“Oh, I didn’t shop much—­I didn’t stay out long.”  She raised a kindling face to him.  “And what do you think I’ve been doing?  While you were sitting in your stuffy old theatre, worrying about the money I was spending (oh, you needn’t fib—­I know you were!) I was saving you hundreds and thousands.  I’ve saved you the price of our passage!”

Ralph laughed in pure enjoyment of her beauty.  When she shone on him like that what did it matter what nonsense she talked?

“You wonderful woman—­how did you do it?  By countermanding a tiara?”

“You know I’m not such a fool as you pretend!” She held him at arm’s length with a nod of joyous mystery.  “You’ll simply never guess!  I’ve made Peter Van Degen ask us to go home on the Sorceress.  What. do you say to that?”

She flashed it out on a laugh of triumph, without appearing to have a doubt of the effect the announcement would produce.

Ralph stared at her.  “The Sorceress?  You made him?”

“Well, I managed it, I worked him round to it!  He’s crazy about the idea now—­but I don’t think he’d thought of it before he came.”

“I should say not!” Ralph ejaculated.  “He never would have had the cheek to think of it.”

“Well, I’ve made him, anyhow!  Did you ever know such luck?”

“Such luck?” He groaned at her obstinate innocence.  “Do you suppose I’ll let you cross the ocean on the Sorceress?”

She shrugged impatiently.  “You say that because your cousin doesn’t go on her.”

“If she doesn’t, it’s because it’s no place for decent women.”

“It’s Clare’s fault if it isn’t.  Everybody knows she’s crazy about you, and she makes him feel it.  That’s why he takes up with other women.”

Her anger reddened her cheeks and dropped her brows like a black bar above her glowing eyes.  Even in his recoil from what she said Ralph felt the tempestuous heat of her beauty.  But for the first time his latent resentments rose in him, and he gave her back wrath for wrath.

“Is that the precious stuff he tells you?”

“Do you suppose I had to wait for him to tell me?  Everybody knows it—­everybody in New York knew she was wild when you married.  That’s why she’s always been so nasty to me.  If you won’t go on the Sorceress they’ll all say it’s because she was jealous of me and wouldn’t let you.”

Ralph’s indignation had already flickered down to disgust.  Undine was no longer beautiful—­she seemed to have the face of her thoughts.  He stood up with an impatient laugh.

“Is that another of his arguments?  I don’t wonder they’re convincing—­” But as quickly as it had come the sneer dropped, yielding to a wave of pity, the vague impulse to silence and protect her.  How could he have given way to the provocation of her weakness, when his business was to defend her from it and lift her above it?  He recalled his old dreams of saving her from Van Degenism—­it was not thus that he had imagined the rescue.