With everything vigorously under way, and the actual sailing day in
sight, Xenophon Curry was calling on his friend and benefactress, Flora
Utterbourne, to express for perhaps the hundredth time his overwhelming
gratitude. He stirred his tea happily and looked about the little drawing
room which Flora had made so much her own with the assistance of sales
and auctions. Glancing about one understood Flora’s success.
The tea things stood between them on the very gate-legged table acquired
at Crawl Hill, and in which the impresario insisted upon feeling a
whimsical part interest. Flora had just returned from a luncheon
party—they had met, as a matter of fact, on her threshold—and as they
sipped and chatted she informally lifted off a hat of faun straw and
figured silk, thrusting the pins back into it, with the veil still where
it had been brushed up out of the way across the crown. She laid the hat
aside and touched her hair comfortably. His response to the geniality
of this hour of early twilight, with a small clock ticking somewhere,
was very whole-hearted, though of course sentimental, because everything
about the impresario was sentimental.
Some turn or other in the talk presently brought up the subject of his
rings. “I’ve been _noticing_ them,” she smiled. “It seems to me I’ve
never seen so many—and some of the ‘stones’ seem quite _wonderful_!”
“I know,” he laughed, “there are a good many more than there ought to
be, but I get so attached to each new one that drops into my hands, I
couldn’t bear to give any of ’em up.”
“Good gracious!” she exclaimed. “Do they really come as easily as all
_that_?”
“Oh, well,” he confided, “it’s become a sort of custom that when one of
my songbirds is offered a contract by one of the big managers and has to
leave me—and I want to tell you I’ve discovered more than one now famous
star and given the boost to begin with!—then I get a ring in remembrance.
Sometimes it will be a great big stone—like this one, you see? Then again
a more modest size, like this one. It depends,” he added confidentially,
“a little on the contract; but I love every single ring on my fingers
exactly the same, because each one stands for a songbird.”
“A songbird who has flown away,” she murmured, her fine eyes a little sad.
“Yes,” he sighed. “But it can’t be helped, and it doesn’t mean, you know,
that they don’t go right on being loyal. We all have to make our way in
the world. Lord, if it isn’t one thing it’s another! Money’s the main
difficulty, and what can you hope to do if you never had any?”
Ah, what indeed? The impresario set down his cup thoughtfully; and a
moment later she sympathetically brought out her own special phase of
that curious irony they had spoken of at the auction. “No one would
_think_, to see how ‘entrenched’ we look, that I’d be out of here, ‘bag
and baggage,’ early in the _morning_!”
“What?” cried Mr. Curry, really quite shaken.
She nodded and smiled at him over a slice of caramel cake she was
nibbling.
“Tomorrow!”
“It’s really heart-_breaking_,” she admitted slowly, “though when I’ve
had time to grow a little interested in the new ‘apartment’ it won’t
matter. But it did strike me as so _irresistibly_ funny, sitting here
with you ‘over the teacups,’ that at eight o’clock the men will be at the
door for my _trunks_!”
Suddenly he leaned toward her with great earnestness. “Miss Utterbourne,
I want to ask you a favour.”
“Yes?” Her brows were arched in cordial interrogation.
“It—it’s about this table—table we bought,” he said, quite steadily
despite the brazen pronoun, and fixing her with his honest, eager gaze.
“Of _course_,” she laughed softly, and with a subtle note of warm
joyousness, “I’ve _always_ thought of it as ‘our’ table! I shall never
_think_ of it otherwise!”
“Well, I want to ask you,” he continued, earnestly thumping with one
sparkling finger, “not to leave the table behind.” She coloured a little,
and he pressed on: “I want you to take it with you to the new apartment
for a kind of nucleus—to begin building around!”
“Ah,” she sighed lightly, but with a gently glowing graciousness, “you’re
a diabolical tempter at my _elbow_, for I’m sure you know my weakness for
‘gate-legged’ tables!”
“I guess I have a weakness for them, too,” he admitted doggedly.
“Well,” she laughed, blushing still more happily, “then I’m afraid the
table _will_ have to go along, _really_, though I’m sure the people who
are subletting will _notice_! What would sound most _plausible_, do you
think?” She was growing quite excited. “For it would hardly do to tell
quite the facts—_would_ it?”