"He was crazy about her last fall."

"Miss Page?" (The younger voice, with a thrill in it.)

"Carlotta. Of course this is confidential."

"Surely."

"I saw her with him in his car one evening. And on her vacation last summer—"

The voices dropped to a whisper. Sidney, standing cold and white by the sterilizer, put out a hand to steady herself. So that was it! No wonder Carlotta had hated her. And those whispering voices! What were they saying? How hateful life was, and men and women. Must there always be something hideous in the background? Until now she had only seen life. Now she felt its hot breath on her cheek.

She was steady enough in a moment, cool and calm, moving about her work with ice-cold hands and slightly narrowed eyes. To a sort of physical nausea was succeeding anger, a blind fury of injured pride. He had been in love with Carlotta and had tired of her. He was bringing her his warmed-over emotions. She remembered the bitterness of her month's exile, and its probable cause. Max had stood by her then. Well he might, if he suspected the truth.

For just a moment she had an illuminating flash of Wilson as he really was, selfish and self-indulgent, just a trifle too carefully dressed, daring as to eye and speech, with a carefully calculated daring, frankly pleasure-loving. She put her hands over her eyes.

The voices in the next room had risen above their whisper.

"Genius has privileges, of course," said the older voice. "He is a very great surgeon. To-morrow he is to do the Edwardes operation again. I am glad I am to see him do it."

Sidney still held her hands over her eyes. He WAS a great surgeon: in his hands he held the keys of life and death. And perhaps he had never cared for Carlotta: she might have thrown herself at him. He was a man, at the mercy of any scheming woman.

She tried to summon his image to her aid. But a curious thing happened. She could not visualize him. Instead, there came, clear and distinct, a picture of K. Le Moyne in the hall of the little house, reaching one of his long arms to the chandelier over his head and looking up at her as she stood on the stairs.



CHAPTER XXII

"My God, Sidney, I'm asking you to marry me!"

"I—I know that. I am asking you something else, Max."

"I have never been in love with her."

His voice was sulky. He had drawn the car close to a bank, and they were sitting in the shade, on the grass. It was the Sunday afternoon after Sidney's experience in the operating-room.

"You took her out, Max, didn't you?"

"A few times, yes. She seemed to have no friends. I was sorry for her."

"That was all?"

"Absolutely. Good Heavens, you've put me through a catechism in the last ten minutes!"

"If my father were living, or even mother, I—one of them would have done this for me, Max. I'm sorry I had to. I've been very wretched for several days."

It was the first encouragement she had given him. There was no coquetry about her aloofness. It was only that her faith in him had had a shock and was slow of reviving.

"You are very, very lovely, Sidney. I wonder if you have any idea what you mean to me?"

"You meant a great deal to me, too," she said frankly, "until a few days ago. I thought you were the greatest man I had ever known, and the best. And then—I think I'd better tell you what I overheard. I didn't try to hear. It just happened that way."

He listened doggedly to her account of the hospital gossip, doggedly and with a sinking sense of fear, not of the talk, but of Carlotta herself. Usually one might count on the woman's silence, her instinct for self-protection. But Carlotta was different. Damn the girl, anyhow! She had known from the start that the affair was a temporary one; he had never pretended anything else.

There was silence for a moment after Sidney finished. Then:

"You are not a child any longer, Sidney. You have learned a great deal in this last year. One of the things you know is that almost every man has small affairs, many of them sometimes, before he finds the woman he wants to marry. When he finds her, the others are all off—there's nothing to them. It's the real thing then, instead of the sham."

"Palmer was very much in love with Christine, and yet—"

"Palmer is a cad."

"I don't want you to think I'm making terms. I'm not. But if this thing went on, and I found out afterward that you—that there was anyone else, it would kill me."

"Then you care, after all!"

There was something boyish in his triumph, in the very gesture with which he held out his arms, like a child who has escaped a whipping. He stood up and, catching her hands, drew her to her feet. "You love me, dear."

"I'm afraid I do, Max."

"Then I'm yours, and only yours, if you want me," he said, and took her in his arms.

He was riotously happy, must hold her off for the joy of drawing her to him again, must pull off her gloves and kiss her soft bare palms.

"I love you, love you!" he cried, and bent down to bury his face in the warm hollow of her neck.

Sidney glowed under his caresses—was rather startled at his passion, a little ashamed.

"Tell me you love me a little bit. Say it."

"I love you," said Sidney, and flushed scarlet.

But even in his arms, with the warm sunlight on his radiant face, with his lips to her ear, whispering the divine absurdities of passion, in the back of her obstinate little head was the thought that, while she had given him her first embrace, he had held other women in his arms. It made her passive, prevented her complete surrender.

And after a time he resented it. "You are only letting me love you," he complained. "I don't believe you care, after all."

He freed her, took a step back from her.

"I am afraid I am jealous," she said simply. "I keep thinking of—of Carlotta."

"Will it help any if I swear that that is off absolutely?"

"Don't be absurd. It is enough to have you say so."

But he insisted on swearing, standing with one hand upraised, his eyes on her. The Sunday landscape was very still, save for the hum of busy insect life. A mile or so away, at the foot of two hills, lay a white farmhouse with its barn and outbuildings. In a small room in the barn a woman sat; and because it was Sunday, and she could not sew, she read her Bible.

"—and that after this there will be only one woman for me," finished Max, and dropped his hand. He bent over and kissed Sidney on the lips.

At the white farmhouse, a little man stood in the doorway and surveyed the road with eyes shaded by a shirt-sleeved arm. Behind him, in a darkened room, a barkeeper was wiping the bar with a clean cloth.

"I guess I'll go and get my coat on, Bill," said the little man heavily. "They're starting to come now. I see a machine about a mile down the road."

Sidney broke the news of her engagement to K. herself, the evening of the same day. The little house was quiet when she got out of the car at the door. Harriet was asleep on the couch at the foot of her bed, and Christine's rooms were empty. She found Katie on the back porch, mountains of Sunday newspapers piled around her.

"I'd about give you up," said Katie. "I was thinking, rather than see your ice-cream that's left from dinner melt and go to waste, I'd take it around to the Rosenfelds."

"Please take it to them. I'd really rather they had it."

She stood in front of Katie, drawing off her gloves.

"Aunt Harriet's asleep. Is—is Mr. Le Moyne around?"

"You're gettin' prettier every day, Miss Sidney. Is that the blue suit Miss Harriet said she made for you? It's right stylish. I'd like to see the back."

Sidney obediently turned, and Katie admired.

"When I think how things have turned out!" she reflected. "You in a hospital, doing God knows what for all sorts of people, and Miss Harriet making a suit like that and asking a hundred dollars for it, and that tony that a person doesn't dare to speak to her when she's in the dining-room. And your poor ma...well, it's all in a lifetime! No; Mr. K.'s not here. He and Mrs. Howe are gallivanting around together."

"Katie!"

"Well, that's what I call it. I'm not blind. Don't I hear her dressing up about four o'clock every afternoon, and, when she's all ready, sittin' in the parlor with the door open, and a book on her knee, as if she'd been reading all afternoon? If he doesn't stop, she's at the foot of the stairs, calling up to him. 'K.,' she says, 'K., I'm waiting to ask you something!' or, 'K., wouldn't you like a cup of tea?' She's always feedin' him tea and cake, so that when he comes to table he won't eat honest victuals."

Sidney had paused with one glove half off. Katie's tone carried conviction. Was life making another of its queer errors, and were Christine and K. in love with each other? K. had always been HER friend, HER confidant. To give him up to Christine—she shook herself impatiently. What had come over her? Why not be glad that he had some sort of companionship?

She went upstairs to the room that had been her mother's, and took off her hat. She wanted to be alone, to realize what had happened to her. She did not belong to herself any more. It gave her an odd, lost feeling. She was going to be married—not very soon, but ultimately. A year ago her half promise to Joe had gratified her sense of romance. She was loved, and she had thrilled to it.

But this was different. Marriage, that had been but a vision then, loomed large, almost menacing. She had learned the law of compensation: that for every joy one pays in suffering. Women who married went down into the valley of death for their children. One must love and be loved very tenderly to pay for that. The scale must balance.

And there were other things. Women grew old, and age was not always lovely. This very maternity—was it not fatal to beauty? Visions of child-bearing women in the hospitals, with sagging breasts and relaxed bodies, came to her. That was a part of the price.

Harriet was stirring, across the hall. Sidney could hear her moving about with flat, inelastic steps.

That was the alternative. One married, happily or not as the case might be, and took the risk. Or one stayed single, like Harriet, growing a little hard, exchanging slimness for leanness and austerity of figure, flat-chested, thin-voiced. One blossomed and withered, then, or one shriveled up without having flowered. All at once it seemed very terrible to her. She felt as if she had been caught in an inexorable hand that had closed about her.

Harriet found her a little later, face down on her mother's bed, crying as if her heart would break. She scolded her roundly.

"You've been overworking," she said. "You've been getting thinner. Your measurements for that suit showed it. I have never approved of this hospital training, and after last January—"

She could hardly credit her senses when Sidney, still swollen with weeping, told her of her engagement.

"But I don't understand. If you care for him and he has asked you to marry him, why on earth are you crying your eyes out?"

"I do care. I don't know why I cried. It just came over me, all at once, that I—It was just foolishness. I am very happy, Aunt Harriet."

Harriet thought she understood. The girl needed her mother, and she, Harriet, was a hard, middle-aged woman and a poor substitute. She patted Sidney's moist hand.

"I guess I understand," she said. "I'll attend to your wedding things, Sidney. We'll show this street that even Christine Lorenz can be outdone." And, as an afterthought: "I hope Max Wilson will settle down now. He's been none too steady."

K. had taken Christine to see Tillie that Sunday afternoon. Palmer had the car out—had, indeed, not been home since the morning of the previous day. He played golf every Saturday afternoon and Sunday at the Country Club, and invariably spent the night there. So K. and Christine walked from the end of the trolley line, saying little, but under K.'s keen direction finding bright birds in the hedgerows, hidden field flowers, a dozen wonders of the country that Christine had never dreamed of.

The interview with Tillie had been a disappointment to K. Christine, with the best and kindliest intentions, struck a wrong note. In her endeavor to cover the fact that everything in Tillie's world was wrong, she fell into the error of pretending that everything was right.

Tillie, grotesque of figure and tragic-eyed, listened to her patiently, while K. stood, uneasy and uncomfortable, in the wide door of the hay-barn and watched automobiles turning in from the road. When Christine rose to leave, she confessed her failure frankly.

"I've meant well, Tillie," she said. "I'm afraid I've said exactly what I shouldn't. I can only think that, no matter what is wrong, two wonderful pieces of luck have come to you. Your husband—that is, Mr. Schwitter—cares for you,—you admit that,—and you are going to have a child."

Tillie's pale eyes filled.

"I used to be a good woman, Mrs. Howe," she said simply. "Now I'm not. When I look in that glass at myself, and call myself what I am, I'd give a good bit to be back on the Street again."

She found opportunity for a word with K. while Christine went ahead of him out of the barn.

"I've been wanting to speak to you, Mr. Le Moyne." She lowered her voice. "Joe Drummond's been coming out here pretty regular. Schwitter says he's drinking a little. He don't like him loafing around here: he sent him home last Sunday. What's come over the boy?"

"I'll talk to him."

"The barkeeper says he carries a revolver around, and talks wild. I thought maybe Sidney Page could do something with him."

"I think he'd not like her to know. I'll do what I can."

K.'s face was thoughtful as he followed Christine to the road.

Christine was very silent, on the way back to the city. More than once K. found her eyes fixed on him, and it puzzled him. Poor Christine was only trying to fit him into the world she knew—a world whose men were strong but seldom tender, who gave up their Sundays to golf, not to visiting unhappy outcasts in the country. How masculine he was, and yet how gentle! It gave her a choking feeling in her throat. She took advantage of a steep bit of road to stop and stand a moment, her fingers on his shabby gray sleeve.

It was late when they got home. Sidney was sitting on the low step, waiting for them.

Wilson had come across at seven, impatient because he must see a case that evening, and promising an early return. In the little hall he had drawn her to him and kissed her, this time not on the lips, but on the forehead and on each of her white eyelids.

"Little wife-to-be!" he had said, and was rather ashamed of his own emotion. From across the Street, as he got into his car, he had waved his hand to her.

Christine went to her room, and, with a long breath of content, K. folded up his long length on the step below Sidney.

"Well, dear ministering angel," he said, "how goes the world?"

"Things have been happening, K."

He sat erect and looked at her. Perhaps because she had a woman's instinct for making the most of a piece of news, perhaps—more likely, indeed—because she divined that the announcement would not be entirely agreeable, she delayed it, played with it.

"I have gone into the operating-room."

"Fine!"

"The costume is ugly. I look hideous in it."

"Doubtless."

He smiled up at her. There was relief in his eyes, and still a question.

"Is that all the news?"

"There is something else, K."

It was a moment before he spoke. He sat looking ahead, his face set. Apparently he did not wish to hear her say it; for when, after a moment, he spoke, it was to forestall her, after all.

"I think I know what it is, Sidney."

"You expected it, didn't you?"

"I—it's not an entire surprise."

"Aren't you going to wish me happiness?"

"If my wishing could bring anything good to you, you would have everything in the world."

His voice was not entirely steady, but his eyes smiled into hers.

"Am I—are we going to lose you soon?"

"I shall finish my training. I made that a condition."

Then, in a burst of confidence:—

"I know so little, K., and he knows so much! I am going to read and study, so that he can talk to me about his work. That's what marriage ought to be, a sort of partnership. Don't you think so?"

K. nodded. His mind refused to go forward to the unthinkable future. Instead, he was looking back—back to those days when he had hoped sometime to have a wife to talk to about his work, that beloved work that was no longer his. And, finding it agonizing, as indeed all thought was that summer night, he dwelt for a moment on that evening, a year before, when in the same June moonlight, he had come up the Street and had seen Sidney where she was now, with the tree shadows playing over her.

Even that first evening he had been jealous.

It had been Joe then. Now it was another and older man, daring, intelligent, unscrupulous. And this time he had lost her absolutely, lost her without a struggle to keep her. His only struggle had been with himself, to remember that he had nothing to offer but failure.

"Do you know," said Sidney suddenly, "that it is almost a year since that night you came up the Street, and I was here on the steps?"

"That's a fact, isn't it!" He managed to get some surprise into his voice.

"How Joe objected to your coming! Poor Joe!"

"Do you ever see him?"

"Hardly ever now. I think he hates me."

"Why?"

"Because—well, you know, K. Why do men always hate a woman who just happens not to love them?"

"I don't believe they do. It would be much better for them if they could. As a matter of fact, there are poor devils who go through life trying to do that very thing, and failing."

Sidney's eyes were on the tall house across. It was Dr. Ed's evening office hour, and through the open window she could see a line of people waiting their turn. They sat immobile, inert, doggedly patient, until the opening of the back office door promoted them all one chair toward the consulting-room.

"I shall be just across the Street," she said at last. "Nearer than I am at the hospital."

"You will be much farther away. You will be married."

"But we will still be friends, K.?"

Her voice was anxious, a little puzzled. She was often puzzled with him.

"Of course."

But, after another silence, he astounded her. She had fallen into the way of thinking of him as always belonging to the house, even, in a sense, belonging to her. And now—

"Shall you mind very much if I tell you that I am thinking of going away?"

"K.!"

"My dear child, you do not need a roomer here any more. I have always received infinitely more than I have paid for, even in the small services I have been able to render. Your Aunt Harriet is prosperous. You are away, and some day you are going to be married. Don't you see—I am not needed?"

"That does not mean you are not wanted."

"I shall not go far. I'll always be near enough, so that I can see you"—he changed this hastily—"so that we can still meet and talk things over. Old friends ought to be like that, not too near, but to be turned on when needed, like a tap."

"Where will you go?"

"The Rosenfelds are rather in straits. I thought of helping them to get a small house somewhere and of taking a room with them. It's largely a matter of furniture. If they could furnish it even plainly, it could be done. I—haven't saved anything."

"Do you ever think of yourself?" she cried. "Have you always gone through life helping people, K.? Save anything! I should think not! You spend it all on others." She bent over and put her hand on his shoulder. "It will not be home without you, K."

To save him, he could not have spoken just then. A riot of rebellion surged up in him, that he must let this best thing in his life go out of it. To go empty of heart through the rest of his days, while his very arms ached to hold her! And she was so near—just above, with her hand on his shoulder, her wistful face so close that, without moving, he could have brushed her hair.

"You have not wished me happiness, K. Do you remember, when I was going to the hospital and you gave me the little watch—do you remember what you said?"

"Yes"—huskily.

"Will you say it again?"

"But that was good-bye."

"Isn't this, in a way? You are going to leave us, and I—say it, K."

"Good-bye, dear, and—God bless you."



CHAPTER XXIII

The announcement of Sidney's engagement was not to be made for a year. Wilson, chafing under the delay, was obliged to admit to himself that it was best. Many things could happen in a year. Carlotta would have finished her training, and by that time would probably be reconciled to the ending of their relationship.

He intended to end that. He had meant every word of what he had sworn to Sidney. He was genuinely in love, even unselfishly—as far as he could be unselfish. The secret was to be carefully kept also for Sidney's sake. The hospital did not approve of engagements between nurses and the staff. It was disorganizing, bad for discipline.

Sidney was very happy all that summer. She glowed with pride when her lover put through a difficult piece of work; flushed and palpitated when she heard his praises sung; grew to know, by a sort of intuition, when he was in the house. She wore his ring on a fine chain around her neck, and grew prettier every day.

Once or twice, however, when she was at home, away from the glamour, her early fears obsessed her. Would he always love her? He was so handsome and so gifted, and there were women who were mad about him. That was the gossip of the hospital. Suppose she married him and he tired of her? In her humility she thought that perhaps only her youth, and such charm as she had that belonged to youth, held him. And before her, always, she saw the tragic women of the wards.

K. had postponed his leaving until fall. Sidney had been insistent, and Harriet had topped the argument in her businesslike way. "If you insist on being an idiot and adopting the Rosenfeld family," she said, "wait until September. The season for boarders doesn't begin until fall."

So K. waited for "the season," and ate his heart out for Sidney in the interval.

Johnny Rosenfeld still lay in his ward, inert from the waist down. K. was his most frequent visitor. As a matter of fact, he was watching the boy closely, at Max Wilson's request.

"Tell me when I'm to do it," said Wilson, "and when the time comes, for God's sake, stand by me. Come to the operation. He's got so much confidence that I'll help him that I don't dare to fail."

So K. came on visiting days, and, by special dispensation, on Saturday afternoons. He was teaching the boy basket-making. Not that he knew anything about it himself; but, by means of a blind teacher, he kept just one lesson ahead. The ward was intensely interested. It found something absurd and rather touching in this tall, serious young man with the surprisingly deft fingers, tying raffia knots.

The first basket went, by Johnny's request, to Sidney Page.

"I want her to have it," he said. "She got corns on her fingers from rubbing me when I came in first; and, besides—"

"Yes?" said K. He was tying a most complicated knot, and could not look up.

"I know something," said Johnny. "I'm not going to get in wrong by talking, but I know something. You give her the basket."

K. looked up then, and surprised Johnny's secret in his face.

"Ah!" he said.

"If I'd squealed she'd have finished me for good. They've got me, you know. I'm not running in 2.40 these days."

"I'll not tell, or make it uncomfortable for you. What do you know?"

Johnny looked around. The ward was in the somnolence of mid-afternoon. The nearest patient, a man in a wheel-chair, was snoring heavily.

"It was the dark-eyed one that changed the medicine on me," he said. "The one with the heels that were always tapping around, waking me up. She did it; I saw her."

After all, it was only what K. had suspected before. But a sense of impending danger to Sidney obsessed him. If Carlotta would do that, what would she do when she learned of the engagement? And he had known her before. He believed she was totally unscrupulous. The odd coincidence of their paths crossing again troubled him.

Carlotta Harrison was well again, and back on duty. Luckily for Sidney, her three months' service in the operating-room kept them apart. For Carlotta was now not merely jealous. She found herself neglected, ignored. It ate her like a fever.

But she did not yet suspect an engagement. It had been her theory that Wilson would not marry easily—that, in a sense, he would have to be coerced into marriage. Some clever woman would marry him some day, and no one would be more astonished than himself. She thought merely that Sidney was playing a game like her own, with different weapons. So she planned her battle, ignorant that she had lost already.

Her method was simple enough. She stopped sulking, met Max with smiles, made no overtures toward a renewal of their relations. At first this annoyed him. Later it piqued him. To desert a woman was justifiable, under certain circumstances. But to desert a woman, and have her apparently not even know it, was against the rules of the game.

During a surgical dressing in a private room, one day, he allowed his fingers to touch hers, as on that day a year before when she had taken Miss Simpson's place in his office. He was rewarded by the same slow, smouldering glance that had caught his attention before. So she was only acting indifference!

Then Carlotta made her second move. A new interne had come into the house, and was going through the process of learning that from a senior at the medical school to a half-baked junior interne is a long step back. He had to endure the good-humored contempt of the older men, the patronizing instructions of nurses as to rules.

Carlotta alone treated him with deference. His uneasy rounds in Carlotta's precinct took on the state and form of staff visitations. She flattered, cajoled, looked up to him.

After a time it dawned on Wilson that this junior cub was getting more attention than himself: that, wherever he happened to be, somewhere in the offing would be Carlotta and the Lamb, the latter eyeing her with worship. Her indifference had only piqued him. The enthroning of a successor galled him. Between them, the Lamb suffered mightily—was subject to frequent "bawling out," as he termed it, in the operating-room as he assisted the anaesthetist. He took his troubles to Carlotta, who soothed him in the corridor—in plain sight of her quarry, of course—by putting a sympathetic hand on his sleeve.

Then, one day, Wilson was goaded to speech.

"For the love of Heaven, Carlotta," he said impatiently, "stop making love to that wretched boy. He wriggles like a worm if you look at him."

"I like him. He is thoroughly genuine. I respect him, and—he respects me."

"It's rather a silly game, you know."

"What game?"

"Do you think I don't understand?"

"Perhaps you do. I—I don't really care a lot about him, Max. But I've been down-hearted. He cheers me up."

Her attraction for him was almost gone—not quite. He felt rather sorry for her.

"I'm sorry. Then you are not angry with me?"

"Angry? No." She lifted her eyes to his, and for once she was not acting. "I knew it would end, of course. I have lost a—a lover. I expected that. But I wanted to keep a friend."

It was the right note. Why, after all, should he not be her friend? He had treated her cruelly, hideously. If she still desired his friendship, there was no disloyalty to Sidney in giving it. And Carlotta was very careful. Not once again did she allow him to see what lay in her eyes. She told him of her worries. Her training was almost over. She had a chance to take up institutional work. She abhorred the thought of private duty. What would he advise?

The Lamb was hovering near, hot eyes on them both. It was no place to talk.

"Come to the office and we'll talk it over."

"I don't like to go there; Miss Simpson is suspicious."

The institution she spoke of was in another city. It occurred to Wilson that if she took it the affair would have reached a graceful and legitimate end.

Also, the thought of another stolen evening alone with her was not unpleasant. It would be the last, he promised himself. After all, it was owing to her. He had treated her badly.

Sidney would be at a lecture that night. The evening loomed temptingly free.

"Suppose you meet me at the old corner," he said carelessly, eyes on the Lamb, who was forgetting that he was only a junior interne and was glaring ferociously. "We'll run out into the country and talk things over."

She demurred, with her heart beating triumphantly.

"What's the use of going back to that? It's over, isn't it?"

Her objection made him determined. When at last she had yielded, and he made his way down to the smoking-room, it was with the feeling that he had won a victory.

K. had been uneasy all that day; his ledgers irritated him. He had been sleeping badly since Sidney's announcement of her engagement. At five o'clock, when he left the office, he found Joe Drummond waiting outside on the pavement.

"Mother said you'd been up to see me a couple of times. I thought I'd come around."

K. looked at his watch.

"What do you say to a walk?"

"Not out in the country. I'm not as muscular as you are. I'll go about town for a half-hour or so."

Thus forestalled, K. found his subject hard to lead up to. But here again Joe met him more than halfway.

"Well, go on," he said, when they found themselves in the park; "I don't suppose you were paying a call."

"No."

"I guess I know what you are going to say."

"I'm not going to preach, if you're expecting that. Ordinarily, if a man insists on making a fool of himself, I let him alone."

"Why make an exception of me?"

"One reason is that I happen to like you. The other reason is that, whether you admit it or not, you are acting like a young idiot, and are putting the responsibility on the shoulders of some one else."

"She is responsible, isn't she?"

"Not in the least. How old are you, Joe?"

"Twenty-three, almost."

"Exactly. You are a man, and you are acting like a bad boy. It's a disappointment to me. It's more than that to Sidney."

"Much she cares! She's going to marry Wilson, isn't she?"

"There is no announcement of any engagement."

"She is, and you know it. Well, she'll be happy—not! If I'd go to her to-night and tell her what I know, she'd never see him again." The idea, thus born in his overwrought brain, obsessed him. He returned to it again and again. Le Moyne was uneasy. He was not certain that the boy's statement had any basis in fact. His single determination was to save Sidney from any pain.

When Joe suddenly announced his inclination to go out into the country after all, he suspected a ruse to get rid of him, and insisted on going along. Joe consented grudgingly.

"Car's at Bailey's garage," he said sullenly. "I don't know when I'll get back."

"That won't matter." K.'s tone was cheerful. "I'm not sleeping, anyhow."

That passed unnoticed until they were on the highroad, with the car running smoothly between yellowing fields of wheat. Then:—

"So you've got it too!" he said. "We're a fine pair of fools. We'd both be better off if I sent the car over a bank."

He gave the wheel a reckless twist, and Le Moyne called him to time sternly.

They had supper at the White Springs Hotel—not on the terrace, but in the little room where Carlotta and Wilson had taken their first meal together. K. ordered beer for them both, and Joe submitted with bad grace.

But the meal cheered and steadied him. K. found him more amenable to reason, and, gaining his confidence, learned of his desire to leave the city.

"I'm stuck here," he said. "I'm the only one, and mother yells blue murder when I talk about it. I want to go to Cuba. My uncle owns a farm down there."

"Perhaps I can talk your mother over. I've been there."

Joe was all interest. His dilated pupils became more normal, his restless hands grew quiet. K.'s even voice, the picture he drew of life on the island, the stillness of the little hotel in its mid-week dullness, seemed to quiet the boy's tortured nerves. He was nearer to peace than he had been for many days. But he smoked incessantly, lighting one cigarette from another.

At ten o'clock he left K. and went for the car. He paused for a moment, rather sheepishly, by K.'s chair.

"I'm feeling a lot better," he said. "I haven't got the band around my head. You talk to mother."

That was the last K. saw of Joe Drummond until the next day.



CHAPTER XXIV

Carlotta dressed herself with unusual care—not in black this time, but in white. She coiled her yellow hair in a soft knot at the back of her head, and she resorted to the faintest shading of rouge. She intended to be gay, cheerful. The ride was to be a bright spot in Wilson's memory. He expected recriminations; she meant to make him happy. That was the secret of the charm some women had for men. They went to such women to forget their troubles. She set the hour of their meeting at nine, when the late dusk of summer had fallen; and she met him then, smiling, a faintly perfumed white figure, slim and young, with a thrill in her voice that was only half assumed.

"It's very late," he complained. "Surely you are not going to be back at ten."

"I have special permission to be out late."

"Good!" And then, recollecting their new situation: "We have a lot to talk over. It will take time."

At the White Springs Hotel they stopped to fill the gasolene tank of the car. Joe Drummond saw Wilson there, in the sheet-iron garage alongside of the road. The Wilson car was in the shadow. It did not occur to Joe that the white figure in the car was not Sidney. He went rather white, and stepped out of the zone of light. The influence of Le Moyne was still on him, however, and he went on quietly with what he was doing. But his hands shook as he filled the radiator.

When Wilson's car had gone on, he went automatically about his preparations for the return trip—lifted a seat cushion to investigate his own store of gasolene, replacing carefully the revolver he always carried under the seat and packed in waste to prevent its accidental discharge, lighted his lamps, examined a loose brake-band.

His coolness gratified him. He had been an ass: Le Moyne was right. He'd get away—to Cuba if he could—and start over again. He would forget the Street and let it forget him.

The men in the garage were talking.

"To Schwitter's, of course," one of them grumbled. "We might as well go out of business."

"There's no money in running a straight place. Schwitter and half a dozen others are getting rich."

"That was Wilson, the surgeon in town. He cut off my brother-in-law's leg—charged him as much as if he had grown a new one for him. He used to come here. Now he goes to Schwitter's, like the rest. Pretty girl he had with him. You can bet on Wilson."

So Max Wilson was taking Sidney to Schwitter's, making her the butt of garage talk! The smiles of the men were evil. Joe's hands grew cold, his head hot. A red mist spread between him and the line of electric lights. He knew Schwitter's, and he knew Wilson.

He flung himself into his car and threw the throttle open. The car jerked, stalled.

"You can't start like that, son," one of the men remonstrated. "You let 'er in too fast."

"You go to hell!" Joe snarled, and made a second ineffectual effort.

Thus adjured, the men offered neither further advice nor assistance. The minutes went by in useless cranking—fifteen. The red mist grew heavier. Every lamp was a danger signal. But when K., growing uneasy, came out into the yard, the engine had started at last. He was in time to see Joe run his car into the road and turn it viciously toward Schwitter's.

Carlotta's nearness was having its calculated effect on Max Wilson. His spirits rose as the engine, marking perfect time, carried them along the quiet roads.

Partly it was reaction—relief that she should be so reasonable, so complaisant—and a sort of holiday spirit after the day's hard work. Oddly enough, and not so irrational as may appear, Sidney formed a part of the evening's happiness—that she loved him; that, back in the lecture-room, eyes and even mind on the lecturer, her heart was with him.

So, with Sidney the basis of his happiness, he made the most of his evening's freedom. He sang a little in his clear tenor—even, once when they had slowed down at a crossing, bent over audaciously and kissed Carlotta's hand in the full glare of a passing train.

"How reckless of you!"

"I like to be reckless," he replied.

His boyishness annoyed Carlotta. She did not want the situation to get out of hand. Moreover, what was so real for her was only too plainly a lark for him. She began to doubt her power.

The hopelessness of her situation was dawning on her. Even when the touch of her beside him and the solitude of the country roads got in his blood, and he bent toward her, she found no encouragement in his words:—"I am mad about you to-night."

She took her courage in her hands:—"Then why give me up for some one else?"

"That's—different."

"Why is it different? I am a woman. I—I love you, Max. No one else will ever care as I do."

"You are in love with the Lamb!"

"That was a trick. I'm sorry, Max. I don't care for anyone else in the world. If you let me go I'll want to die."

Then, as he was silent:—

"If you'll marry me, I'll be true to you all my life. I swear it. There will be nobody else, ever."

The sense, if not the words, of what he had sworn to Sidney that Sunday afternoon under the trees, on this very road! Swift shame overtook him, that he should be here, that he had allowed Carlotta to remain in ignorance of how things really stood between them.

"I'm sorry, Carlotta. It's impossible. I'm engaged to marry some one else."

"Sidney Page?"—almost a whisper.

"Yes."

He was ashamed at the way she took the news. If she had stormed or wept, he would have known what to do. But she sat still, not speaking.

"You must have expected it, sooner or later."

Still she made no reply. He thought she might faint, and looked at her anxiously. Her profile, indistinct beside him, looked white and drawn. But Carlotta was not fainting. She was making a desperate plan. If their escapade became known, it would end things between Sidney and him. She was sure of that. She needed time to think it out. It must become known without any apparent move on her part. If, for instance, she became ill, and was away from the hospital all night, that might answer. The thing would be investigated, and who knew—

The car turned in at Schwitter's road and drew up before the house. The narrow porch was filled with small tables, above which hung rows of electric lights enclosed in Japanese paper lanterns. Midweek, which had found the White Springs Hotel almost deserted, saw Schwitter's crowded tables set out under the trees. Seeing the crowd, Wilson drove directly to the yard and parked his machine.

"No need of running any risk," he explained to the still figure beside him. "We can walk back and take a table under the trees, away from those infernal lanterns."

She reeled a little as he helped her out.

"Not sick, are you?"

"I'm dizzy. I'm all right."

She looked white. He felt a stab of pity for her. She leaned rather heavily on him as they walked toward the house. The faint perfume that had almost intoxicated him, earlier, vaguely irritated him now.

At the rear of the house she shook off his arm and preceded him around the building. She chose the end of the porch as the place in which to drop, and went down like a stone, falling back.

There was a moderate excitement. The visitors at Schwitter's were too much engrossed with themselves to be much interested. She opened her eyes almost as soon as she fell—to forestall any tests; she was shrewd enough to know that Wilson would detect her malingering very quickly—and begged to be taken into the house. "I feel very ill," she said, and her white face bore her out.

Schwitter and Bill carried her in and up the stairs to one of the newly furnished rooms. The little man was twittering with anxiety. He had a horror of knockout drops and the police. They laid her on the bed, her hat beside her; and Wilson, stripping down the long sleeve of her glove, felt her pulse.

"There's a doctor in the next town," said Schwitter. "I was going to send for him, anyhow—my wife's not very well."

"I'm a doctor."

"Is it anything serious?"

"Nothing serious."

He closed the door behind the relieved figure of the landlord, and, going back to Carlotta, stood looking down at her.

"What did you mean by doing that?"

"Doing what?"

"You were no more faint than I am."

She closed her eyes.

"I don't remember. Everything went black. The lanterns—"

He crossed the room deliberately and went out, closing the door behind him. He saw at once where he stood—in what danger. If she insisted that she was ill and unable to go back, there would be a fuss. The story would come out. Everything would be gone. Schwitter's, of all places!

At the foot of the stairs, Schwitter pulled himself together. After all, the girl was only ill. There was nothing for the police. He looked at his watch. The doctor ought to be here by this time. It was sooner than they had expected. Even the nurse had not come. Tillie was alone, out in the harness-room. He looked through the crowded rooms, at the overflowing porch with its travesty of pleasure, and he hated the whole thing with a desperate hatred.

Another car. Would they never stop coming! But perhaps it was the doctor. A young man edged his way into the hall and confronted him.

"Two people just arrived here. A man and a woman—in white. Where are they?"

It was trouble then, after all!

"Upstairs—first bedroom to the right." His teeth chattered. Surely, as a man sowed he reaped.

Joe went up the staircase. At the top, on the landing, he confronted Wilson. He fired at him without a word—saw him fling up his arms and fall back, striking first the wall, then the floor.

The buzz of conversation on the porch suddenly ceased. Joe put his revolver in his pocket and went quietly down the stairs. The crowd parted to let him through.

Carlotta, crouched in her room, listening, not daring to open the door, heard the sound of a car as it swung out into the road.



CHAPTER XXV

On the evening of the shooting at Schwitter's, there had been a late operation at the hospital. Sidney, having duly transcribed her lecture notes and said her prayers, was already asleep when she received the insistent summons to the operating-room. She dressed again with flying fingers. These night battles with death roused all her fighting blood. There were times when she felt as if, by sheer will, she could force strength, life itself, into failing bodies. Her sensitive nostrils dilated, her brain worked like a machine.

That night she received well-deserved praise. When the Lamb, telephoning hysterically, had failed to locate the younger Wilson, another staff surgeon was called. His keen eyes watched Sidney—felt her capacity, her fiber, so to speak; and, when everything was over, he told her what was in his mind.

"Don't wear yourself out, girl," he said gravely. "We need people like you. It was good work to-night—fine work. I wish we had more like you."

By midnight the work was done, and the nurse in charge sent Sidney to bed.

It was the Lamb who received the message about Wilson; and because he was not very keen at the best, and because the news was so startling, he refused to credit his ears.

"Who is this at the 'phone?"

"That doesn't matter. Le Moyne's my name. Get the message to Dr. Ed Wilson at once. We are starting to the city."

"Tell me again. I mustn't make a mess of this."

"Dr. Wilson, the surgeon, has been shot," came slowly and distinctly. "Get the staff there and have a room ready. Get the operating-room ready, too."

The Lamb wakened then, and roused the house. He was incoherent, rather, so that Dr. Ed got the impression that it was Le Moyne who had been shot, and only learned the truth when he got to the hospital.

"Where is he?" he demanded. He liked K., and his heart was sore within him.

"Not in yet, sir. A Mr. Le Moyne is bringing him. Staff's in the executive committee room, sir."

"But—who has been shot? I thought you said—"

The Lamb turned pale at that, and braced himself.

"I'm sorry—I thought you understood. I believe it's not—not serious. It's Dr. Max, sir."

Dr. Ed, who was heavy and not very young, sat down on an office chair. Out of sheer habit he had brought the bag. He put it down on the floor beside him, and moistened his lips.

"Is he living?"

"Oh, yes, sir. I gathered that Mr. Le Moyne did not think it serious."

He lied, and Dr. Ed knew he lied.

The Lamb stood by the door, and Dr. Ed sat and waited. The office clock said half after three. Outside the windows, the night world went by—taxi-cabs full of roisterers, women who walked stealthily close to the buildings, a truck carrying steel, so heavy that it shook the hospital as it rumbled by.

Dr. Ed sat and waited. The bag with the dog-collar in it was on the floor. He thought of many things, but mostly of the promise he had made his mother. And, having forgotten the injured man's shortcomings, he was remembering his good qualities—his cheerfulness, his courage, his achievements. He remembered the day Max had done the Edwardes operation, and how proud he had been of him. He figured out how old he was—not thirty-one yet, and already, perhaps—There he stopped thinking. Cold beads of sweat stood out on his forehead.

"I think I hear them now, sir," said the Lamb, and stood back respectfully to let him pass out of the door.

Carlotta stayed in the room during the consultation. No one seemed to wonder why she was there, or to pay any attention to her. The staff was stricken. They moved back to make room for Dr. Ed beside the bed, and then closed in again.

Carlotta waited, her hand over her mouth to keep herself from screaming. Surely they would operate; they wouldn't let him die like that!

When she saw the phalanx break up, and realized that they would not operate, she went mad. She stood against the door, and accused them of cowardice—taunted them.

"Do you think he would let any of you die like that?" she cried. "Die like a hurt dog, and none of you to lift a hand?"

It was Pfeiffer who drew her out of the room and tried to talk reason and sanity to her.

"It's hopeless," he said. "If there was a chance, we'd operate, and you know it."

The staff went hopelessly down the stairs to the smoking-room, and smoked. It was all they could do. The night assistant sent coffee down to them, and they drank it. Dr. Ed stayed in his brother's room, and said to his mother, under his breath, that he'd tried to do his best by Max, and that from now on it would be up to her.

K. had brought the injured man in. The country doctor had come, too, finding Tillie's trial not imminent. On the way in he had taken it for granted that K. was a medical man like himself, and had placed his hypodermic case at his disposal.

When he missed him,—in the smoking-room, that was,—he asked for him.

"I don't see the chap who came in with us," he said. "Clever fellow. Like to know his name."

The staff did not know.

K. sat alone on a bench in the hall. He wondered who would tell Sidney; he hoped they would be very gentle with her. He sat in the shadow, waiting. He did not want to go home and leave her to what she might have to face. There was a chance she would ask for him. He wanted to be near, in that case.

He sat in the shadow, on the bench. The night watchman went by twice and stared at him. At last he asked K. to mind the door until he got some coffee.

"One of the staff's been hurt," he explained. "If I don't get some coffee now, I won't get any."

K. promised to watch the door.

A desperate thing had occurred to Carlotta. Somehow, she had not thought of it before. Now she wondered how she could have failed to think of it. If only she could find him and he would do it! She would go down on her knees—would tell him everything, if only he would consent.

When she found him on his bench, however, she passed him by. She had a terrible fear that he might go away if she put the thing to him first. He clung hard to his new identity.

So first she went to the staff and confronted them. They were men of courage, only declining to undertake what they considered hopeless work. The one man among them who might have done the thing with any chance of success lay stricken. Not one among them but would have given of his best—only his best was not good enough.

"It would be the Edwardes operation, wouldn't it?" demanded Carlotta.

The staff was bewildered. There were no rules to cover such conduct on the part of a nurse. One of them—Pfeiffer again, by chance—replied rather heavily:—

"If any, it would be the Edwardes operation."

"Would Dr. Edwardes himself be able to do anything?"

This was going a little far.

"Possibly. One chance in a thousand, perhaps. But Edwardes is dead. How did this thing happen, Miss Harrison?"

She ignored his question. Her face was ghastly, save for the trace of rouge; her eyes were red-rimmed.

"Dr. Edwardes is sitting on a bench in the hall outside!" she announced.

Her voice rang out. K. heard her and raised his head. His attitude was weary, resigned. The thing had come, then! He was to take up the old burden. The girl had told.

Dr. Ed had sent for Sidney. Max was still unconscious. Ed remembered about her when, tracing his brother's career from his babyhood to man's estate and to what seemed now to be its ending, he had remembered that Max was very fond of Sidney. He had hoped that Sidney would take him and do for him what he, Ed, had failed to do.

So Sidney was summoned.

She thought it was another operation, and her spirit was just a little weary. But her courage was indomitable. She forced her shoes on her tired feet, and bathed her face in cold water to rouse herself.

The night watchman was in the hall. He was fond of Sidney; she always smiled at him; and, on his morning rounds at six o'clock to waken the nurses, her voice was always amiable. So she found him in the hall, holding a cup of tepid coffee. He was old and bleary, unmistakably dirty too—but he had divined Sidney's romance.

"Coffee! For me?" She was astonished.

"Drink it. You haven't had much sleep."

She took it obediently, but over the cup her eyes searched his.

"There is something wrong, daddy."

That was his name, among the nurses. He had had another name, but it was lost in the mists of years.

"Get it down."

So she finished it, not without anxiety that she might be needed. But daddy's attentions were for few, and not to be lightly received.

"Can you stand a piece of bad news?"

Strangely, her first thought was of K.

"There has been an accident. Dr. Wilson—"

"Which one?"

"Dr. Max—has been hurt. It ain't much, but I guess you'd like to know it."

"Where is he?"

"Downstairs, in Seventeen."

So she went down alone to the room where Dr. Ed sat in a chair, with his untidy bag beside him on the floor, and his eyes fixed on a straight figure on the bed. When he saw Sidney, he got up and put his arms around her. His eyes told her the truth before he told her anything. She hardly listened to what he said. The fact was all that concerned her—that her lover was dying there, so near that she could touch him with her hand, so far away that no voice, no caress of hers, could reach him.

The why would come later. Now she could only stand, with Dr. Ed's arms about her, and wait.

"If they would only do something!" Sidney's voice sounded strange to her ears.

"There is nothing to do."

But that, it seemed, was wrong. For suddenly Sidney's small world, which had always sedately revolved in one direction, began to move the other way.

The door opened, and the staff came in. But where before they had moved heavily, with drooped heads, now they came quickly, as men with a purpose. There was a tall man in a white coat with them. He ordered them about like children, and they hastened to do his will. At first Sidney only knew that now, at last, they were going to do something—the tall man was going to do something. He stood with his back to Sidney, and gave orders.

The heaviness of inactivity lifted. The room buzzed. The nurses stood by, while the staff did nurses' work. The senior surgical interne, essaying assistance, was shoved aside by the senior surgical consultant, and stood by, aggrieved.

It was the Lamb, after all, who brought the news to Sidney. The new activity had caught Dr. Ed, and she was alone now, her face buried against the back of a chair.

"There'll be something doing now, Miss Page," he offered.

"What are they going to do?"

"Going after the bullet. Do you know who's going to do it?"

His voice echoed the subdued excitement of the room—excitement and new hope.

"Did you ever hear of Edwardes, the surgeon?—the Edwardes operation, you know. Well, he's here. It sounds like a miracle. They found him sitting on a bench in the hall downstairs."

Sidney raised her head, but she could not see the miraculously found Edwardes. She could see the familiar faces of the staff, and that other face on the pillow, and—she gave a little cry. There was K.! How like him to be there, to be wherever anyone was in trouble! Tears came to her eyes—the first tears she had shed.

As if her eyes had called him, he looked up and saw her. He came toward her at once. The staff stood back to let him pass, and gazed after him. The wonder of what had happened was growing on them.

K. stood beside Sidney, and looked down at her. Just at first it seemed as if he found nothing to say. Then:

"There's just a chance, Sidney dear. Don't count too much on it."

"I have got to count on it. If I don't, I shall die."

If a shadow passed over his face, no one saw it.

"I'll not ask you to go back to your room. If you will wait somewhere near, I'll see that you have immediate word."

"I am going to the operating-room."

"Not to the operating-room. Somewhere near."

His steady voice controlled her hysteria. But she resented it. She was not herself, of course, what with strain and weariness.

"I shall ask Dr. Edwardes."

He was puzzled for a moment. Then he understood. After all, it was as well. Whether she knew him as Le Moyne or as Edwardes mattered very little, after all. The thing that really mattered was that he must try to save Wilson for her. If he failed—It ran through his mind that if he failed she might hate him the rest of her life—not for himself, but for his failure; that, whichever way things went, he must lose.

"Dr. Edwardes says you are to stay away from the operation, but to remain near. He—he promises to call you if—things go wrong."

She had to be content with that.

Nothing about that night was real to Sidney. She sat in the anaesthetizing-room, and after a time she knew that she was not alone. There was somebody else. She realized dully that Carlotta was there, too, pacing up and down the little room. She was never sure, for instance, whether she imagined it, or whether Carlotta really stopped before her and surveyed her with burning eyes.

"So you thought he was going to marry you!" said Carlotta—or the dream. "Well, you see he isn't."

Sidney tried to answer, and failed—or that was the way the dream went.

"If you had enough character, I'd think you did it. How do I know you didn't follow us, and shoot him as he left the room?"

It must have been reality, after all; for Sidney's numbed mind grasped the essential fact here, and held on to it. He had been out with Carlotta. He had promised—sworn that this should not happen. It had happened. It surprised her. It seemed as if nothing more could hurt her.

In the movement to and from the operating room, the door stood open for a moment. A tall figure—how much it looked like K.!—straightened and held out something in its hand.

"The bullet!" said Carlotta in a whisper.

Then more waiting, a stir of movement in the room beyond the closed door. Carlotta was standing, her face buried in her hands, against the door. Sidney suddenly felt sorry for her. She cared a great deal. It must be tragic to care like that! She herself was not caring much; she was too numb.

Beyond, across the courtyard, was the stable. Before the day of the motor ambulances, horses had waited there for their summons, eager as fire horses, heads lifted to the gong. When Sidney saw the outline of the stable roof, she knew that it was dawn. The city still slept, but the torturing night was over. And in the gray dawn the staff, looking gray too, and elderly and weary, came out through the closed door and took their hushed way toward the elevator. They were talking among themselves. Sidney, straining her ears, gathered that they had seen a miracle, and that the wonder was still on them.

Carlotta followed them out.

Almost on their heels came K. He was in the white coat, and more and more he looked like the man who had raised up from his work and held out something in his hand. Sidney's head was aching and confused.

She sat there in her chair, looking small and childish. The dawn was morning now—horizontal rays of sunlight on the stable roof and across the windowsill of the anaesthetizing-room, where a row of bottles sat on a clean towel.

The tall man—or was it K.?—looked at her, and then reached up and turned off the electric light. Why, it was K., of course; and he was putting out the hall light before he went upstairs. When the light was out everything was gray. She could not see. She slid very quietly out of her chair, and lay at his feet in a dead faint.

K. carried her to the elevator. He held her as he had held her that day at the park when she fell in the river, very carefully, tenderly, as one holds something infinitely precious. Not until he had placed her on her bed did she open her eyes. But she was conscious before that. She was so tired, and to be carried like that, in strong arms, not knowing where one was going, or caring—

The nurse he had summoned hustled out for aromatic ammonia. Sidney, lying among her pillows, looked up at K.

"How is he?"

"A little better. There's a chance, dear."

"I have been so mixed up. All the time I was sitting waiting, I kept thinking that it was you who were operating! Will he really get well?"

"It looks promising."

"I should like to thank Dr. Edwardes."

The nurse was a long time getting the ammonia. There was so much to talk about: that Dr. Max had been out with Carlotta Harrison, and had been shot by a jealous woman; the inexplicable return to life of the great Edwardes; and—a fact the nurse herself was willing to vouch for, and that thrilled the training-school to the core—that this very Edwardes, newly risen, as it were, and being a miracle himself as well as performing one, this very Edwardes, carrying Sidney to her bed and putting her down, had kissed her on her white forehead.

The training-school doubted this. How could he know Sidney Page? And, after all, the nurse had only seen it in the mirror, being occupied at the time in seeing if her cap was straight. The school, therefore, accepted the miracle, but refused the kiss.

The miracle was no miracle, of course. But something had happened to K. that savored of the marvelous. His faith in himself was coming back—not strongly, with a rush, but with all humility. He had been loath to take up the burden; but, now that he had it, he breathed a sort of inarticulate prayer to be able to carry it.

And, since men have looked for signs since the beginning of time, he too asked for a sign. Not, of course, that he put it that way, or that he was making terms with Providence. It was like this: if Wilson got well, he'd keep on working. He'd feel that, perhaps, after all, this was meant. If Wilson died—Sidney held out her hand to him.

"What should I do without you, K.?" she asked wistfully.

"All you have to do is to want me."

His voice was not too steady, and he took her pulse in a most businesslike way to distract her attention from it.

"How very many things you know! You are quite professional about pulses."

Even then he did not tell her. He was not sure, to be frank, that she'd be interested. Now, with Wilson as he was, was no time to obtrude his own story. There was time enough for that.

"Will you drink some beef tea if I send it to you?"

"I'm not hungry. I will, of course."

"And—will you try to sleep?"

"Sleep, while he—"

"I promise to tell you if there is any change. I shall stay with him."

"I'll try to sleep."

But, as he rose from the chair beside her low bed, she put out her hand to him.

"K."

"Yes, dear."

"He was out with Carlotta. He promised, and he broke his promise."

"There may have been reasons. Suppose we wait until he can explain."

"How can he explain?" And, when he hesitated: "I bring all my troubles to you, as if you had none. Somehow, I can't go to Aunt Harriet, and of course mother—Carlotta cares a great deal for him. She said that I shot him. Does anyone really think that?"

"Of course not. Please stop thinking."

"But who did, K.? He had so many friends, and no enemies that I knew of."

Her mind seemed to stagger about in a circle, making little excursions, but always coming back to the one thing.

"Some drunken visitor to the road-house."

He could have killed himself for the words the moment they were spoken.

"They were at a road-house?"

"It is not just to judge anyone before you hear the story."

She stirred restlessly.

"What time is it?"

"Half-past six."

"I must get up and go on duty."

He was glad to be stern with her. He forbade her rising. When the nurse came in with the belated ammonia, she found K. making an arbitrary ruling, and Sidney looking up at him mutinously.

"Miss Page is not to go on duty to-day. She is to stay in bed until further orders."

"Very well, Dr. Edwardes."

The confusion in Sidney's mind cleared away suddenly. K. was Dr. Edwardes! It was K. who had performed the miracle operation—K. who had dared and perhaps won! Dear K., with his steady eyes and his long surgeon's fingers! Then, because she seemed to see ahead as well as back into the past in that flash that comes to the drowning and to those recovering from shock, and because she knew that now the little house would no longer be home to K., she turned her face into her pillow and cried. Her world had fallen indeed. Her lover was not true and might be dying; her friend would go away to his own world, which was not the Street.

K. left her at last and went back to Seventeen, where Dr. Ed still sat by the bed. Inaction was telling on him. If Max would only open his eyes, so he could tell him what had been in his mind all these years—his pride in him and all that.

With a sort of belated desire to make up for where he had failed, he put the bag that had been Max's bete noir on the bedside table, and began to clear it of rubbish—odd bits of dirty cotton, the tubing from a long defunct stethoscope, glass from a broken bottle, a scrap of paper on which was a memorandum, in his illegible writing, to send Max a check for his graduating suit. When K. came in, he had the old dog-collar in his hand.

"Belonged to an old collie of ours," he said heavily. "Milkman ran over him and killed him. Max chased the wagon and licked the driver with his own whip."

His face worked.

"Poor old Bobby Burns!" he said. "We'd raised him from a pup. Got him in a grape-basket."

The sick man opened his eyes.



CHAPTER XXVI

Max had rallied well, and things looked bright for him. His patient did not need him, but K. was anxious to find Joe; so he telephoned the gas office and got a day off. The sordid little tragedy was easy to reconstruct, except that, like Joe, K. did not believe in the innocence of the excursion to Schwitter's. His spirit was heavy with the conviction that he had saved Wilson to make Sidney ultimately wretched.

For the present, at least, K.'s revealed identity was safe. Hospitals keep their secrets well. And it is doubtful if the Street would have been greatly concerned even had it known. It had never heard of Edwardes, of the Edwardes clinic or the Edwardes operation. Its medical knowledge comprised the two Wilsons and the osteopath around the corner. When, as would happen soon, it learned of Max Wilson's injury, it would be more concerned with his chances of recovery than with the manner of it. That was as it should be.

But Joe's affair with Sidney had been the talk of the neighborhood. If the boy disappeared, a scandal would be inevitable. Twenty people had seen him at Schwitter's and would know him again.

To save Joe, then, was K.'s first care.

At first it seemed as if the boy had frustrated him. He had not been home all night. Christine, waylaying K. in the little hall, told him that. "Mrs. Drummond was here," she said. "She is almost frantic. She says Joe has not been home all night. She says he looks up to you, and she thought if you could find him and would talk to him—"

"Joe was with me last night. We had supper at the White Springs Hotel. Tell Mrs. Drummond he was in good spirits, and that she's not to worry. I feel sure she will hear from him to-day. Something went wrong with his car, perhaps, after he left me."

He bathed and shaved hurriedly. Katie brought his coffee to his room, and he drank it standing. He was working out a theory about the boy. Beyond Schwitter's the highroad stretched, broad and inviting, across the State. Either he would have gone that way, his little car eating up the miles all that night, or—K. would not formulate his fear of what might have happened, even to himself.

As he went down the Street, he saw Mrs. McKee in her doorway, with a little knot of people around her. The Street was getting the night's news.

He rented a car at a local garage, and drove himself out into the country. He was not minded to have any eyes on him that day. He went to Schwitter's first. Schwitter himself was not in sight. Bill was scrubbing the porch, and a farmhand was gathering bottles from the grass into a box. The dead lanterns swung in the morning air, and from back on the hill came the staccato sounds of a reaping-machine.

"Where's Schwitter?"

"At the barn with the missus. Got a boy back there."

Bill grinned. He recognized K., and, mopping dry a part of the porch, shoved a chair on it.

"Sit down. Well, how's the man who got his last night? Dead?"

"No."

"County detectives were here bright and early. After the lady's husband. I guess we lose our license over this."

"What does Schwitter say?"

"Oh, him!" Bill's tone was full of disgust. "He hopes we do. He hates the place. Only man I ever knew that hated money. That's what this house is—money."

"Bill, did you see the man who fired that shot last night?"

A sort of haze came over Bill's face, as if he had dropped a curtain before his eyes. But his reply came promptly:

"Surest thing in the world. Close to him as you are to me. Dark man, about thirty, small mustache—"

"Bill, you're lying, and I know it. Where is he?"

The barkeeper kept his head, but his color changed.

"I don't know anything about him." He thrust his mop into the pail. K. rose.

"Does Schwitter know?"

"He doesn't know nothing. He's been out at the barn all night."

The farmhand had filled his box and disappeared around the corner of the house. K. put his hand on Bill's shirt-sleeved arm.

"We've got to get him away from here, Bill."

"Get who away?"

"You know. The county men may come back to search the premises."

"How do I know you aren't one of them?"

"I guess you know I'm not. He's a friend of mine. As a matter of fact, I followed him here; but I was too late. Did he take the revolver away with him?"

"I took it from him. It's under the bar."

"Get it for me."

In sheer relief, K.'s spirits rose. After all, it was a good world: Tillie with her baby in her arms; Wilson conscious and rallying; Joe safe, and, without the revolver, secure from his own remorse. Other things there were, too—the feel of Sidney's inert body in his arms, the way she had turned to him in trouble. It was not what he wanted, this last, but it was worth while. The reaping-machine was in sight now; it had stopped on the hillside. The men were drinking out of a bucket that flashed in the sun.

There was one thing wrong. What had come over Wilson, to do so reckless a thing? K., who was a one-woman man, could not explain it.

From inside the bar Bill took a careful survey of Le Moyne. He noted his tall figure and shabby suit, the slight stoop, the hair graying over his ears. Barkeepers know men: that's a part of the job. After his survey he went behind the bar and got the revolver from under an overturned pail.

K. thrust it into his pocket.

"Now," he said quietly, "where is he?"

"In my room—top of the house."

K. followed Bill up the stairs. He remembered the day when he had sat waiting in the parlor, and had heard Tillie's slow step coming down. And last night he himself had carried down Wilson's unconscious figure. Surely the wages of sin were wretchedness and misery. None of it paid. No one got away with it.

The room under the eaves was stifling. An unmade bed stood in a corner. From nails in the rafters hung Bill's holiday wardrobe. A tin cup and a cracked pitcher of spring water stood on the window-sill.

Joe was sitting in the corner farthest from the window. When the door swung open, he looked up. He showed no interest on seeing K., who had to stoop to enter the low room.

"Hello, Joe."

"I thought you were the police."

"Not much. Open that window, Bill. This place is stifling."

"Is he dead?"

"No, indeed."

"I wish I'd killed him!"

"Oh, no, you don't. You're damned glad you didn't, and so am I."

"What will they do with me?"

"Nothing until they find you. I came to talk about that. They'd better not find you."

"Huh!"

"It's easier than it sounds."

K. sat down on the bed.

"If I only had some money!" he said. "But never mind about that, Joe; I'll get some."

Loud calls from below took Bill out of the room. As he closed the door behind him, K.'s voice took on a new tone: "Joe, why did you do it?"

"You know."

"You saw him with somebody at the White Springs, and followed them?"

"Yes."

"Do you know who was with him?"

"Yes, and so do you. Don't go into that. I did it, and I'll stand by it."

"Has it occurred to you that you made a mistake?"

"Go and tell that to somebody who'll believe you!" he sneered. "They came here and took a room. I met him coming out of it. I'd do it again if I had a chance, and do it better."

"It was not Sidney."

"Aw, chuck it!"

"It's a fact. I got here not two minutes after you left. The girl was still there. It was some one else. Sidney was not out of the hospital last night. She attended a lecture, and then an operation."

Joe listened. It was undoubtedly a relief to him to know that it had not been Sidney; but if K. expected any remorse, he did not get it.

"If he is that sort, he deserves what he got," said the boy grimly.

And K. had no reply. But Joe was glad to talk. The hours he had spent alone in the little room had been very bitter, and preceded by a time that he shuddered to remember. K. got it by degrees—his descent of the staircase, leaving Wilson lying on the landing above; his resolve to walk back and surrender himself at Schwitter's, so that there could be no mistake as to who had committed the crime.

"I intended to write a confession and then shoot myself," he told K. "But the barkeeper got my gun out of my pocket. And—"

After a pause: "Does she know who did it?"

"Sidney? No."

"Then, if he gets better, she'll marry him anyhow."

"Possibly. That's not up to us, Joe. The thing we've got to do is to hush the thing up, and get you away."

"I'd go to Cuba, but I haven't the money."

K. rose. "I think I can get it."

He turned in the doorway.

"Sidney need never know who did it."

"I'm not ashamed of it." But his face showed relief.

There are times when some cataclysm tears down the walls of reserve between men. That time had come for Joe, and to a lesser extent for K. The boy rose and followed him to the door.

"Why don't you tell her the whole thing?—the whole filthy story?" he asked. "She'd never look at him again. You're crazy about her. I haven't got a chance. It would give you one."

"I want her, God knows!" said K. "But not that way, boy."

Schwitter had taken in five hundred dollars the previous day.

"Five hundred gross," the little man hastened to explain. "But you're right, Mr. Le Moyne. And I guess it would please HER. It's going hard with her, just now, that she hasn't any women friends about. It's in the safe, in cash; I haven't had time to take it to the bank." He seemed to apologize to himself for the unbusinesslike proceeding of lending an entire day's gross receipts on no security. "It's better to get him away, of course. It's good business. I have tried to have an orderly place. If they arrest him here—"

His voice trailed off. He had come a far way from the day he had walked down the Street, and eyed Its poplars with appraising eyes—a far way. Now he had a son, and the child's mother looked at him with tragic eyes. It was arranged that K. should go back to town, returning late that night to pick up Joe at a lonely point on the road, and to drive him to a railroad station. But, as it happened, he went back that afternoon.

He had told Schwitter he would be at the hospital, and the message found him there. Wilson was holding his own, conscious now and making a hard fight. The message from Schwitter was very brief:—

"Something has happened, and Tillie wants you. I don't like to trouble you again, but she—wants you."

K. was rather gray of face by that time, having had no sleep and little food since the day before. But he got into the rented machine again—its rental was running up; he tried to forget it—and turned it toward Hillfoot. But first of all he drove back to the Street, and walked without ringing into Mrs. McKee's.

Neither a year's time nor Mrs. McKee's approaching change of state had altered the "mealing" house. The ticket-punch still lay on the hat-rack in the hall. Through the rusty screen of the back parlor window one viewed the spiraea, still in need of spraying. Mrs. McKee herself was in the pantry, placing one slice of tomato and three small lettuce leaves on each of an interminable succession of plates.

K., who was privileged, walked back.

"I've got a car at the door," he announced, "and there's nothing so extravagant as an empty seat in an automobile. Will you take a ride?"

Mrs. McKee agreed. Being of the class who believe a boudoir cap the ideal headdress for a motor-car, she apologized for having none.

"If I'd known you were coming I would have borrowed a cap," she said. "Miss Tripp, third floor front, has a nice one. If you'll take me in my toque—"

K. said he'd take her in her toque, and waited with some anxiety, having not the faintest idea what a toque was. He was not without other anxieties. What if the sight of Tillie's baby did not do all that he expected? Good women could be most cruel. And Schwitter had been very vague. But here K. was more sure of himself: the little man's voice had expressed as exactly as words the sense of a bereavement that was not a grief.

He was counting on Mrs. McKee's old fondness for the girl to bring them together. But, as they neared the house with its lanterns and tables, its whitewashed stones outlining the drive, its small upper window behind which Joe was waiting for night, his heart failed him, rather. He had a masculine dislike for meddling, and yet—Mrs. McKee had suddenly seen the name in the wooden arch over the gate: "Schwitter's."

"I'm not going in there, Mr. Le Moyne."

"Tillie's not in the house. She's back in the barn."

"In the barn!"

"She didn't approve of all that went on there, so she moved out. It's very comfortable and clean; it smells of hay. You'd be surprised how nice it is."

"The like of her!" snorted Mrs. McKee. "She's late with her conscience, I'm thinking."

"Last night," K. remarked, hands on the wheel, but car stopped, "she had a child there. It—it's rather like very old times, isn't it? A man-child, Mrs. McKee, not in a manger, of course."

"What do you want me to do?" Mrs. McKee's tone, which had been fierce at the beginning, ended feebly.

"I want you to go in and visit her, as you would any woman who'd had a new baby and needed a friend. Lie a little—" Mrs. McKee gasped. "Tell her the baby's pretty. Tell her you've been wanting to see her." His tone was suddenly stern. "Lie a little, for your soul's sake."

She wavered, and while she wavered he drove her in under the arch with the shameful name, and back to the barn. But there he had the tact to remain in the car, and Mrs. McKee's peace with Tillie was made alone. When, five minutes later, she beckoned him from the door of the barn, her eyes were red.

"Come in, Mr. K.," she said. "The wife's dead, poor thing. They're going to be married right away."

The clergyman was coming along the path with Schwitter at his heels. K. entered the barn. At the door to Tillie's room he uncovered his head. The child was asleep at her breast.

The five thousand dollar check from Mr. Lorenz had saved Palmer Howe's credit. On the strength of the deposit, he borrowed a thousand at the bank with which he meant to pay his bills, arrears at the University and Country Clubs, a hundred dollars lost throwing aces with poker dice, and various small obligations of Christine's.

The immediate result of the money was good. He drank nothing for a week, went into the details of the new venture with Christine's father, sat at home with Christine on her balcony in the evenings. With the knowledge that he could pay his debts, he postponed the day. He liked the feeling of a bank account in four figures.

The first evening or two Christine's pleasure in having him there gratified him. He felt kind, magnanimous, almost virtuous. On the third evening he was restless. It occurred to him that his wife was beginning to take his presence as a matter of course. He wanted cold bottled beer. When he found that the ice was out and the beer warm and flat, he was furious.

Christine had been making a fight, although her heart was only half in it. She was resolutely good-humored, ignored the past, dressed for Palmer in the things he liked. They still took their dinners at the Lorenz house up the street. When she saw that the haphazard table service there irritated him, she coaxed her mother into getting a butler.

The Street sniffed at the butler behind his stately back. Secretly and in its heart, it was proud of him. With a half-dozen automobiles, and Christine Howe putting on low neck in the evenings, and now a butler, not to mention Harriet Kennedy's Mimi, it ceased to pride itself on its commonplaceness, ignorant of the fact that in its very lack of affectation had lain its charm.

On the night that Joe shot Max Wilson, Palmer was noticeably restless. He had seen Grace Irving that day for the first time but once since the motor accident. To do him justice, his dissipation of the past few months had not included women.

The girl had a strange fascination for him. Perhaps she typified the care-free days before his marriage; perhaps the attraction was deeper, fundamental. He met her in the street the day before Max Wilson was shot. The sight of her walking sedately along in her shop-girl's black dress had been enough to set his pulses racing. When he saw that she meant to pass him, he fell into step beside her.

"I believe you were going to cut me!"

"I was in a hurry."

"Still in the store?"

"Yes." And, after a second's hesitation: "I'm keeping straight, too."

"How are you getting along?"

"Pretty well. I've had my salary raised."

"Do you have to walk as fast as this?"

"I said I was in a hurry. Once a week I get off a little early. I—"

He eyed her suspiciously.

"Early! What for?"

"I go to the hospital. The Rosenfeld boy is still there, you know."

"Oh!"

But a moment later he burst out irritably:—

"That was an accident, Grace. The boy took the chance when he engaged to drive the car. I'm sorry, of course. I dream of the little devil sometimes, lying there. I'll tell you what I'll do," he added magnanimously. "I'll stop in and talk to Wilson. He ought to have done something before this."

"The boy's not strong enough yet. I don't think you can do anything for him, unless—"

The monstrous injustice of the thing overcame her. Palmer and she walking about, and the boy lying on his hot bed! She choked.

"Well?"

"He worries about his mother. If you could give her some money, it would help."

"Money! Good Heavens—I owe everybody."

"You owe him too, don't you? He'll never walk again."

"I can't give them ten dollars. I don't see that I'm under any obligation, anyhow. I paid his board for two months in the hospital."

When she did not acknowledge this generosity,—amounting to forty-eight dollars,—his irritation grew. Her silence was an accusation. Her manner galled him, into the bargain. She was too calm in his presence, too cold. Where she had once palpitated visibly under his warm gaze, she was now self-possessed and quiet. Where it had pleased his pride to think that he had given her up, he found that the shoe was on the other foot.

At the entrance to a side street she stopped.

"I turn off here."

"May I come and see you sometime?"

"No, please."

"That's flat, is it?"

"It is, Palmer."

He swung around savagely and left her.

The next day he drew the thousand dollars from the bank. A good many of his debts he wanted to pay in cash; there was no use putting checks through, with incriminating indorsements. Also, he liked the idea of carrying a roll of money around. The big fellows at the clubs always had a wad and peeled off bills like skin off an onion. He took a couple of drinks to celebrate his approaching immunity from debt.

He played auction bridge that afternoon in a private room at one of the hotels with the three men he had lunched with. Luck seemed to be with him. He won eighty dollars, and thrust it loose in his trousers pocket. Money seemed to bring money! If he could carry the thousand around for a day or so, something pretty good might come of it.

He had been drinking a little all afternoon. When the game was over, he bought drinks to celebrate his victory. The losers treated, too, to show they were no pikers. Palmer was in high spirits. He offered to put up the eighty and throw for it. The losers mentioned dinner and various engagements.

Palmer did not want to go home. Christine would greet him with raised eyebrows. They would eat a stuffy Lorenz dinner, and in the evening Christine would sit in the lamplight and drive him mad with soft music. He wanted lights, noise, the smiles of women. Luck was with him, and he wanted to be happy.

At nine o'clock that night he found Grace. She had moved to a cheap apartment which she shared with two other girls from the store. The others were out. It was his lucky day, surely.

His drunkenness was of the mind, mostly. His muscles were well controlled. The lines from his nose to the corners of his mouth were slightly accentuated, his eyes open a trifle wider than usual. That and a slight paleness of the nostrils were the only evidences of his condition. But Grace knew the signs.

"You can't come in."

"Of course I'm coming in."

She retreated before him, her eyes watchful. Men in his condition were apt to be as quick with a blow as with a caress. But, having gained his point, he was amiable.

"Get your things on and come out. We can take in a roof-garden."

"I've told you I'm not doing that sort of thing."

He was ugly in a flash.

"You've got somebody else on the string."

"Honestly, no. There—there has never been anybody else, Palmer."

He caught her suddenly and jerked her toward him.

"You let me hear of anybody else, and I'll cut the guts out of him!"

He held her for a second, his face black and fierce. Then, slowly and inevitably, he drew her into his arms. He was drunk, and she knew it. But, in the queer loyalty of her class, he was the only man she had cared for. She cared now. She took him for that moment, felt his hot kisses on her mouth, her throat, submitted while his rather brutal hands bruised her arms in fierce caresses. Then she put him from her resolutely.

"Now you're going."

"The hell I'm going!"

But he was less steady than he had been. The heat of the little flat brought more blood to his head. He wavered as he stood just inside the door.

"You must go back to your wife."

"She doesn't want me. She's in love with a fellow at the house."

"Palmer, hush!"

"Lemme come in and sit down, won't you?"

She let him pass her into the sitting-room. He dropped into a chair.

"You've turned me down, and now Christine—she thinks I don't know. I'm no fool; I see a lot of things. I'm no good. I know that I've made her miserable. But I made a merry little hell for you too, and you don't kick about it."

"You know that."

She was watching him gravely. She had never seen him just like this. Nothing else, perhaps, could have shown her so well what a broken reed he was.

"I got you in wrong. You were a good girl before I knew you. You're a good girl now. I'm not going to do you any harm, I swear it. I only wanted to take you out for a good time. I've got money. Look here!" He drew out the roll of bills and showed it to her. Her eyes opened wide. She had never known him to have much money.

"Lots more where that comes from."

A new look flashed into her eyes, not cupidity, but purpose.

She was instantly cunning.

"Aren't you going to give me some of that?"

"What for?"

"I—I want some clothes."

The very drunk have the intuition sometimes of savages or brute beasts.

"You lie."

"I want it for Johnny Rosenfeld."

He thrust it back into his pocket, but his hand retained its grasp of it.

"That's it," he complained. "Don't lemme be happy for a minute! Throw it all up to me!"

"You give me that for the Rosenfeld boy, and I'll go out with you."

"If I give you all that, I won't have any money to go out with!"

But his eyes were wavering. She could see victory.

"Take off enough for the evening."

But he drew himself up.

"I'm no piker," he said largely. "Whole hog or nothing. Take it."

He held it out to her, and from another pocket produced the eighty dollars, in crushed and wrinkled notes.

"It's my lucky day," he said thickly. "Plenty more where this came from. Do anything for you. Give it to the little devil. I—" He yawned. "God, this place is hot!"

His head dropped back on his chair; he propped his sagging legs on a stool. She knew him—knew that he would sleep almost all night. She would have to make up something to tell the other girls; but no matter—she could attend to that later.

She had never had a thousand dollars in her hands before. It seemed smaller than that amount. Perhaps he had lied to her. She paused, in pinning on her hat, to count the bills. It was all there.



CHAPTER XXVII

K. spent all of the evening of that day with Wilson. He was not to go for Joe until eleven o'clock. The injured man's vitality was standing him in good stead. He had asked for Sidney and she was at his bedside. Dr. Ed had gone.

"I'm going, Max. The office is full, they tell me," he said, bending over the bed. "I'll come in later, and if they'll make me a shakedown, I'll stay with you to-night."

The answer was faint, broken but distinct. "Get some sleep...I've been a poor stick...try to do better—" His roving eyes fell on the dog collar on the stand. He smiled, "Good old Bob!" he said, and put his hand over Dr. Ed's, as it lay on the bed.

K. found Sidney in the room, not sitting, but standing by the window. The sick man was dozing. One shaded light burned in a far corner. She turned slowly and met his eyes. It seemed to K. that she looked at him as if she had never really seen him before, and he was right. Readjustments are always difficult.

Sidney was trying to reconcile the K. she had known so well with this new K., no longer obscure, although still shabby, whose height had suddenly become presence, whose quiet was the quiet of infinite power.

She was suddenly shy of him, as he stood looking down at her. He saw the gleam of her engagement ring on her finger. It seemed almost defiant. As though she had meant by wearing it to emphasize her belief in her lover.

They did not speak beyond their greeting, until he had gone over the record. Then:—

"We can't talk here. I want to talk to you, K."

He led the way into the corridor. It was very dim. Far away was the night nurse's desk, with its lamp, its annunciator, its pile of records. The passage floor reflected the light on glistening boards.

"I have been thinking until I am almost crazy, K. And now I know how it happened. It was Joe."

"The principal thing is, not how it happened, but that he is going to get well, Sidney."

She stood looking down, twisting her ring around her finger.

"Is Joe in any danger?"

"We are going to get him away to-night. He wants to go to Cuba. He'll get off safely, I think."

"WE are going to get him away! YOU are, you mean. You shoulder all our troubles, K., as if they were your own."

"I?" He was genuinely surprised. "Oh, I see. You mean—but my part in getting Joe off is practically nothing. As a matter of fact, Schwitter has put up the money. My total capital in the world, after paying the taxicab to-day, is seven dollars."

"The taxicab?"

"By Jove, I was forgetting! Best news you ever heard of! Tillie married and has a baby—all in twenty-four hours! Boy—they named it Le Moyne. Squalled like a maniac when the water went on its head. I—I took Mrs. McKee out in a hired machine. That's what happened to my capital." He grinned sheepishly. "She said she would have to go in her toque. I had awful qualms. I thought it was a wrapper."

"You, of course," she said. "You find Max and save him—don't look like that! You did, didn't you? And you get Joe away, borrowing money to send him. And as if that isn't enough, when you ought to have been getting some sleep, you are out taking a friend to Tillie, and being godfather to the baby."

He looked uncomfortable, almost guilty.

"I had a day off. I—"

"When I look back and remember how all these months I've been talking about service, and you said nothing at all, and all the time you were living what I preached—I'm so ashamed, K."

He would not allow that. It distressed him. She saw that, and tried to smile.

"When does Joe go?"

"To-night. I'm to take him across the country to the railroad. I was wondering—"

"Yes?"

"I'd better explain first what happened, and why it happened. Then if you are willing to send him a line, I think it would help. He saw a girl in white in the car and followed in his own machine. He thought it was you, of course. He didn't like the idea of your going to Schwitter's. Carlotta was taken ill. And Schwitter and—and Wilson took her upstairs to a room."