"It has been," he answered, while his grave gentleness fell like dew on
the smouldering fire in his eyes. "It has been, my dear, and it will be
always until I die."




CHAPTER IX

OF MASQUES AND MUMMERIES


In the afternoon of the next day Laura received by a special messenger
an urgent appeal from Gerty Bridewell.

"Come to me at once," said the note, which appeared to have been written
in frantic haste. "I am in desperate trouble and I need you."

The distress of the writer was quite as apparent as the exaggeration,
and while Laura rolled rapidly toward her in a cab, she prepared herself
with a kind of nervous courage to bear the brunt of the inevitable
scene. Perry was at the bottom of it she knew--she had answered such
summonses often enough before to pre-figure with unerring insight the
nature of the event. He had shown his periodical inclination to a fresh
affair, his errant fancy had wandered in a particular direction, and
Gerty's epicurean philosophy had failed as usual to account for the
concrete fact. To Laura the amazing part was not so much Perry's
fickleness, which she had brought herself to accept with tolerant
aversion, as the extraordinary value Gerty placed upon an emotion which
was kept alive by an artifice at once so evident and so ineffectual.