The Flirt Part 9

"Oh, 'jilted'!" she exclaimed. "All the wild boys that a girl can't make herself like aren't 'jilted,' are they?"

"I believe I should say--yes," he returned. "Yes, in this instance, just about all of them."

"Is every woman a target for you, Mr. Corliss? I suppose you know that you have a most uncomfortable way of shooting up the landscape." She stirred uneasily, and moved away from him to the other end of the bench.

"I didn't miss that time," he laughed. "Don't you ever miss?"

He leaned quickly toward her and answered in a low voice: "You can be sure I'm not going to miss anything about _you_."

It was as if his bending near her had been to rouge her. But it cannot be said that she disliked his effect upon her; for the deep breath she drew in audibly, through her shut teeth, was a signal of delight; and then followed one of those fraught silences not uncharacteristic of dialogues with Cora.

Presently, she gracefully and uselessly smoothed her hair from the left temple with the backs of her fingers, of course finishing the gesture prettily by tucking in a hairpin tighter above the nape of her neck. Then, with recovered coolness, she asked:

"Did you come all the way from Italy just to sell our old house, Mr. Corliss?"

"Perhaps that was part of why I came," he said, gayly. "I need a great deal of money, Miss Cora Madison."

"For your villa and your yacht?"

"No; I'm a magician, dear lady----"

"Yes," she said, almost angrily. "Of course you know it!"

"You mock me! No; I'm going to make everybody rich who will trust me. I have a secret, and it's worth a mountain of gold. I've put all I have into it, and will put in everything else I can get for myself, but it's going to take a great deal more than that. And everybody who goes into it will come out on Monte Cristo's island."

"Then I'm sorry papa hasn't anything to put in," she said.

"But he has: his experience in business and his integrity. I want him to be secretary of my company. Will you help me to get him?"

he laughed.

"Do you want me to?" she asked with a quick, serious glance straight in his eyes, one which he met admirably.

"I have an extremely definite impression," he said lightly, "that you can make anybody you know do just what you want him to."

"And I have another that you have still another 'extremely definite impression' that takes rank over that," she said, but not with his lightness, for her tone was faintly rueful. "It is that you can make _me_ do just what you want me to."

Mr. Valentine Corliss threw himself back on the bench and laughed aloud. "What a girl!" he cried. Then for a fraction of a second he set his hand over hers, an evanescent touch at which her whole body started and visibly thrilled.

She lifted her gloved hand and looked at it with an odd wonder; her alert emotions, always too ready, flinging their banners to her cheeks again.

"Oh, I don't think it's soiled," he said, a speech which she punished with a look of starry contempt. For an instant she made him afraid that something had gone wrong with his measuring tape; but with a slow movement she set her hand softly against her hot cheek; and he was rea.s.sured: it was not his touching her that had offended her, but the allusion to it.

"Thanks," he said, very softly.

She dropped her hand to her parasol, and began, musingly, to dig little holes in the gravel of the path. "Richard Lindley is looking for investments," she said.

"I'm glad to hear he's been so successful," returned Corliss.

"He might like a share in your gold-mine."

"Thank heaven it isn't literally a gold-mine," he exclaimed.

"There have been so many crooked ones exploited I don't believe you could get anybody nowadays to come in on a real one. But I think you'd make an excellent partner for an adventurer who had discovered hidden treasure; and I'm that particular kind of adventurer. I think I'll take you in."

"Do you?"

"How would you like to save a man from being ruined?"

"Ruined? You don't mean it literally?"

"Literally!" He laughed gayly. "If I don't 'land' this I'm gone, smashed, finished--quite ended! Don't bother, I'm going to 'land'

it. And it's rather a serious compliment I'm paying you, thinking you can help me. I'd like to see a woman--just once in the world--who could manage a thing like this." He became suddenly very grave. "Good G.o.d! wouldn't I be at her feet!"

Her eyes became even more eager. "You think I--I _might_ be a woman who could?"

"Who knows, Miss Madison? I believe----" He stopped abruptly, then in a lowered, graver voice asked: "Doesn't it somehow seem a little queer to you when we call each other, 'Miss Madison' and 'Mr. Corliss'?"

"Yes," she answered slowly; "it does."

"Doesn't it seem to you," he went on, in the same tone, "that we only 'Miss' and 'Mister' each other in fun? That though you never saw me until yesterday, we've gone pretty far beyond mere surfaces? That we did in our talk, last night?"

"Yes," she repeated; "it does."

He let a pause follow, and then said huskily:

"How far are we going?"

"I don't know." She was barely audible; but she turned deliberately, and there took place an eager exchange of looks which continued a long while. At last, and without ending this serious encounter, she whispered:

"How far do _you_ think?"

Mr. Corliss did not answer, and a peculiar phenomenon became vaguely evident to the girl facing him: his eyes were still fixed full upon hers, but he was not actually looking at her; nevertheless, and with an extraordinarily acute attention, he was unquestionably looking at something. The direct front of pupil and iris did not waver from her; but for the time he was not aware of her; had not even heard her question. Something in the outer field of his vision had suddenly and completely engrossed him; something in that nebulous and hazy background which we see, as we say, with the white of the eye. Cora instinctively turned and looked behind her, down the path.

There was no one in sight except a little girl and the elderly burgess who had glanced over his shoulder at Cora as she entered the park; and he was, in face, mien, and attire, so thoroughly the unnoticeable, average man-on-the-street that she did not even recall him as the looker-round of a little while ago. He was strolling benevolently, the little girl clinging to one of his hands, the other holding an apple; and a composite photograph of a thousand grandfathers might have resulted in this man's picture.

As the man and little girl came slowly up the walk toward the couple on the bench there was a faint tinkle at Cora's feet: her companion's scarfpin, which had fallen from his tie. He was maladroit about picking it up, trying with thumb and forefinger to seize the pin itself, instead of the more readily grasped design of small pearls at the top, so that he pushed it a little deeper into the gravel; and then occurred a tiny coincidence: the elderly man, pa.s.sing, let fall the apple from his hand, and it rolled toward the pin just as Corliss managed to secure the latter. For an instant, though the situation was so absolutely commonplace, so casual, Cora had a wandering consciousness of some mysterious tensity; a feeling like the premonition of a crisis very near at hand. This sensation was the more curious because nothing whatever happened. The man got his apple, joined in the child's laughter, and went on.

"What was it you asked me?" said Corliss, lifting his head again and restoring the pin to his tie. He gazed carelessly at the back of the grandsire, disappearing beyond a bush at a bend in the path.

"Who was that man?" said Cora with some curiosity.

"That old fellow? I haven't an idea. You see I've been away from here so many years I remember almost no one. Why?"

"I don't know, unless it was because I had an idea you were thinking of him instead of me. You didn't listen to what I said."

"That was because I was thinking so intensely of you," he began instantly. "A startlingly vivid thought of you came to me just then. Didn't I look like a man in a trance?"

"What was the thought?"

"It was a picture: I saw you standing under a great bulging sail, and the water flying by in moonlight; oh, a moon and a night such as you have never seen! and a big blue headland looming up against the moon, and crowned with lemon groves and vineyards, all sparkling with fireflies--old watch-towers and the roofs of white villas gleaming among olive orchards on the slopes--the sound of mandolins----"