anxious to endow you with houses and lands. Dita," and never had she heard him plead his love with such fervor, "Dita, you must not ruin your whole life by a blind whim. You must listen to advice. You must be guided by your friends in this matter.

"It is true, of course," he continued, "that I make a very large income, but I lay nothing by. It is impossible. I must keep up an appearance—the painter prince, and all that sort of thing. It is expected of me. It is a part of my stock in trade."

"Then you consider, 'Gene," her voice was calmly, reassuringly reasonable now, "you consider that fully to enjoy life we must both possess more than an ordinarily large income?"

"Dearest Dita," he bent forward with his tenderest, most ingratiating smile, "do not for one moment mistake me. I think, I know we could be happy without a centime between us, but viewing life as it is lived and considering your tastes and my tastes, the mode of existence to which we have accustomed ourselves and all that, I think we, like most other people, would do well to avoid the perilous experiment of comparative poverty. Whether we wish to believe it or not, really to invest life with romance and interest and charm requires more than mere imagination, of which you and I possess an abundant store, Dita. It also requires money."

"It would require a great deal more than that for me, Eugene," she rose to her feet now and stood looking at him as if from mountain heights, so remote and distant she seemed. "Remember the old legend of my amulet,"—she lifted it and swung it to and fro as she talked,—"that sooner or later it would force the one who possessed it to reveal himself in his true character? Well, it has proved its ancient claim. You apparently possessed it long enough for it to force you to reveal your true self; or perhaps that was inevitable under any circumstances."

"What do you mean, Dita?" he, too, had sprung to his feet, and stood facing her, both fear and chagrin in his eyes.

"This," she flung out her hand with the amulet in it; "while I sat here talking to Cresswell, I was turning this square bit of crystal this way and that, watching it catch the light. Suddenly, as I held it between my thumb and forefinger, I saw you, it reflected you quite clearly. You thrust your head a little forward from the door, down there," indicating by a gesture the door at the lower end of the room, "anxious to hear the better what Cresswell was saying and quite sure from the position of our chairs that we could not see you. Then I sent him away and waited. I knew, I knew instinctively, that you would do just as you did, Eugene, and—so I waited. I knew that I should hear that outer door close, that I should hear you walk across the floor, I knew it."

The moments pulsed like heartbeats between them.

"I shall not deny it," he said at last, "but Dita, Dita, I did it for you. I felt that you would follow some quixotic course, which you would regret for a lifetime. I know so well your mad, impulsive recklessness. Oh, Dita," he stretched out his arms to her.

There was no responsive movement on her part. She stood mute, immovable, eyes downcast, as if she could not bear to look upon his humiliation.

The long chain had slipped through her fingers, and the amulet swung at the end of it, to and fro between herself and him, like the pendulum of an inflexible fate.

"Dita," his voice was irresistibly appealing, "you will not thrust me thus out of your heart, oh, not for this!"

"You never had a place in my heart, Eugene, I know that now."

She swept across the floor, but as she put up her hand to pull aside the curtain before the door, she paused. "I—I'm sorry, Eugene," she faltered and by an effort of will lifted her eyes to him at last.

But they fell neither on the shamed nor the conquered. His head was thrown back, his eyes met hers. He was smiling, and his smile held unfathomable things. It spoke of a spirit eternally young and yet which had felt the weary weight of all dead and crumbling centuries. It was sad, disillusioned, yet eagerly joyous. It had tasted all things and found them vanity, yet pursued an unending quest with infinite zest.

"Dear Dita," he murmured, "never doubt that I loved you, love you still, but as the artist loves, not the plodder. You or any woman can only be to him the 'shadow of the idol of his thought,' the mere symbol of beauty, but what he really loves, Dita, is beauty's self."