"He's still there," interrupted Maud, who had gone to peer from the window at Mrs. Hewston's announcement that this watch-dog of Dita's morals waited without, "with his head out of the window looking up at the house. And, oh, Heavens!" falling back against the lintel, "here is Eugene Gresham coming up the steps, and Mr. Hewston is glaring at him until his eyes are standing out of his head. He is purple in the face. Now he is speaking to the chauffeur. Why, they are off, gone like the wind."
Mrs. Hewston fell back limply in her chair. She seemed incapable of speech for a moment. "Alice," she said at last, in awe-stricken tones, "he has gone to tell Cress that Eugene Gresham is here."
"Well, what of it?" snapped Mrs. Wilstead. "Cresswell will only laugh at him and smooth him down. You know that."
"I hope so," breathed Mrs. Hewston. "He seems to amuse Cresswell. Fancy. But then," more understandingly, "he doesn't have to live with him."
Dita's fears calmed by Mrs. Wilstead's essentially common-sense point of view, her confidence was further restored by Eugene's evident ignorance of any plots and plans on Mr. Cresswell Hepworth's part of bringing this triangular situation, involving himself, his wife and the other man, to a fiction-hallowed and moss-grown conclusion.
It was therefore without particular apprehension, at any rate apprehensions of the kind nourished by Mr. Hewston, that she dressed for the dinner _en tête-à-tête_ with her husband. It was rather with a sense of mounting interest, even excitement.
She wavered in her choice of a gown, scanning with hypercritical eye a dozen or more. White savored of a school-girl simplicity and disarmed her if she chose to be subtle. Blue was unbecoming; sufficient taboo. "Green's forsaken and yellow's forsworn," she murmured ruefully. Black remained, thin, soft-falling gauze, distinguished, distinctive, exquisite in design and effect; above its shadow rose her neck of cream, her hair was the dusk shadow of copper, her eyes were darkly brilliant.
She hesitated at jewels. He had given her so many. Which would go best with her gown? Then she turned away from even the mental contemplation of them with a feeling of distaste. She could not, even to please him, wear his jewels when he and she were almost strangers, when but the details of their final parting remained to be settled. And yet would it not look a bit odd to appear without any ornaments whatever?