The contrast from the hall with its blaze of electrics to the lurid light of the library affected him strangely.  He paused on the threshold and passed his hand over his eyes.  Gila stood where the ruby light of hearth and lamp would set her vivid dress on fire and light the jewels at her throat and hair.  She knew her clear skin, dark hair, and eyes would bear the startling contrast, and how her white shoulders gleamed from the crimson velvet.  She knew how to arrange the flaming scarf of gauze deftly about those white shoulders so that it would reveal more than it concealed.

The young man lingered unaccountably.  He had a sense of leaving something behind him.  Almost he hesitated as she came forward to greet him, and looked back as if to rid himself of some obligation.  Then she put her bits of confiding hands out to him and smiled that wistful, engaging smile that would have been worth a fortune on the screen.

He thrilled with wonder over her delicate, dazzling beauty; and felt the luxury of the room about him, responding to its lure.

“So dandy of you to come to me when you are so busy after your long illness.”  Her voice was soft and confiding, its cadences like soothing music.  She motioned him to a chair.  “You see, I wanted to have you all to myself for a little while, just to tell you how perfectly fine you were at that awful fire.”

She dropped upon the couch drawn out at just the right angle from the fire and settled among the cushions gracefully.  The flicker of the firelight played upon the jeweled combs and gleamed at her throat.  The little pointed slippers cozily crossed looked innocent enough to have been meant for the golden street.  Her eyes looked up into his with that confiding lure that thrills and thrills again.

Her voice dropped softer, and she turned half away and gazed pensively into the fire on the hearth.  “I wouldn’t let them talk to me about it.  It seemed so awful.  And you were so strong and great.”

“It was nothing!” He did not want to talk about the fire.  There was something incongruous, almost unholy, in having it discussed here.  It jangled on his nerves.  For there in front of him in the fireplace burned a mimic pit like the one into which the martyr Steve had fallen; and there before him on the couch sat the girl!  What was there so familiar about her?  Ah! now he knew.  The Scarlet Woman!  Her gown was an exact reproduction of the one the great actress had worn on the stage that night.  He was conscious of wishing to sit beside her on that couch and revel in the ravishing color of her.  What was there about this room that made all his pulses beat?

Playfully, skilfully, she led him on.  They talked of the dances and games, little gossip of the university, with now and then a telling personality, and a sweep of long lashes over pearly cheeks, or a lifting of great, innocent eyes of admiration to his face.

She offered wine in delicate gold-incrusted ruby glasses, but Courtland did not drink.  He scarcely noticed her veiled annoyance at his refusal.  He was drinking in the wine of her presence.  She suggested that he smoke, and would not have hesitated to join him, perhaps, but he told her he was in training, and she cooed softly of his wonderful strength of character in resisting.