"Oh!" said Cordelia coldly, vaguely; and all that evening Hartley wondered what unknown trouble was weighing upon her spirit. As at other times when similar inscrutable phases of her character had flashed before him, he let the teasing little mystery of the moment pass without attempting to probe more deeply into it. For he remembered that the real key to her inner and truer self lay between the covers of her first book, The Silver Poppy. CHAPTER XII EROS THE RELUCTANT So many dreams must fail us, dear, So many springs to autumn turn, Let us, in one memorial year, Learn all there is of love to learn. JOHN HARTLEY, "Pale Souls." A husband's jealousies, my dear, are the mushrooms on the beefsteak of matrimony.--"The Silver Poppy." "My dear, are you falling in love?" It was Mrs. Spaulding who suddenly asked this of Cordelia, tumbling a lump of sugar into the depths of her coffee-cup as a figure and symbol of some vaster emotional descent. Cordelia looked across the breakfast table at her abstractedly. "Why not?" she asked lazily. Mrs. Spaulding looked up, about to speak. The right light, however, was not on Cordelia's brow, and there were certain bounds beyond which she had learned not to trespass. So she only sighed. "Fall in love, my dear, a dozen times, if you like. But----" And again Mrs. Spaulding sighed. Cordelia perhaps understood more than she pretended. Only that morning Mrs. Spaulding had read aloud to her a little note from Repellier--a most formal little note making excuses for being unable to join them in their box party at Wallack's. From the first, almost, Cordelia had comprehended that silent unshifting drama, undreamed of by even its hero and central figure, the gentle, upright, honest old artist himself. At one time that patient but perverse adoration on the part of Mrs. Spaulding had impressed Cordelia as beautiful in its constancy, as ethereal in its very intangibility. But of late it was beginning to stand before her as the foolish caprice of a pertinacious and yet idle and dissatisfied woman. But it was Mrs. Spaulding's one romance--wilful and unreasonable, yet none the less golden. Wealth had brought her many things, but out of the midst of her opulence she reached eagerly for the unattainable--seeking, without knowing it, for life's relieving burden of sorrow, for her woman's due heritage of tears. "You ought to be happy," Cordelia one day had said to her; "_you_ get everything you want." She had been trying to scold Cordelia out of a passing mood of discontent.