CHAPTER IX.
OF MASQUES AND MUMMERIES In the afternoon of the next day Laura received by a special messenger an urgent appeal from Gerty Bridewell.
"Come to me at once," said the note, which appeared to have been written in frantic haste.

"I am in desperate trouble and I need you." The distress of the writer was quite as apparent as the exaggeration, and while Laura rolled rapidly toward her in a cab, she prepared herself with a kind of nervous courage to bear the brunt of the inevitable scene.

Perry was at the bottom of it she knew--she had answered such summonses often enough before to pre-figure with unerring insight the nature of the event.

He had shown his periodical inclination to a fresh affair, his errant fancy had wandered in a particular direction, and Gerty's epicurean philosophy had failed as usual to account for the concrete fact.

To Laura the amazing part was not so much Perry's fickleness, which she had brought herself to accept with tolerant aversion, as the extraordinary value Gerty placed upon an emotion which was kept alive by an artifice at once so evident and so ineffectual.
There was but one thing shorter lived than his repentance she knew, and that was the sentiment of which he was charitably supposed to have repented.