“Lady Anne?  You’ll look the part in that garden party frock he is designing for you.”

And now she had reached the question toward which she had been working.  “Shall you go?”

He shook his head.  “I doubt it.  It isn’t a function from which one will be missed.  And the Ballards won’t be there.  Mary is going over to New York with Constance for a few days before the sailing.  I’m to join them on the final day.”

“And you won’t go to the garden party without Mary?”

He found himself moved, suddenly, to speak out to her.

“She wouldn’t go if she were here—­not with me.”

“Contrary Mary?” she drawled the words, giving them piquant suggestion.

“It isn’t contrariness.  Her independence is characteristic.  She won’t let me do things because she wants to do them by herself.  But some day she’ll let me do them.”

He said it grimly, and Delilah flashed a glance at him, then said carefully, “It would be a pity if she should fancy—­Roger Poole.”

“She won’t.”

“You can’t tell—­pity leads to the softer feeling, you know.”

“Why should she pity him?”

“There’s his past.”

“His past?  Roger Poole’s?  What do you know of it, Delilah?”

As he leaned forward to ask the eager question, he knew that by all the rules of the game he should not be discussing Mary with any one.  But he told himself hotly that it was for Mary’s good.  If things had been hidden, they should be revealed—­the sooner the better.

Delilah gave him the details dramatically.

“Then his wife is dead?”

“Yes.  But before that the scandal lost him his church.  Nobody seems to know much of it all, I fancy.  Mary only gave me the outline.”

“And she knows?”

“Yes.  Roger told her.”

“The chances are that there’s—­another side.”

He knew that it was a small thing to say.  He would not have said it to any one but Delilah.  She would not think him small.  To her all things would be fair for a lover.

Before he went, that afternoon, he had promised to go with Delilah to the White House garden party.

Hence a week later there floated within the vision of the celebrities and society folk, gathered together on the spacious lawn of the executive mansion, a lovely lady in faint rose-white, with a touch of heavenly blue in her wide hat, from which floated a veil which half hid her down-drooped eyes.

People began at once to ask, “Who is she?”

When it was discovered that her name was Jeliffe, and that she was not a distinguished personage, it did not matter greatly.  There was about her an air of distinction—­a certain quiet atmosphere of withdrawal from the common herd which had nothing in it of haughtiness, but which seemed to set her apart.

Porter, following in her wake as she swept across the green, thought of the girl in leopard skins, whose unconventionality had shocked him.  Surely in this woman was developed a sense of herself as the center of a picture which was almost uncanny.  He found himself contrasting Mary’s simplicity and lack of pose.