The Safety Curtain | Page 4

abruptly as they had begun. She dashed a trembling hand across her eyes.
"Who's crying?" she said.
He uttered a brief, half-grudging laugh. "That's better. Now drink some wine! Yes, I insist! You must eat something, too. You look half-starved."
She accepted the wine, sitting in an acrobatic attitude on the floor facing him. She drank it, and an odd sparkle of mischief shot up in her great eyes. She surveyed him with an impish expression--much as a grasshopper might survey a toad.
"Are you married?" she inquired, unexpectedly.
"No," said Merryon, shortly. "Why?"
She gave a little laugh that had a catch in it. "I was only thinking that your wife wouldn't like me much. Women are so suspicious."
Merryon turned aside, and began to pour out a drink for himself. There was something strangely elusive about this little creature whom Fortune had flung to him. He wondered what he should do with her. Was she too old for a foundling hospital?
"How old are you?" he asked, abruptly.
She did not answer.
He looked at her, frowning.
"Don't!" she said. "It's ugly. I'm not quite forty. How old are you?"
"What?" said Merryon.
"Not--quite--forty," she said again, with extreme distinctness. "I'm small for my age, I know. But I shall never grow any more now. How old did you say you were?"
Merryon's eyes regarded her piercingly. "I should like the truth," he said, in his short, grim way.
She made a grimace that turned into an impish smile. "Then you must stick to the things that matter," she said. "That is--nobody's business."
He tried to look severe, but very curiously failed. He picked up a plate of sandwiches to mask a momentary confusion, and offered it to her.
Again, with simplicity, she accepted, and there fell a silence between them while she ate, her eyes again upon the fire. Her face, in repose, was the saddest thing he had ever seen. More than ever did she make him think of a child that had been hurt.
She finished her sandwich and sat for a while lost in thought. Merryon leaned back in his chair, watching her. The little, pointed features possessed no beauty, yet they had that which drew the attention irresistibly. The delicate charm of her dancing was somehow expressed in every line. There was fire, too,--a strange, bewitching fire,--behind the thick black lashes.
Very suddenly that fire was turned upon him again. With a swift, darting movement she knelt up in front of him, her clasped hands on his knees.
"Why did you save me just now?" she said. "Why wouldn't you let me die?"
He looked full at her. She vibrated like a winged creature on the verge of taking flight. But her eyes--her eyes sought his with a strange assurance, as though they saw in him a comrade.
"Why did you make me live when I wanted to die?" she insisted. "Is life so desirable? Have you found it so?"
His brows contracted at the last question, even while his mouth curved cynically. "Some people find it so," he said.
"But you?" she said, and there was almost accusation in her voice, "Have the gods been kind to you? Or have they thrown you the dregs--just the dregs?"
The passionate note in the words, subdued though it was, was not to be mistaken. It stirred him oddly, making him see her for the first time as a woman rather than as the fantastic being, half-elf, half-child, whom he had wrested from the very jaws of Death against her will. He leaned slowly forward, marking the deep, deep shadows about her eyes, the vivid red of her lips.
"What do you know about the dregs?" he said.
She beat her hands with a small, fierce movement on his knees, mutely refusing to answer.
"Ah, well," he said, "I don't know why I should answer either. But I will. Yes, I've had dregs--dregs--and nothing but dregs for the last fifteen years."
He spoke with a bitterness that he scarcely attempted to restrain, and the girl at his feet nodded--a wise little feminine nod.
"I knew you had. It comes harder to a man, doesn't it?"
"I don't know why it should," said Merryon, moodily.
"I do," said the Dragon-Fly. "It's because men were made to boss creation. See? You're one of the bosses, you are. You've been led to expect a lot, and because you haven't had it you feel you've been cheated. Life is like that. It's just a thing that mocks at you. I know."
She nodded again, and an odd, will-o'-the-wisp smile flitted over her face.
"You seem to know--something of life," the man said.
She uttered a queer choking laugh. "Life is a big, big swindle," she said. "The only happy people in the world are those who haven't found it out. But you--you say there are other things in life besides suffering. How did you know that if--if you've never had anything but dregs?"
"Ah!" Merryon