“With you?” He met her charming eyes with his ironic smile.  “Oh, I couldn’t—­I was brought up on your kind, and perfect as you are, you would only give me the tiresome, familiar society affair.  There isn’t any mystery about you.  I know your secret.”

“Well, at least you didn’t learn it from Madame Alta,” she retorted.

“From Madame Alta!  Pshaw! she was never anything but a vocal instrument.”

“Do you remember the way she sang this?” asked Gerty; and springing to her feet she fell into an exaggerated mimicry of the prima donna’s pose, while she trilled out a languishing passage from “Faust.”  “I always laughed when she got to that scene,” she added, coming back to the couch, “because when she grew sentimental she reminded me of a love-sick sheep.”

“Then why do you resurrect her ghost?” he demanded.  “So far as I am concerned she might have lived in the last century.”

“And yet how mad you used to be about her.”

“’Mad’—­that’s just the word.  I was.”  He drew out his watch, glanced at it, and rose to his feet with an ejaculation of dismay, “Why, you’ve actually made me forget that we aren’t living in eternity,” he said.  “I’ll be awfully late for dinner and it’s every bit your fault.”

“But think of me,” gasped Gerty, already moving in the direction of her bedroom, “I dine at Ninety-first Street, and I must get into a gown that laces in the back.”  She darted out with a bird-like flutter; and running quickly down the staircase, he hurried from the house and into a passing cab.  During the short drive to his rooms his thoughts were exclusively engrossed with the necessity of making a rapid change and framing a suitable apology for his hostess.  The annoyance of the rush served more effectually to banish Laura than any amount of determined opposition would have done.

CHAPTER VI

THE FINER VISION

So far as Connie was concerned the trip South had been, to all outward appearance at least, entirely successful.  Adams had watched her bloom back into something of her girlish prettiness, and day by day, in the quiet little Florida village to which they had gone, the lines of nervous exhaustion had faded slowly from her face.  For the first two weeks she had been content to lie motionless in the balmy air beneath the pines, while she had yielded herself to the silence with a resignation almost pathetic in its childish helplessness.  But with her returning vigour the old ache for excitement awoke within her, and to stifle her craving for the drug which Adams had denied her, she had turned at last to the immoderate use of wine.  So, hopelessly but with unfailing courage, he had brought her again to New York where he had placed her in the charge of a specialist in obscure diseases of the nerves.