"Well, let me tell something, dear," said his wife soothingly. "Cress will very soon be in town again, for here are invitations to a dinner the Hepworths are having next week. Quite an informal affair. Perdita writes me, 'Just the little group of Cresswell's best friends, which I hope I may also claim as mine,'" reading from the note she had picked up from the table. "Very sweet of her."
"A dinner, eh," growled Hewston, "with all of us, and I suppose that painter fellow. Well, I only hope it will not fall to me to open poor Cresswell's eyes."
"I'll not shirk my duty if it does. You can understand that. What evening is this dinner? Next Thursday! Humph! Who is that?" as the curtain before the door was pushed aside and some one entered.
"I!" said Wallace Martin, "only poor little me. They told me to come up. What's happening next Thursday?"
"The Hepworths' dinner. There is probably an invitation awaiting you at home."
"No, there is not," he said. "It's in my pocket now. I picked it up as I was leaving. From what Maud Carmine has just told me, I imagine it's a touching family group composed of ourselves and Eugene Gresham."
"Dear me," deplored Mrs. Hewston, "I do wish she would consider Willoughby more. She must know that he can not endure the sight of Mr. Gresham."
"It is not her fault," said Martin quickly, "as far as I can make out from what Maud told me. Cress became imbued with the idea that he wanted his dear old friends clustering about the board, and made out the list himself."
"How like a man!" remarked Alice Wilstead gloomily. "But why, just now?"
"Oh, he's been adding to that pet collection of amulets of his, and he wanted to show us his new acquisitions. That's the root of it, I fancy. I don't imagine the lovely Perdita pined for us. She has been a creature of moods lately. Very hotty-like with me."
"She was actually almost impertinent to Willoughby the other day." Mrs. Hewston spoke with a hushed mournfulness. "I'm afraid all this luxury and adulation has turned her head, and Willoughby spoke so gently to her, too, did you not, dear?"
AS it chanced the Hepworths were not particularly fortunate in their choice of an evening for the dinner so gloomily anticipated by their guests. The weather was unpropitious. All day rain had threatened, and the air had been almost sultry, a parting word flung over her shoulder to autumn by a mischievous July who should long ago have vanished. As the evening wore on clouds banked more densely upon the horizon, occasionally muttering thunder, and this electric hint of storm in the air had in some way communicated itself to the mental atmosphere. A sense of foreboding, a consciousness of discord, seemed to swell ominously now and again beneath the smooth and colorful surface of the dinner. Even the dullest of the guests felt that, and to the intuitive, the stately progress of the meal was nerve-racking.