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Over his pipe in our room Stayne said to me:

“Got my bid all right. I tell you what, she’s a corking fine girl, old man, and no mistake. You don’t know her very well, do you?”

By that sign I knew that, however Miss Hromada might feel toward Stayne, Stayne would never be in love with her, for a man is not in love with a girl about whom he will speak to another man. Said I:

“Don’t go to that house party. Believe me, no good will come of it.”

He looked at me a moment over his pipe, and I saw he understood.

“Wouldn’t you go?” says he.

“Suppose it was you sister!”

He winced at that and then added:

“But you know I’m not so sure about myself.”

“Come now,” I answered.”Seriously, now, aren’t you sure about yourself?”

He hesitated and then laughed a bit.

“Yes, I guess I am. But about Miss Hromada—is it as bad as all that? and mustn’t I go?”

“It’s quite as bad,” I told him.”Everyone sees it but you. Decidedly, I would not go to that house party.”

“Well, maybe you’re right,” he said; “I’ll think it over.”

He thought it over—and went. It was a bad business from the beginning. I was not at the party, but it was easy enough, Heaven knows, to hear what went forward. San Francisco gossip is not discreetly whispered over the teacups—it is shouted through megaphones, in public places. At the house party Cresencia calmly appropriated young Stayne with superb, almost imperial, nonchalance. Stayne played his part in the one-sided game, and, once having made the mistake of going to the house party, he was not much to blame up to a certain point. When a girl threw herself into his arms he was not the man to keep his hands in his pockets. Who would have been? But at the end of a week Cresencia’s passion for him had become a veritable fury. The red-hot, degenerate Spanish blood of her sang in her veins, and her high-strung nerves crisped and recoiled upon themselves like the ends of broken violin strings. She used to sit in her room—so a girl told me—at night, after a dance or dinner, rolling her head to and fro upon her folded arms, or biting at the bare flesh of them, in a very excess of passion. Stayne had flirted with girls aplenty before this time, and had gone through the mill like any other city-bred man, and usually could hold his own with the best of them. Cresencia, however, was outside this experience. A girl who would catch her breath at the touch of his hand upon her bare wrist, or go suddenly pale at his unexpected entrance, troubled him not a little.

At the end of the first week Stayne saw that the Certain Point had been reached, and invented an excuse to leave. Miss Hromada invented a better one for his staying. And he stayed. Up to this Certain Point, as well, Cresencia had been grandly unsuspicious of Stayne, assuming, as a matter of course, that he was in love with her. After the first week she was less sure of him, and her uncertainty only made her cling to him more desperately. The smash came one evening, as smashes generally come, when people least expect them, and when they are all unprepared for the crisis. Feeling, as he afterward told me, like a kicked puppy, Stayne told Cresencia the truth—blundered it out—blurted it out, like a schoolboy. She must have been superb then. She was a born and bred Hromada, for that moment, at any rate. She rose slowly to her full six feet, her hands rigid at her side, and without a gesture or movement spoke to him for five minutes in a low, calm voice, while Stayne (he told me himself) cowered there before her, counting the ticking of the clock, and following, with shifty eyes, the pa
ttern in the carpet at his feet.

“Now you had better go,” she said at length.

Stayne groped toward the door, wondering how soon he could draw a full breath, and if he could ever look at himself in the glass again without blushing. By the time his shaking hand closed on the knob, the daughter of an hundred Hromadas had lapsed back into the young girl of degenerate blood and jangled nerves and untamed passions. A scene really terrible followed.