The Lighted Match | Page 4

a stage and had laid aside a part--abandoning a semblance which it was no longer necessary to maintain. A pained droop came to the corners of her lips and she dropped wearily into the broad oak seat of the inglenook. There she sat, with her chin propped on her hands, elbows on her knees, and gazed silently at the logs.
"Why did they have to come just now and spoil my holiday?"
She spoke as though unconscious that her musings were finding voice, and the half-whispered words were wistful. Benton took a step nearer and bent impulsively forward.
"What is it?" he anxiously questioned.
She only looked intently into the coals with trouble-clouded eyes and shook her head. He could not tell whether in response to his words or to some thought of her own.
Dropping on one knee at her feet, he gently covered her hands with his own. He could feel the delicate play of her breath on his forehead.
"Cara," he whispered, "what is it, dear?"
She started, and with a spasmodic movement caught one of his hands, for an instant pressing it in her own, then, rising, she shook her head with a gesture of the fingers at the temples as though she would brush away cobwebs that enmeshed and fogged the brain.
"Nothing, boy." Her smile was somewhat wistful. "Nothing but silly imaginings." She laughed and when she spoke again her voice was as light as if her world held only triviality and laughter. "Yet there be important things to decide. What shall I wear for dinner?"
"It's such a hard question," he demurred. "I like you best in so many things, but the queen can do no wrong--make no mistake."
A sudden shadow of pain crossed her eyes, and she caught her lower lip sharply between her teeth.
"Was it something I said?" he demanded.
"Nothing," she answered slowly. "Only don't say that again, ever--'the queen can do no wrong.' Now, I must go."
She rose and turned toward the door, then suddenly carrying one hand to her eyes, she took a single unsteady step and swayed as though she would fall. Instantly his arms were around her and for a moment he could feel, in its wild fluttering, her heart against the red breast of his hunting-coat.
Her laugh was a little shaken as she drew away from him and stood, still a trifle unsteady. Her voice was surcharged with self-contempt.
"Sir Gray Eyes, I--I ask you to believe that I don't habitually fall about into people's arms. I'm developing nerves--there is a white feather in my moral and mental plumage."
He looked at her with grave eyes, from which he sternly banished all questioning--and remained silent.
They passed out into the hall and, at the foot of the stairs where their ways diverged, she paused to look back at him with an unclouded smile.
"You have not told me what to wear."
His eyes were as steady as her own. "You will please wear the black gown with the shimmery things all over it. I can't describe it, but I can remember it. And a single red rose," he judiciously added.
"'Tis October and the florists are fifty miles away," she demurred. "It would take a magician's wand to produce the red rose."
"I noticed a funny looking thing among my golf sticks," he remembered. "It is a little bit like a niblick, but it may be a magic wand in disguise. You wear the black gown and trust to providence for the red rose."
She threw back a laugh and was gone.
When she disappeared at the turning, he wheeled and went to the "bachelors' barracks," as the master of "Idle Times" dubbed the wing where the unmarried men were quartered.
Two suites next adjoining the room allotted to Benton had been unoccupied when he had gone out that forenoon. Between his quarters and these erstwhile vacant ones lay a room forming a sort of buffer space. Here a sideboard, a card-table, and desk made the "neutral zone," as Van called it, available for his guests as a territory either separating or connecting their individual chambers.
Now a blaze of transoms and a sound of voices proclaimed that the apartments were tenanted. Benton entered his own unlighted room, and then with his hand at the electric switch halted in embarrassment.
The folding-doors between his apartment and the "neutral territory" stood wide, and the attitudes and voices of the two men he saw there indicated their interview to be one in which outsiders should have no concern. To switch on the light would be to declare himself a witness to a part at least; to remain would be to become unwilling auditor to more; to open the door he had just closed behind him would also be to attract attention to himself. He paused in momentary uncertainty.
One of the men was Pagratide, transformed by anger; seemingly taller, darker,