140
FLAMING
YOUTH
with the still passion of lovely sounds remembered.
Slowly
the lids drooped over them. She tilted her chin and in her effortless, liquid voice of song gave out the exquisite
rhythm of a melody from the Tschaikowsky Fifth which they had just heard. “Don’t, Pat,” muttered Scott.
“Don’t you like it?” “TI Jove it. So—don’t.”
She moved toward him, her throat still quivering with the beauty of sound, and lifted her hand to the bright,
curt waves of hair at his temple, brushing them lightly back. A dusky colour glowed in her cheeks. As the dim echo of the music died, she leaned to him. Her lips, light, fervent, cool, softly firm, met his, lingered upon them for the smallest, sweetest moment as a moth hovers in its flight from a flower. Then she, too, was in flight.
“Good-night,” she whispered back to him from the doorway. Pat’s challenge to Stancia’s supremacy gave Scott plenty to speculate about. His first sentiment was amusement that this daring child should have deliberately elected to enter the lists against her older and more beautiful sister. But what was Pat’s interest in him? Flirtation? Evidently. He guessed that it was the dash of diablerie in her that had inspired the experiment. Nevertheless, he was conscious of a rather excited interest in and curiosity about her, not as a precocious child, but as a reckonable woman with distinct provocations of person and mind. In comparison with her, Scott reflected (and was shocked at his own disloyalty in so reflecting) Stancia was becom-
ing insipid. He discovered, in thinking it over, that there had grown up an impalpable embarrassment between Stancia and himself, and that it seemed to have been growing for some
