Love in a Cloud: A Comedy in Filigree

"I didn't want you to think I was a tyrant," he went on. "Of course I'm willing you should write to anybody that you think best."

"But – but I wrote that letter to Mr. Fairfield before I knew who he was!" gasped May.

"Well, what of it? Anything that you could say to a stranger, of course you could say to a man you knew."

For reply May put up one hand to her eyes, and with the other began a distressing and complicated search for a handkerchief. Jack bent forward to peer into her face and instantly assumed a look of deep contrition.

"Oh, I say," he remonstrated, "it's no fair to cry. Besides, you'll spoil your gloves, and now you've got to pay me a pair you can't afford to be so extravagant."

The effect of this appeal was to draw from May a sort of hysterical gurgle, a sound indescribably funny, and which might pass for either a cry of joy or of woe.

"I think you are too bad," she protested chokingly. "You know I didn't want Mr. Fairfield to have that letter when I was engaged to you!"

"Oh, is that all?" he returned lightly. "Then that's easily fixed. Let's not be engaged any more, and then there'll be no harm in his having it."

Apparently astonishment dried her tears. She looked at him in a sort of petrified wonder.

"I really mean it, my dear," he went on with a paternal air which was exceedingly droll in Jack Neligage. "I'll say more. I never meant for a minute to marry you. I knew you didn't want to have me, and I'd no notion of being tied to a dragooned wife."

"A dragooned wife?" May repeated.

She was evidently so stupefied by the turn things had taken that she could not follow him.

"A woman dragooned into marrying me," Jack explained, with a jovial grin; "one that was thinking all the time how much happier she would be with somebody else."

"And you never meant to marry me? Then what did you get engaged to me for?"

"I didn't. You wrote me that you were engaged to me, and of course as a gentleman I couldn't contradict a lady, especially on a point so delicate as that."

May flushed as red as the fingers of dawn.

"Your mother – " she began; but he interrupted her.

"Isn't it best that we don't go into that?" he said in a graver voice. "I confess that I amused myself a little, and I thought that you needed a lesson. There were other things, but no matter. I never was the whelp you and Alice thought me."

"Oh, Alice!" cried May, with an air of sudden enlightenment.

"Well, what about her?" Jack demanded.

"Nothing," replied May, smiling demurely to herself, "only she will be glad that the engagement is broken. She said awfully hard things about you."

"I am obliged to her," he answered grimly.

"Oh, not really awful," May corrected herself quickly, "and anyway it was only because she was so fond of you."

To this he made no reply, and for some time they drove on in silence. Then Jack shook off his brief depression, and apparently set himself to be as amusing as he could. He aroused May to a condition of mirth almost wildly joyous. They laughed and jested, told each other stories, and the girl's eyes shone, her dimples danced in and out like sun-flecks flashing on the water, the color in her cheeks was warm and delightful. Not a word more was said on personal matters until Jack deposited her at her own door once more.

"I never had such a perfectly lovely ride in my life!" she exclaimed, looking at him with eyes full of animation and gratitude.

"Then you see what you are losing in throwing me over," he returned. "Oh, you've had your chance and lost it!"

She laughed brightly, and held out her hand.

"But you see," she said mischievously, "the trouble is that the best thing about the ride was just that loss!"

"I like your impudence!" he chuckled. "Well, you're welcome. Good-by. I'll send Fairfield round to talk with you about the letter."

And before she could reply he was away.

XXII

THE COOING OF TURTLE-DOVES

There is nothing like the possibility of loss to bring a man to his bearings in regard to a woman. Dick Fairfield had told Jack that of course he was not a marrying man, that he could not afford to marry a poor woman, and that nothing would induce him to marry a rich one; he had even set down in his diary on the announcement of Jack's engagement that he could never have offered his hand to a girl with so much money; what his secret thought may have been no sage may say, but he had all the outward signs of a man who has convinced himself that he has no idea of trying to secure the girl he loves. Now that the affair had shaped itself so that May was again free, he hurried to her with a precipitation which had in it a choice flavor of comedy.

May always told him afterward that he did not even do her the honor to ask her for her hand, but that he coolly walked in and took up the engagement of Jack Neligage where it had been dropped. It was at least true that by nine o'clock that very evening they were sitting side by side as cosy and as idiotically blissful as a young couple newly betrothed should be. However informally the preliminaries had been conducted, the conclusion seemed to be eminently satisfactory.

"To think that this is the result of that little letter that I found on my table one rainy night last February," Dick observed rapturously. "I remember just how it looked."

"It was horrid of me to write it," May returned, with a demure look which almost as plainly as words added: "Contradict me!"

"It was heavenly of you," Dick declared, rising to the occasion most nobly. "It was the nicest valentine that ever was."

Some moments of endearments interesting to the participants but not edifying in narration followed upon this assertion, and then the little stream of lover-talk purled on again.

"Oh, Mr. Fairfield," May began with utter irrelevancy, "I – "

"You promised not to call me that," he interrupted.

"But it's so strange to say Dick. Well, Dick, then – "

The slight interruption of a caress having been got over, she went on with her shattered observation.

"What was I going to say? You put me all out, with your 'Dick' – I do think it's the dearest name! – Stop! I know what I was going to say. I was frightened almost to death when Mrs. Neligage said the Count wrote 'Love in a Cloud.' Oh, I wanted to get under the tea-table!"

"But you didn't really think he wrote my letters?"

"I couldn't believe it; but I didn't know what to think. Then when he wore a red carnation the next day, I thought I should die. I thought anyway he'd read the letter; and that's what made me so meek when Mrs. Neligage took hold of me."

"But you never suspected that I wrote the book?" Fairfield asked.

"Oh, I don't know. Sometimes it seems to me as if I really did know all the time. Don't you remember how we talked about the book at Mrs. Harbinger's tea?"

"That's just your intuition," Dick returned. "I know I didn't suspect you, for it troubled me tremendously that I cared so much for you when I thought I was in love with my unknown correspondent. It didn't seem loyal."

"But of course it was, you know, because there was only one of us."

Dick laughed, and bestowed upon her an ecstatic little hug.