Part 23 (1/2)

”It's Iris' birthday, isn't it, Bruce?” Cherry flatly refused to endow her uncle with the t.i.tle which rightly belonged to him. ”What are you going to give her?”

”Give her? Well, come round here, and you shall see.”

Nothing loth, Cherry obeyed, and stood beside him attentively while he opened a small leather case and took out a pair of earrings each consisting of a tiny, pear-shaped moonstone dangling at the end of a thin platinum chain.

”Earrings! But Iris hasn't any holes in her ears, my dear!” Cherry's consternation was genuine.

”I know that, you little goose! But these don't want holes--see, you screw them on like this.”

He took one of her little pink ears in his fingers and screwed on the earring deftly.

”There, run and look at yourself,” he commanded, and she trotted away to an oval gla.s.s which hung on the wall between the long windows. As she moved, Cheniston pa.s.sed the remaining earring to his sister.

”What do you say, Chloe--is it a suitable present for her ladys.h.i.+p!”

Chloe took up the little trinket with a rather dubious air.

”Somehow I don't think I can fancy Iris wearing earrings,” she said; and Bruce, who had a respect for his sister's opinion which she herself did not suspect, looked rueful.

”But, Chloe, why not? You always wear them?”

”Certainly I do.” As a matter of fact she did, and the pearls or sapphires which she affected were as much a part of her personality as her black hair or her narrow blue eyes. ”But then Iris is a different sort of person. She is younger, more natural, more unsophisticated; and I'm not quite sure whether these pretty things will suit her charming face.”

”Oh!” Bruce's own face fell, and for once Chloe felt an impulse of compa.s.sion with another's disappointment.

”At any rate they are very dainty and girlish,” she said, handing back the case. ”I congratulate you on your taste, Bruce. You might very easily have got more elaborate ones--like some of mine--which would have been very inappropriate to a girl.”

”Why do you always speak of yourself as though you were a middle-aged woman, Chloe?” asked her brother with a sudden curiosity. ”You seem to forget you are younger than I--why, you are only twenty-six now.”

”Am I?” Her smile was baffling. ”In actual years I believe I am. But in thought, in feeling, in everything, I am a hundred years older than you, Bruce.”

Cherry's return to her uncle's side with a request to him to take out ”the dangly thing what tickles my ear” cut short Bruce's reply, and breakfast proceeded tranquilly, while the sun shone gaily and the roses for which Cherry Orchard was famous scented the soft, warm air which floated in through the widely-opened windows.

Meanwhile Anstice was in a quandary on this beautiful summer morning.

Before he had pledged his word to Cheniston to stand aside and leave the field open to his rival, he had gladly accepted Iris' invitation to her birthday dinner and dance; but the thought of the dances she had promised him had changed from a source of antic.i.p.atory delight to one of the sheerest torment.

It had not been easy to avoid her. There had been hours in which he had had to restrain himself by every means in his power from rus.h.i.+ng over to Greengates to implore her pardon for his discourtesy, and to beg her to receive him back into her most desirable favour. It had cost him an effort whose magnitude had left him cold and sick to greet her distantly on the rare occasions of their meeting; and many times he had been ready to throw his promise to the winds, to repudiate the horrible bargain he had struck, and to tell her plainly in so many words that he loved her and wanted her for his wife.

But he never yielded to the temptation. He had pledged his word, and somehow the thought that he was paying the price, now, for Hilda Ryder's untimely death, brought, ever and again, a fleeting sense of comfort as though the sacrifice of his own chance of happiness was an offering laid at her feet in expiation of the wrong he had all unwittingly wrought her.

But his heart sank at the idea of facing Iris once more, and the thought of her as she would surely be, the centre and queen of all the evening's gaiety, was almost unendurable.

At times he told himself that he could not go to Greengates that night.

He was only human, and the sight of her, dressed, as she would surely be, in some s.h.i.+mmering airy thing which would enhance all her beauty, would break down his steadfast resolve. He could not be with her in the warm summer night, hold her in his arms in the dance, while the music of the violins throbbed in his ears, the perfume of a thousand roses intoxicated all his senses, and not cry out his love, implore her to be kind as she was fair, to readmit him to her friends.h.i.+p, and grant him, presently, the privileges of a lover....

And then, in the next moment he told himself he could not bear to miss the meeting with her. He must go, must see her once more, see the wide grey eyes beneath their crown of sunny hair, hear her sweet, kind voice, touch her hand....