But now his face clouded again. "I am glad you had supper. To-morrow
we'll starve."
The exaggeration annoyed her, she exclaimed at it and then stopped
short. Already she had envisaged the situation. But it was idle, she
thought, to excite him additionally.
"Well?" he almost whinnied.
But as he would have to know, she out with it. "There's the portrait,
there's the violin. Either would tide us over."
In speaking she had approached him again. He shoved her aside. With a
jerk he got to his feet, struck an attitude, tapped himself on the
breast.
"I, Marquis de Casa-Evora, sell my father's picture! I, Angelo Cara,
sell my violin! And you, my daughter, suggest such a thing! But are you
my daughter? Are you--oh!"
It trailed away. The noble anger, real or assumed, fell from him. No
longer the outraged father, he was but a human being in pain.
Cassy hurried to the mantel where, in provision of these attacks, were
glass tubes with amyl in them. She took and broke one and had him inhale
it.
Then, though presently the spasm passed, the wolf remained. But the
beast had no terrors for Cassy. Buoyant, as youth ever is, his fangs
amused her. They might close on her, but they would not hurt, at any
rate very much, or, in any case, very long. Meanwhile she had had supper
and for the morrow she had a plan. That night she dreamed of it. From
the dream she passed into another. She dreamed she was going about
giving money away. The dream of a dream, it was very beautiful, and
sometimes, to exceptional beings, beautiful dreams come true, not in the
future merely, but in a walk-up.
V
In Park Avenue that night there was no dramatic father in waiting. There
were no bills, no scenes, no thought of secret errands; merely a
drawing-room in which a fire was burning and where, presently, Margaret
and Lennox were alone.
"I have letters to write," Mrs. Austen told them.
She had no letters to write, but she did have a thing or two to
consider. What the wolf was to Cassy's father, Lennox was to her.
At dinner, Peter Verelst's advice to do nothing had seemed strategic. At
the Splendor, it had seemed stupid. The spectacle of that girl
hobnobbing with Lennox had interested her enormously. If a spectacle can
drip, that had dripped and with possibilities which, if dim as yet, were
none the less providential, particularly when viewed spaciously, in the
light of other possibilities which Paliser exhaled. Mrs. Austen was a
woman of distinction. You had only to look at her to be aware of it.
Yet, at the possible possibilities, she licked her chops.
Meanwhile, with the seriousness of those to whom love is not the
sentiment that it once was, or the sensation that it has become, but the
dense incarnate mystery that it ever should be, Margaret and Lennox were
also occupied with the future.