The Silver Poppy Part 17

"But aren't there any stocks that are safe? I mean, aren't there any good ones _you_ feel certain about, for instance?"

"Of course; but those are the kind you never make your money out of--at least not at the rate women want to make it. They're slow and steady."

"But you've been in Wall Street so long! Surely there's something you feel to be safe and yet going to go up, too?"

The ghost of a smile crept over his worn face.

"Miss Vaughan, if I had that delightful power, I'd make a million before I came home for dinner to-night."

"But didn't you make nearly a thousand dollars for your brother Louis?"

she asked, after a pause.

"Yes, I did; and it caused me more bother and worry than making eighty times that much out of my own money. Louis is a pretty poor man, you know."

"Yes?" said Cordelia.

"It meant a good deal to him. If I hadn't carried him over on my own shoulders he'd have been hard hit."

"I don't think I should mind the risk."

"One never does, till one tries it."

"I _want_ to try." Then after a moment's pause she said: "Mr.

Spaulding."

"Well?"

"Mr. Spaulding, I've two thousand dollars," she had not quite that sum, but she knew that she could easily make it up by means of a loan from his wife--"and I intend to speculate with it. Won't you invest it for me?"

"Miss Vaughan, I've made it a rule, an inexorable rule, never to take a woman's money in the Street."

"Please!"

"You know lessons there usually cost about a thousand dollars a second."

"I'd be sorry to go to some one I didn't know," she pouted girlishly, and then she added, "or didn't trust."

"Yes, I think probably you would, afterward."

"But I shall," she said determinedly. As to this the man of business made no reply.

The next morning she slipped a bunch of English violets into his little cut-gla.s.s vase.

"Won't you?" she pleaded again in her softest voice.

He looked at the flowers, at his waiting mail, and then at the girl--or was she not a woman?--herself.

"Yes, yes," he said wearily. She took his hand and fondled it as a child might. With all his business he was a somewhat lonely man.

"We'll see what we can do with it," he added more cheerily, in a little glow of latent gallantry that left him feeling uncomfortable and hot.

Then he touched an electric b.u.t.ton and his private secretary appeared with a bundle of notes and doc.u.ments in his hand, and Cordelia slipped away triumphant.

It was her one and only financial plunge. Although Alfred Spaulding never confessed to her that the precariousness of his venture on her behalf cost him two long nights of sleeplessness, it was more successful than he or even she herself had hoped for. Out of it she made twenty-two hundred dollars.

The man of Wall Street, not unnaturally, silently braced himself for another scene with her, determined that this time she should not prevail. Perhaps she saw this, or perhaps she realized that for once sheer luck had gone with her. At any rate, to her host's surprise, and not a little to his inner satisfaction, she placed the money in her own bank and said nothing more of the matter.

CHAPTER XVII

INEFFECTUAL FLUTTERS

She prayed that night for his pure soul, And thanked her new-found G.o.d That he returned unscathed and whole To that white world he trod.

JOHN HARTLEY, "The Broken Knight."

A woman's last love is always a _rechauffe_ of her first.--"The Silver Poppy."

Hartley had to wait in the library for some time; he sat in the dusky, ma.s.sive room wondering why he should listen so eagerly for Cordelia's step. When she did come down--she had finally surrendered and written him a pitiful, urgent little note complaining of his neglect and her loneliness, and declaring that she must see him at once--she stepped before him resplendent in a shimmering gown of salmon-colored liberty satin, which looked almost yellow in the softened lamplight, subdued by her own careful hand. She was more nervous than she appeared, and she was glad of the half-lights. She had long since discovered that the library was the one room in the Spaulding household where one could sit in a.s.sured solitude. The Spauldings, indeed, were not a bookish family, Alfred Spaulding always briskly protesting that he preferred living life to reading it. And when it came to a matter of recreation, he used to say, sixty miles in an automobile knocked the daylights out of sixty chapters of romantic philanderings.

Cordelia came over to Hartley almost timidly, and looked up at him out of her eyes after the manner of a child who had done wrong and had been punished, and was repentant once more.

She was startled to notice the change in him, to see how attenuated and drawn his face was, how worn he looked about the eyes.

"My poor boy!" There was much of the maternal in that little cry. "My poor boy, what is it?" she asked with trembling lip, in her earnestness taking his hand once more.

"Oh, it's nothing. I've been working jolly hard and got a little under the weather," he explained. He could never endure sympathy.

"And you never told me!" There was a touch of more than kindness, of more than melancholy reproof, in the unconsciously softened voice. It seemed to rend all the fogs that had m.u.f.fled and darkened life.

"And now, heigho, I feel like a holiday!" he cried as he told her, half ashamed of the softer mood that stole over him, how much had been accomplished with The Unwise Virgins.

"Why, surely you haven't finished it--so soon?"

"Not finished, altogether, but the bulk of the work is done."

"The bulk done!" She was thinking of her months of silent and agonized labor--her labor that had been lost.

"Yes, now the work of the file remains--and that's easy."

Was it so easy? she was wondering.

Cordelia, he thought, did not appear able to share in his enthusiasm.

She seemed to take no delight in what he had called their common accomplishment. She accepted it all very quietly, and did not even ask when she might see the ma.n.u.script. He had expected her to be more openly interested, at any rate, and was momentarily chilled and puzzled at her unlooked-for indifference. Then some gleam of light seemed to come to him, for looking at her again, she smiled up at him through her still gentle glance of reproach.

"Did you forget? This is my first night."