"Yes," he continued with a thrill of pardonable pride. "During the cruise I did a couple of articles on Crete--oh, just travel- impressions, of course; they couldn't be more. But the editor of the New Review has accepted them, and asks for others. And here's his cheque, if you please! So you see you might have let me take the jolly room downstairs with the pink curtains. And it makes me awfully hopeful about my book."
He had expected a rapturous outburst, and perhaps some reassertion of wifely faith in the glorious future that awaited The Pageant of Alexander; and deep down under the lover's well- being the author felt a faint twinge of mortified vanity when Susy, leaping to her feet, cried out, ravenously and without preamble: "Oh, Nick, Nick--let me see how much they've given you!"
He flourished the cheque before her in the firelight. "A couple of hundred, you mercenary wretch!"
"Oh, oh--" she gasped, as if the good news had been almost too much for her tense nerves; and then surprised him by dropping to the ground, and burying her face against his knees.
"Susy, my Susy," he whispered, his hand on her shaking shoulder.
"Why, dear, what is it? You're not crying?"
"Oh, Nick, Nick--two hundred? Two hundred dollars? Then I've got to tell you--oh now, at once!"
A faint chill ran over him, and involuntarily his hand drew back from her bowed figure.
"Now? Oh, why now?" he protested. "What on earth does it matter now--whatever it is?"
"But it does matter--it matters more than you can think!"
She straightened herself, still kneeling before him, and lifted her head so that the firelight behind her turned her hair into a ruddy halo. "Oh, Nick, the bracelet--Ellie's bracelet ....
I've never returned it to her," she faltered out.
He felt himself recoiling under the hands with which she clutched his knees. For an instant he did not remember what she alluded to; it was the mere mention of Ellie Vanderlyn's name that had fallen between them like an icy shadow. What an incorrigible fool he had been to think they could ever shake off such memories, or cease to be the slaves of such a past!