Brooke laughed, and the dangerous flash in her eyes dying out again, she turned to her plate of salad and the general gossip of the day, but a red spot still glowed in the middle of each cheek. A few minutes later she might have been seen driving down the avenue in her mother’s brougham, trying to decipher, by the light of the electric street lamps, some printing in the silk-covered catalogue. This is what she read: “Marte Lorenz, born at his uncle’s tulip farm near Haarlem, in 1872. Educated in England, where his father had been a merchant. Studied at the Amsterdam Art School, going afterward to Paris, where his countryman, Israels, befriended him. A hard student, but the picture ‘Eucharistia’ is his first important work, while European critics and his masters believe it is the beginning of a great career. At present he is living in seclusion in Normandy, following his art.” Ashton, the useful, had patched up the biographies in the little book, helter-skelter, but Brooke did not know it, and tucking the catalogue carefully into her great muff, she leaned back and closed her eyes. It was her portrait that Lorenz had painted, together with his own, whatever the mystic word “Eucharistia” might mean. He had not forgotten her, then, and he was loath to part with the picture. She did not formulate the pleasure the thought gave her,—it was enough in itself. Then the brougham stopped before the blazing lights of the St. Hilaire, where the Lawtons were making a temporary home, a sort of bridge, that both mother and daughter had long wearied of, between the simpler past and the long-delayed, complex future, when in the new house, now building, her father promised once and for all to drop the reins of tape and wire, cease from hurrying, and take rest. CHAPTER VI THE LAWTONS With Mrs. Lawton the afternoon of the Park musical had been a time of irresolution. When the man of a family is noted for swift arbitrary decisions and often unexplained action in all domestic affairs, in important matters and petty details alike, his wife is apt, simply by force of reaction, to be driven to the opposite extreme in those things that concern herself alone. Not that Adam Lawton’s wife had ever been lacking in spirit, and when, as Pamela Brooke, a girl of twenty, he had taken her from her southern plantation home, then crippled and impoverished by war, yet where she still held absolute sway, many nodded their heads, and said that the calculating, keen-eyed Yankee would some day be startled by the fire of southern blood. Not but what his coming, seeing, and conquering had been as swift as the most romantic could desire, one short month compassing it all, for there was a certain magnetism about Adam Lawton that, when he chose to exert it, was irresistible, while to those outside its influence he was doubly a bit of chilling steel.