LITMIR.BIZ

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replied the Duke, unflatteringly prompt in opening the door.

      The pretty lady went to it with wormlike meekness, but turned on the threshold. "If I meet the Curse, I'll tell it to mind its business," she laughed. "The Claremanaghs have had enough bad luck. You'll create a new record, working out your democratic notions in a new country, with one or two old friends there to applaud them."

      With this exit speech she put herself in charge of Parker, who would ring up the lift for her. The Duke shut the salon door, and turned to the girl. He didn't even say "Thank goodness, the woman's gone!" He seemed to have forgotten her existence.

      "Heavens, what hair you have!" he exclaimed. "I knew it must be gorgeous, but I didn't dream of this. To-night I shall dream of it! By rights, I oughtn't to have seen this show till to-morrow night, ought I? But I'm glad I have. All your beauties bursting upon me at once would be too much for my brain."

      "Don't make fun of me," Juliet laughed, with a wistfulness rather pathetic in so pretty and so rich a girl.

      "Make fun of you!" Claremanagh snatched her up from the low seat, and crushed the yielding, thinly clad young body in his arms. On the sweet-scented, damp hair he rained kisses. "Am I a wooden man? Take that—and that, to punish you! Mavourneen—if it were to-morrow!"

      Between warm joy and chilling doubt Juliet Phayre shivered. If only she could believe him—believe that he cared for her, and not for the money! She almost had believed—before Emmy West came.

      The girl burned to tell "Pat" what Emmy had said and hinted. If he could reassure her, it would be balm on a wound never quite healed. But—if he couldn't. If questioning should make bad things worse? Then she would wish in vain that she'd "let sleeping dogs lie," because she loved the man too much to give him up. She had wanted him as a child wants the moon, ever since the day she, a gilt-edged Red Cross nurse, had met him, a soldier on leave, in Paris. Now she had got him—or almost—and the future might be so wonderful!

      He had promised her uncle, Henry Phayre, to live for at least half of each year in America, there to work as other men worked (Phayre would supply the employment), and Juliet had looked forward to being proud of her adorable husband, happy with him; a living proof—the pair of them—that an American girl can marry a duke for himself, not for his title; that a duke can make an American heiress his wife for love. But now, Emmy had raked up those old rags of gossip, nearly forgotten. And Juliet had read in the paper only a few days ago about Pavoya's first night in New York; the furore her "wild eastern dancing and strange, Slavic fascination" had created. The girl felt sick at heart as she asked herself if Pat's pleasure in the thought of "seeing New York" had any connection with Pavoya's presence there.

      It was all she could do not to purr out her complaints of "that cat, Emmy West," but native prudence prevailed over hot impulse. She enjoyed as much as Emmy permitted Pat's praise of her glorious hair (surely Pavoya's wasn't as long or thick, and probably its "rusty red" was due to dye), and then she reminded him of the parcel.

      "Is it my present from you?" she asked, almost shyly, nodding toward the table where Pat had thrown the neat white square.

      Instantly he let her go, and took the little parcel again in his hand.

      "Yes, sweet, it is my present for you," he said. "But not the present I wanted to give you. That's why I risked the 'curse' and came to explain."

      "Oh!" was the girl's noncommittal answer. Her heart sank. The pearls were not in the packet, she knew now, but her disappointment was not so much in missing them as in the thought that Emmy could say "I told you so!"

      "Before you open these silly seals, and see what I've brought," the Duke went on, "I want to make my explanation, and be sure you understand the whole business. Come and sit by me on the sofa, will you?"

      He drew her down beside him, and gathered her close.

      "Of course, you know all about our pearls, the one ewe lamb of ancient glory left to us poor Claremanaghs," he said.

      "I don't know all about them," amended Juliet, her heart missing a beat.

      "Tell me just what you do know, and then I shan't bore you with repetitions."

      "Oh, people have told me things," she hedged. "Didn't a Tsarina of Russia sell the pearls to some old ancestor of yours?"

      "Good lord, no!" he chuckled. "Never was a Claremanagh so stony broke as yours truly; yet never was there one since the days of pterodactyls who could run to the price of a Tsarina's pearls; that is, in lucre. My great-great-grandfather bought them with kisses. But joking apart, it's rather a romantic tale. He was a soldier and offered his services to Russia because he'd seen a portrait of the Tsarina, which the Prince of Wales had, and fell in love with it. Well, she fell in love with him, too, at sight. He wasn't bad to look at, judging from his portrait——"

      "Was he like you?" cut in Juliet.

      Pat laughed. "They say so. When we can get those Pill people out of Castle Claremanagh (their lease has a year to run) you shall tell me if you find a likeness. There was an 'affair' between the two; and great-great-grandfather Pat (he was Patrick, too, like all the eldest sons) had it politely intimated to him, through his friend Wales, that he'd better come home—a marriage had been arranged for him. He'd not have stirred a foot if it hadn't been for his Love. She begged him to go. There was a plot to murder him, it seems, and as for her, she'd ceased to be very popular with the Tsar, her husband. She made her sweetheart promise to marry the English girl, and she gave him the rope of pearls which since then have been called after her—the 'Tsarina's pearls.' They were for his wife, as a gift from her, so the girl shouldn't hate the thought of their love."

      "I should have hated it all the more!" cried Juliet. "I wouldn't have worn the things if I'd been his bride."

      "Well, as my bride I hope you will wear them often. They'll be dashed becoming to your blondness, for the things are unique in one way: they're blue; a hundred and eighty immense and perfectly matched blue pearls. Never has anything been seen like them, the expert johnnies say."

      "Was the Tsarina a blonde?" the girl wanted to know.

      "A copper-headed blonde. You shall see her miniature."

      Juliet said nothing. But she thought of Lyda Pavoya's head. She had never seen the Polish dancer, but she had heard her described: the traditional "siren-green" eyes, white face, and red hair. And she knew that Emmy West modelled herself, so far as Nature permitted, on Pavoya.

      "In the ordinary sense of the word, the Tsarina pearls aren't an heirloom in our family," Claremanagh continued. "But the first bride who received them passed on the gift to her eldest son's bride. So it has gone on ever since. The thing falls to the heir, or his wife; and it's tacitly understood that neither the rope as a whole, nor even one of the pearls, shall be sold. Well, I came into the inheritance (if you can call it that) seven years ago, when I was twenty-one. I'm afraid I'd have sold the bally thing more than once if I could have done it in common decency. But I couldn't. So there you are!"

      "What did you do with it?" Juliet ventured, half dreading the answer. Her head was pressed close to Pat's shoulder. She could not look up at his face, but she thought a muscle jumped in the arm that held her, and that there was a sudden change in his tone.

      "Do with it?" he echoed. "Why, what should I do but keep it in the bank waiting for the Lady of my Dreams? I couldn't wear it round my neck, you know! But, well, I did get it out of the bank now and then, to show to beautiful beings who begged to see it. Once it was in a Loan Exhibition for the benefit of something or other, I forget what. The confession I have to make, though, is this: only two months before I met the dearest girl on earth I was so hard up I'd have had to grind a monkey-organ in the streets if I hadn't been engaged in fighting for King and Country. I'd had some beastly bad luck with a speculation an alleged pal had let me in for, and honest Injun, I didn't know which way to turn, until a chap I know offered me two hundred thousand francs on the security of the pearls."

      "Francs?"

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