The Great Pearl Secret

								

in touch with those back-door, kitchen-stairs reporters.  Then, to give
an air of carelessness to her words, she turned the subject.  "Perhaps
you might let Mademoiselle know I've come.  Parker told me that she was
lying down--that she'd promised her uncle to rest till tea time.  So I
wouldn't have her disturbed.  But if her hair is being washed, she
might let me in."
"I will ask Miladi," said Simone.  "I came to the salon to see if the
curtains were drawn.  If Madame permits!"  She tripped with her short,
high-heeled step first to one window, then the other, and closed the
draperies of old-rose brocade.  Having done this, she pattered out of
the room.
Emmy West's eyes followed the thin but graceful figure in black silk.
"Simone is a character!" she thought.  And she wondered what the maid's
secret opinion was of this marriage which would take place next day;
the richest American heiress with the poorest British duke!
Left alone again, Emmy wriggled up from her nest of cushions, and
beguiled the time in examining the wedding gifts once more.  This did
not take long, as the marriage had been suddenly hurried on by special
license, and friends of Juliet Phayre and the Duke of Claremanagh had
had only a few days to send in their offerings.  Emmy had made this
uninvited visit with the object of admiring a certain one of Juliet's
presents, but she had already informed herself that it was not on show
with the rest.  Unless the bride-elect refused to see her, she did not
intend to leave Harridge's without a glimpse--or anyhow, news--of it.
When she had wandered languidly round the three or four tables on which
jewel cases, gold, silver, china, and tortoise-shell things were
spread, she propped her own black-edged card conspicuously in front of
a Sevres-framed mirror, and bent down for a hasty peep at her face in
its oval.  She wondered if her hair were a tiny touch too red.  She
liked it, herself, and thought the heart-shaped white face, with its
wide-apart black eyes set in that copper halo, a siren face.  In the
weeds of a war-widow it seemed to her that she was almost irresistible,
but she could not help realizing that there were people who did resist
her.  The Duke was one.  And an attractive cousin of Juliet's, John
Manners, was another.  She was vaguely aware that her own taste was
decidedly vivid.  Perhaps the hair was rather red!  She had had it
"bobbed" since Juliet came to London, because it worried her that
Juliet should look years younger than she.  No one would take Lady West
for twenty-seven, but she had been an "old girl" and Juliet a "new
girl," the year they met at school.  Juliet was twenty-three now, and
she, Emmy, had gone back to twenty-five.  One had to be that, if one
had married before the war!
Quickly she dusted on a little powder from her vanity box, and
accentuated the cupid's bow of her lips with a stick of red salve, for