At the possibility of any such conversation—and of such language!—she flushed afresh and again called herself a fool. There could be no such conversation. Paliser would never question. He was too indifferent The consciousness comforted, precisely as, a moment before, the picture of herself shovelling gold had moved her to tears.

Then absently she found herself looking in the garden where the aproned man was at work. But it was Lennox that she saw. Again and again since the wedding-evening, when Paliser had told her of the unscrambled eggs, she had wondered about the broken engagement. On that evening she had felt that she had taken the wrong road and had lost her way. The feeling was momentary. If Lennox had never been engaged, the result would have been the same. Not once had he so much as said boo! He had not even looked it. At table, on the wedding-evening, the unscrambled eggs had not tasted very good, but reflection had salted them and since then, in reviewing the matter, it had occurred to her that it was none of her business.

Now as she looked out on the garden she wondered whether he had cared very greatly for this girl, for if he had, what then did she mean by throwing over a man who was too good for her, too good for anybody?

She sighed and absently looked again at the gardener. He was bending down, occupied in planting something. Since she had first noticed him he had half-circled a parterre and she was about to telephone and ask if the car were ready when he straightened, turned, extracted a pipe and attempted to light it.

The air was very still, there was no breeze, but the match was ineffective. On his trousers, with a backward movement, he struck another match and raised it to the bowl. The flame, faintly blue, mounted and, with it, a curl of smoke. But it was not Cassy or, more exactly, it was not her objective self, that saw it. It was her subjective self that registered and afterward reproduced that momentary and entirely commonplace incident. What the objective Cassy saw was not the flame or the smoke or the pipe, but the hand that held the match. It was thumbless. Many hands are. From the hand she looked at the man's face and gave a little scream, instantly suppressed.

But her mouth twitched, she tried to swallow and she experienced, what was new to her, an odd sensation in the epiglottis. She did not remember that she had ever been what is called sick at the stomach, none the less she realised that she was on the point of becoming so. Like the little scream, she choked it back. But the immanence of nausea stifled her, and she sat down on a brocade-covered chair.

Her hand had gone to her throat and though almost at once the sensation subsided, she held it there. The gold bands of the rings that were pressed against her throat cooled it, but the palm of the hand was wet. Unconscious of that, she was unaware that she could not think. A crack on the head makes you dizzy and into her dizziness a somnolence had entered. The somnolence dulled all the cells of the brain save one and that one cell, vehemently active, was inciting her to some effort, though to what she did not know.

"I must get up," she presently told herself and told it once more.

In the repetition of the words there was the effect of a spray. The irritability of the one active cell subsided, that of the others was aroused. Somnambulism ceased. The entire brain awoke. But the truth had not yet fully permeated all the cerebral convolutions and the fact that it had not, manifested itself in the melodramatic phrase which, a week previous, Lennox had uttered, which all have uttered, all at least before whom the unforseen has sprung.

"It is impossible!"

She got up, went to the window, looked again. There was no impossibility there, no doubt even, or the peradventure of one. There was only the ineluctable truth. The aproned man disclosed it. His thumbless hand had held the book. From his mouth, in which there was a pipe, had come the benediction. He was Dr. Grantly. That was the ineluctable truth, the truth which already perhaps she had intercepted in the land of Beauty and Horror.

The first sight of it had sickened. Now the physical effect had gone. But the nausea in passing had been replaced by another sensation, deadlier, equally human, that made her red and hot, blurred her eyes, set her quivering, shook her, put her thoughts on fire, vitriolised her with hate.

Nietzsche said that a woman's ability to hate is in proportion to her inability to charm. The brute omitted to add that a woman's ability to charm corresponds to her evolution.

There was nothing evolved about Cassy then. She had lapsed back into the primitive. Like Armide, she could have burned the palace that enchanted her. None the less, she did nothing. To do nothing may be very important. The inactivity saved her. During it, the vitriol vaporised; the hate fell by. She was still trembling, her hands were unsteady, but the fever was departing, the crisis had passed, the primitive had slunk back into the cellars of the subconscious, and, in the chair, to which without knowing it she had returned, she faced it.

Without, some one knocked and, getting no answer, accepted the invitation as most people do.

"Beg pardon, Mrs. Paliser. The car is at the door."

Cassy half turned. "What?"

Emma reconstructed it. "Whenever you are ready, mem, the car will be waiting."

Cassy turned away. "That will do."

"Thank you, mem."

With that air which servants assume, Emma pursed her lips, reopened them, thought better of it, closed them and closed too the door.

Facing it still, Cassy sat in the brocaded chair. Anger had shaken her and gone, taking with it its spawn which hatred is. What inhabited her then was disgust.

I am in a nice mess, she told herself. But she told it without surprise, as though all along it was something which she might have known, could have avoided, but into which she had put her foot. A momentary vision of the red-crossed Lady Bountiful returned and she even smiled at it. It was a sad little smile though.

Abstractedly, she had been turning and twisting the rings. The motion aroused her. It drew her attention to them. They also had something to say. Something which they had been saying ever since the smoke curled from the pipe. She had not heard it then. There had been too many things tumbling about her. But now she did hear. She took them off, stood up and dropped them on the table where they fell between gold-backed brushes and a vase, gorgeous in delicacy, the colour of ox-blood.

From a cupboard she took the rowdy frock, the tam, the basilica underwear and, for a moment, searched and searched vainly for a pair of stockings. In hunting for them she unearthed the bundle, and that together with the other things, she threw on the bed, which was not brocaded, or even daised. It was silver. A few days before, when she had first seen it, she had clapped her hands. The vase too she had applauded. Now the lovely room, that had seemed so lovely, a curl of smoke had turned into a lupanar.

Quickly, one after another, the modish hat, the delicious frock, the things that could be drawn through a ring, were removed and replaced. In the mirror she looked, stopped, looked again, adjusted the tam and was going to the bed for the bundle when she heard a horn. Head-drawn, she listened.

She would have so much preferred to leave without seeing him or speaking to him. If she could, she would have gone without a word, silently, in the only dignified manner that was possible. But, apparently, matters had arranged themselves otherwise. She went to the bed, took the bundle, moved back to the table and waited.

She did not wait long. Paliser, with the pretence of a knock and a smile on his lips walked in—but not far. That frock, that bundle, the sight of her there, sufficed. He knew. With an awkwardness that was unusual with him, he closed the door and twisted his hat. The smile had gone from his lips. They were dry.

Then as he looked at her and she looked at him—and with what a look!—words seemed such poor things. It was as though already everything had been said, as perhaps in the silent temples of their being, everything, accusations, recriminations, all the futilities of speech had been uttered, impotently, a moment since. A moment earlier she had said her say. As he looked at her he knew that she had and knew too, that before he entered the room, already she had heard his replies.

The consciousness of this, equally shared by both, was so intense that, for a second, Cassy felt that everything happening then had happened ages ago, that she was taking part in a drama rehearsed on a stage that memory cannot reconstruct but which stood, and, it may be, still stands, back of those doors that close behind our birth.

The hallucination, if it be one, and which, given certain crises of the emotions, is common enough, vanished abruptly as it had come. But two seconds had gone since Paliser entered the room, yet, in those seconds, both recognised that eternity had begun between them.

With his hat, a hat studiously selected, made to order, Paliser motioned and with the same studiousness, selecting a platitude, he produced it. "I was going to take you out."

"After taking me in," Cassy in reviewing the situation subsequently commented. But at the time she said nothing. She merely looked. Her rage was gone, her anger spent. Only disgust remained. It was that which her face expressed. It was withering.

Paliser, steadying himself and, as was perhaps only natural, hedging still, resumed: "But apparently you have other intentions."

What a cad that blackguard is! thought Cassy who still said nothing.

"May I ask what they are?"

Cassy threw up her chin. "My intentions are to leave——"

"But why?"

"Don't presume to interrupt me. My intentions are to leave your assignation-house and have you horsewhipped."

Paliser had been served with strong drink before, but none ever as strong as that. It steadied him. He had expected that when it got to her, as eventually it must, there would be the passionate upbraidings, the burst of sobs, the Oh! Oh's!, the What will become of me?, the usual run up and down the scale and the usual remedies which a bank account supplies. He had expected all that. He had prescribed for it often. There was not a symptom for which he did not know the proper dose and just when to administer it. But barely had he crossed the threshold before he realised that all his science would be in default.

Cassy presented an entirely new case, but, fortunately, in the drink which she had served, he saw or thought he saw how to treat it.

He gestured again. "I never cared for scenes. But this house, which it has pleased you to describe from your knowledge of other establishments, is——"

Whatever he may have intended to add, was interrupted. Cassy, previously inexorable as fate, but converted then into a fury, dropped the bundle and caught up the vase. Missing him, it hit the door, where musically it crashed and shattered.

He turned, looked at it, looked at her, at the table. Barring the gold-backed brushes, the jade platter and that bundle, there was nothing that she could conveniently shy, and, in his Oxford voice, but civilly enough, he gave it to her.

"Allow me. There is no necessity whatever for your acting in this manner. The situation, such as it is, it had been my intention to remedy. It had been my intention, I say. But yesterday it came to my knowledge that it is because of your relations with Lennox that his engagement is broken."

Take that, he mentally added and continued aloud: "I might not have believed the story, but I was told that Lennox admitted it." Take that, too, he mentally resumed. I shall be treated to tears in a minute and in no time it will be "Kamerad!"

Sidewise he looked at the ruin of the vase, on which Daughters of Heaven and an ablated dynasty may have warmed their eyes. It affronted his own. Insult, yes, that could be tossed about, but not art, not at least the relatively unique.

With a crease in his lips which now were dry no longer, he looked at Cassy. The awaited tears were not yet visible. But the blood-madness that had seized her, must have let her go, routed, as haematomania may be, by the trivial and, in this instance, by a lie. That lie suffocated her. It was as though, suddenly, she had been garroted.

The condition was only momentary, but, during it, a curtain fell on this vulgar drama, which was to affect so many lives. Before the girl a panorama passed. She saw herself leaving Lennox' rooms. She saw Margaret Austen, saw the woman with her, saw the former's candid eyes; saw the latter's ridiculous airs, saw the construction which between them they had reached and saw, too, the consequences that had resulted. The dirt with which she had been besplattered she did not see. The panorama did not display it. What it alone revealed was Lennox' disaster. Of herself she did not think and regarding Margaret she did not care. That which occupied her was Lennox.

But was it true? In Paliser nothing was true, not even his lies. For it was unaccountable that a matter so simple could not have been cleared with a word. But it was not unaccountable at all. It was obvious. Margaret, a born snob, had given Lennox no chance for that word. Some one, Paliser probably, had invented the admission and she had refused to see him, after condemning him unheard.

I will attend to that, Cassy decided.

At once the suffocation ceased, the panorama sank, the scene shifted, the curtain parted, the drama proceeded and she found herself staring at Paliser, who was staring at her.

"As it is——" he tentatively resumed and would have said more, a lot, anything to coerce the tears to her eyes and with them surrender.

She gave him no chance. She took the bundle and, before he could continue, she passed him, opened the door, slammed it with a din that had in it the clatter of muskets, went down the stair and out to the perron, before which stood a car.

"The station!" she threw at the mechanician.

The house now, jarred a moment earlier by the crash of porcelain and the slamming door, had recovered its silence.

From within, Emma, very agreeably intrigued, a footman with a white sensual face beside her, looked out with slanting eyes.



XXV

Harris, wrinkled as a sweetbread and thin as an umbrella, blinked at Cassy. "Mr. Lennox is out, mem."

"Then go and fetch him."

Past the servant, Cassy forced her way through the vestibule, into the sitting-room, where the usual gloom abided, but where, unusually, were a smell of camphor, two overcoats, two trunks and a bag.

Cassy, putting down the bundle, exclaimed at them. "He is not leaving town?"

"Yes, mem, to-morrow morning, for Mineola." He spoke grudgingly, looking as he spoke like a little old mule at bay.

Cassy, noticing that, said: "See here, I don't mean to bully you, but it is most important that I should see Mr. Lennox—important for him, do you hear?"

"I hear you, mem, but I don't know where he is."

"Then find out. There must be a telephone."

Harris scratched his head but otherwise he did nothing.

"Come!" Cassy told him. "Hurry!"

Harris shifted. "I don't know as how he'd like it. He's been that upset these last few days. I——" He hesitated. Visibly an idea had visited him with which he was grappling. "You're not from Miss Austen, now, are you?"

Cassy caught at it. To confirm it would be fanciful. To deny it would be extravagant. Choosing an in-between for the benefit of this servant whom she knew to be English, she produced it.

"I am the Viscountess of Casa-Evora."

Harris wiped his mouth. A viscountess who had come only the other day with a bundle, and who now forced her way in with another bundle, did not coincide with such knowledge as he had of the nobility. But she was certainly overbearing enough to be anybody.

He turned. "Very good, your ladyship, I'll telephone."

Don't ladyship me, Cassy was about to reply, but judging that impolitic, she sat down.

On the train in she had debated whether she would go first to Harlem or to Lennox and in either case what afterward she should do. She had a few dollars which her father would need. The thought of these assets reminded her that in changing her clothes she had omitted to change back into her own stockings. Well, when she changed again she would return the pair which she had on and, as she determined on that, she saw Paliser's face as she had seen it when she threw the vase. That relapse into the primitive shamed her. She had behaved like a fish-wife. But though she regretted the violence, she regretted even more deeply the vase. The destruction of art is so despicably Hun! For moxa, she evoked the Grantly masquerade.

The entire lack of art in that seemed to her incongruous with the surface Paliser whom she had known. But had she even known the surface which itself was a mask? Yet behind the mask was an intelligence which at least was not ordinary, yet which, none the less, had descended to that! She could not understand it. She could not understand, what some one later explained to her, that a high order of intellect does not of itself prevent a man from soiling it and, with it, himself and his hands. The explanation came later, when other matters were occupying her and when Paliser, headlined in the papers, was dead.

Meanwhile the train had landed her in the Grand Central and she decided to go to Lennox first.

Now as she sat in his sitting-room where, for all she knew, she might have to sit for hours, it comforted her to think that she had so decided. If she had put it off until the morrow, Lennox would, by then, have gone to the aviation-field, where he might be killed before she could patch things up. At thought of that, she wondered whether he might not stay out undiscoverably all night and send for his things to be fetched to the station.

But in that case, Cassy promptly reflected, I'll go to her, pull her out of bed, drag her there—and no thanks either. I didn't do it for you, I did it for him. He's too good for you.

On the mantel, a clock struck, while thinly, through a lateral entrance, Harris emerged.

"The hall-porter at Mr. Lennox' club says he's just gone out with Mr. Jones. Yes, ma'am."

"Mr. Jones! What Mr. Jones? The novelist?"

"I'm thinking so, ma'am. A very haffable gentleman."

"Try to get him. Ask if Mr. Lennox, is there. Or, no, I'll do the talking."

Then presently she was doing it, collaborating rather in the dialogue that ensued.

"Mr. Jones?"

"Yes, darling."

Cassy, swallowing it, resumed: "Mr. Jones, forgive a stranger for intruding, I——"

"Beautiful voice, forgive me. Triple brute that I am, I thought it was my aunt."

"Then let me introduce myself. This is Miss Cara."

"Casta diva! You do me infinite honour!"

"Mr. Jones, I must see Mr. Lennox. It is a matter of life and death."

"Lennox is engaged with death now."

"What!"

"He is preparing for the great adventure. At this moment he is making his will. Miss Cara?"

"Yes?"

"Lennox takes even serious matters gravely."

"But he is with you?"

"In my workshop and at your service as I am."

"You will let me come there?"

"Enthusiastically and yet with all humility for I have no red carpet to run down the stair."

"Then hold on to him, please."

Ouf! sighed Cassy, as she hung it up. Another man who might be Mrs. Yallum's husband! She took the telephone-book, found and memorised the address and turned to Harris. "Thank you very much. Will you mind giving me that package?"

"Beg pardon, ma'am," the little man said, as he opened the door for her. "There's nothing more amiss, is there?"

Cassy covered him with her lovely eyes. "When Mr. Lennox comes back here, he may tell you to unpack."

"Then may God bless your ladyship."

Cassy went on.

At Jones' shop, a floor in a reconstructed private house, a man who had the air of performing a feat, showed her into a room that was summarily, but not spartanly, furnished. On one side was a bookcase supported by caryatides. Above, hung a stretch of silk on which was a flight of dragons. Above the silk was an ivory mask. Fronting the bookcase was the biggest table that Cassy had ever seen.

Jones, vacating the table, advanced to greet her. Perched on his shoulder, was a cat that peered at her. It had long hair, the colour of smoke; a bushy tail; the eyes of an angel and a ferocious moustache.

Although Cassy had other matters in hand, she exclaimed at it. "What a duck!"

Jones, who saw, and at once, that she had not come to ask the time of day, exclaimed also: "Yes, but ducky is as ducky does. That cat talks in her sleep."

But now Lennox, advancing too, had taken her hand.

Withdrawing it, she put the bundle on the table, on which were papers, and, noticeably, a dagger, brilliant, wicked, thin as a shadow. On the blade was a promise—Penetrabo.

She looked up. Jones and the cat had gone. She looked at Lennox. "I don't know where to begin."

Lennox could not tell her. On learning that she wanted to see him, he had supposed it was about her father and he had said as much to Jones. But in greeting her, the novelist knew from her vibrations that whatever her object might be, at least it was not ordinary. Then, taking the cat, he had gone.

Now, though, Cassy was at it. "The day you loaned me a hundred, you remember? As I went out I had the money in my hand. In the hall was Miss Austen. You had just shown me her picture. I recognised her at once. With her was a woman, thin-faced, thin-lipped, thin-minded. She saw me, saw the money, gave me a look. I did not forget it. But it is only to-day that I learned what it meant. It meant that I am no better than I ought to be—or you either."

Lennox had one hand on the table. He raised the other. "Who told you this?"

"Paliser. He said it was the reason your engagement was broken."

In the palm of the upraised hand, the fingers moved forward and back, regularly, methodically, mechanically. Lennox was unaware of it. He was unaware of anything except the monstrous perversity of the tale.

"I came directly from him to your rooms. Your man said you were going away. Thank goodness, I am not too late."

Cassy had seated herself, but now, reaching for the bundle, she stood up. Across the street, in the house opposite, a boy was lowering a shade. It seemed to Cassy that she had raised one. But there are explanations that explain nothing. To Lennox there was a shade suspended before Margaret, who had judged him unheard. It obscured her. He could not see her at all.

Over the way, the boy lowered a second shade and Cassy, as though prompted by it, raised another. "Paliser said you admitted it."

From the obscurity Lennox turned, but it was still about him. "Admitted what?"

Cassy reddened. "What I told you."

With the movement of the head that a bull has when he is going for you, Lennox bent his own. The movement, which was involuntary, was momentary. The shade had lifted. He saw Margaret, but behind her he saw others holding her back, telling her he was not fit to be spoken to. He was going for them. Meanwhile he had forgotten Cassy. He looked up, saw her, remembered the part attributed to her in the story and struck the table.

"It is damnable that such a thing should be said of you."

"Oh," Cassy put in. "It was not at all on my account that I told you. I——" She stopped short. The promised horsewhipping occurred to her.

Lennox took up the knife, gave it a turn, shoved it away. It was very much as though he had twisted it in somebody's gizzards. The idea had come to him that Paliser had concocted the admission. But, as he was unable to conceive what his object could be, he dismissed it. None the less, for what the man had said, he deserved to be booted down the club steps.

Cassy had stopped short. The story behind the story did not concern Lennox, yet as he might wonder how Paliser had ventured with her on such a subject, she began at it again.

"We were married recently, or anyway I thought so. To-day I discovered that the ceremony was bogus. Then I told him a thing or two and he told me that."

Lennox stared. Angry already, angry ever since the rupture, angry with that intensity of anger which only those who love—or who think they do—and who are thwarted in it ever know, and all the angrier because he had no one and could have no one to vent it on, until he got to the front and got at the Huns, at that last fillip from Cassy he saw some one on whom he could vent it, and yet to whom none the less he felt strangely grateful. For, whatever Paliser had done or omitted, at any rate, he had completely clarified the situation.

"I must run," said Cassy. "But you can tell Miss Austen, can't you?"

Lennox, controlling himself, motioned. "Would you mind repeating this to Jones?"

Cassy's eyebrows arched themselves. "It was hard enough to tell you. Were it not for your engagement, I wouldn't have said anything. When dreadful things happen to a girl, people always think that she must be dreadful herself. Isn't that nice of them? I——"

"See here," Lennox interrupted, "you can't leave it like this. Something has got to be done. I can give Paliser a hiding and I will. But that isn't enough. I don't know whether a criminal action will lie, but I do know that you can get damages and heavy ones."

Cassy's lovely eyes searched the room. "Who was that speaking? It wasn't you, was it?"

Lennox, recognising the rebuke, acknowledged it. "Forgive me. I forgot whom I was addressing. Jones will be less stupid. Let us have him in."

But when Jones, immediately requisitioned, appeared, Cassy again putting down her bundle, protested. "Mr. Lennox regards me as an Ariadne and expects me to act like a young lady in a department-store. Either role is too up-stage."

Jones, taken with her mobile mouth, her lovely eyes, the oval of her handsome face, said lightly: "It seems to me that you might assume any part."

Lennox struck out. "Paliser hocuspocused her with a fake marriage. He——"

"Oh," Cassy gently put in, "I have no one to blame but myself. I ought to have known better."

Jones nodded. "Probably you did know. The misadventure is rare of which we are not warned in advance. We cannot see the future but the future sees us. It sends us messages which we call premonitions."

Instantly Cassy was back in the Tamburini's room, where she had seen both beauty and horror. She had not reached the latter yet and the sudden vision Lennox dissipated.

"Stuff and nonsense! Haven't you anything else to say?"

Amiably Jones turned to him. "I can say that no one is wise on an empty stomach." He turned to Cassy. "The Splendor is not far. Will you dine with us, Mrs. Paliser?"

Violently Lennox repeated it; "Mrs. Paliser! Miss Cara is no more Mrs. Paliser than you are."

"To err is highly literary," Jones with great meekness replied. "I hear that it is even human."

Cassy reached again for the bundle. "It is only natural. If I had been told in advance, I could not have believed it. I could not have believed that mock marriages occur anywhere except in cheap fiction. But we live and unlearn. Now I must run."

Lennox took her hand. "I owe you a debt. Count on me."

He spoke gravely and the gravity of it, the force that he exhaled, comforted Cassy's bruised little heart and the comfort, the first that she had had, made her lip twitch. None of that, though! Reacting she rallied and smiled.

"Good-bye—and good luck!"

Jones saw her to the door, followed her out, followed her down to the street, where for a moment he detained her.

"Just a word, if you don't mind. You have been abominably treated and you seek no revenge. That is very fine. You have been abominably treated and you bear no malice. That is superior. You have been abominably treated and you accept it with a smile. That is alchemy. It is only a noble nature that can extract the beautiful from the base. Where do you live?"

At the change of key Cassy laughed but she told him. "Good-bye," she added. "My love to your cat."

She passed on into the sunset. The bundle seemed heavy now, but her heart was lighter. She had got it off, Lennox knew, presently a young woman would be informed and though she could not be expected to dance at the wedding, yet, after all——

The Park took her.



XXVI

When Cassy had gone, Jones went back to his rooms. He went absently, his mind not on her story, which was old as the Palisades, but on a situation, entirely new, which it had suggested.

"Nice girl," he remarked as he re-entered the workshop. "Suppose we go and have dinner."

Sombrely Lennox looked up. At the table where he sat, he had been fingering some papers. He threw them down.

"I am going to have a word with Paliser."

Jones cocked an eye at him. "See here, you are not a knight-errant. The age of chivalry is over." The novelist paused and exclaimed: "What am I saying! The age of chivalry is not over. It can't be. Last night, Verelst dined with a monster!"

Lennox pushed at the papers. "If I were alone concerned, I would thank Paliser. He has done me a good turn. He has set me straight."

Then, to the listening novelist, who later found the story very useful, Lennox repeated Cassy's version of the rhyme and reason of the broken engagement.

The tale of it concluded, Lennox flicked at a speck. "I am grateful to Paliser for that, but for the manner in which he treated her, I shall have a word with him. Just one."

Jones sat down. "A word, eh? Well, why not? Flipping a man in the face with a glove was fashionable in the days of Charles II. Tweaking the nose was Georgian. The horsewhip went out with Victoria. Posting your man was always rather coffee-house and a rough-and-tumble very hooligan. If I were you, which I am not, but if I were, I would adopt contemporaneous methods. To-day we just sit about and backbite. That is progress. Let me commend it to you."

With a wide movement, Lennox swept the papers, shoved them into a pocket and stood up.

Jones also stood up. "Got an appetite? Well, dining has the great disadvantage of taking it away. Come along."

Lennox put on his hat. "I am going first to Park Avenue."

No you're not, thought Jones, who, with an agility which for him was phenomenal, hurried to the door and backed against it.

Lennox motioned him aside.

Jones, without budging, lied. "They're out of town." It was very imbecile. He knew it was, knew, too, that Lennox knew it, and, for the imbecile lie, he substituted another. "I mean they are dining out."

"What the devil are you driving at?" Lennox asked, and not very civilly either.

"A windmill, I suppose. You look like one. I——"

Jones broke off. The expression on Lennox' face arrested him. The attempt at interference, the stupid evasions, the conviction which these things produced, that there was something behind them, something secreted, something about Margaret that Jones knew and which he was concealing, made him livid.

"Out with it."

Jones looked at him, looked away, adjusted his neckcloth, vacated the door, crossed the room and sat down. He did not know to what saint to vow himself. But realising that it was all very useless, that everything is, except such solicitude as one pilgrim may show to another, and that, anyway, Lennox would soon hear it, he gave it to him.

"She is engaged to Paliser."

Lennox, who was approaching, stopped short. "Miss Austen is?"

Jones nodded.

"To Paliser?"

But it seemed too rough and, to take the edge off, Jones added. "It may not be true."

"How did you hear?"

"Verelst told me. He dined there last night."

Lennox turned on his heel. Futilely in that hell to which one may look back and see that it was not hell but purgatory prior to paradise, futilely there he had sought the reason of his damnation. A few minutes before he had thought that Cassy's story revealed it. In the light of it he had seen himself condemned, as many another has been, for crimes which he had not committed. But he had seen, too, the order of release. He had only a word to say. He was going to Park Avenue to say it.

When Jones was below with Cassy so he had thought and not without gratitude to Paliser either. If the cad had held his tongue, enlightenment might have been withheld until to his spirit, freed perhaps in Flanders, had come the revelation. Personally he was therefore grateful to Paliser. But vicariously he was bitter. For his treatment of that girl, punishment should follow.

That girl! Obscurely, in the laboratory of the senses where, without our knowledge, often against our will, our impulses are dictated, a process, intricate and interesting, which Stendhal called crystallisation, was at work.

Unaware of that, conscious only of the moment, to his face had come the look and menace of the wolf.

Now——!

"There is a book over there," Jones, who was watching him, cut in. "It is Seneca's 'De animae tranquilitate.' Take a peek at it. It will tell you, what it has told me, that whatever happens, happens because it had to happen and because it could not happen otherwise. There is no sounder lesson in mental tranquillity."

But for all Lennox heard of that he might then have been dead. Without knowing what he was doing, he sat down. Paliser, Margaret! Margaret, Paliser! Before him, on encephalic films, their forms and faces moved as clearly as though both were in the room. He saw them approaching, saw them embrace. The obsession of jealousy that creates the image, projected it. He closed his eyes, covered his face with his hands. The image got behind them. It persisted but less insistently. The figures were still there. It was their consistence that seemed to fade. Where they had been were shadows—evil, shallow, malign, perverse, lurid as torches and yet but shades. For the jealousy that inflames love can also consume it and, when it does, it leaves ashes that are either sterile with indifference or potent with hate. At the shadows that were torches Lennox looked with closed eyes. Obscurely, without his knowledge, in the laboratory of his senses, crystallisation was at work.

Jones, leaning forward, touched him. "I say, old chap!"

Lennox had been far away, on a journey from which some men return, but never as they went. At Jones' touch he dropped his hands. The innate sentiment of form repossessed him. He straightened, looked about and, after the manner of the deeply preoccupied, who answer a question ten minutes after it is put, said evenly:

"Suppose we do."

Do what? But Jones, getting it at once, stood up. "Come along, then."

On the way to the neighbourly Athenaeum, the novelist talked endlessly about the disadvantages of not being born, which is a very safe subject. Talking still, he piloted Lennox to the dining-room where, the advantages of sedatives occurring to him, he ordered a bottle of Pommard, which is mother's milk.

But when it was brought Lennox would not touch it. He wanted brandy and soda and told Johnson, a captain, to see to it.

In the great high-ceiled room, other members were dining. From one of the tables Ogston sauntered over and, noting that Jones and Lennox had not dressed, which he had, and very beautifully, remarked brilliantly: "You fellers aren't going to the opera, are you? It's the last night."

It was another safe subject and Jones smiled falsely at him. "But you are, eh? Sit down."

Ogston put a hand on the novelist's chair. "No. I'm off to a theatre-party. But I have a ticket for the Metropolitan. You don't either of you want it, do you?"

"Let me see, what is it, to-night?" Jones, with that same false smile, enquired. "And where is the seat?"

"In Paliser's box. He's to be alone and left it here with a note asking me to join him."

Deeply, beneath his breath, Jones swore, but with the same smile, he tried to shift the subject. "You're quite a belle, aren't you?"

"See here, Ogston," Lennox put in, "let me have it."

Ogston, fumbling in his white waistcoat, extracted the ticket and handed it over.

"By the way, Lennox, do you mind my doing a little touting for Cantillon? He's with Dunwoodie. Give him your law business—some of it, anyhow."

"I'll give him some, when I have it," answered Lennox, who was to have some, and sooner and far more monumentally, than either he, or even Jones, suspected.

"Good for you, Lennox. Good-night, Jones." The brilliant and beautifully dressed young man nodded and passed on.

But now the captain was bearing down on them.

Jones looked at Lennox. "You will have to come back to my shop after dinner. There is a phrase in your will that I omitted. I forgot the 'seized and possessed.'"

Lennox drank before he spoke. Then he said: "After dinner, I shall do for Paliser."

Jones, waiting until the captain had gone, looked at Lennox again. "The greatest revenge is the disdain of any."

Lennox made no reply. A waiter put a plate before him and another before Jones. Members passed, going to their tables or leaving them. Occasionally one of them stopped, exchanged the time of day and then passed on. In each exchange Jones collaborated. Lennox said nothing. The food before him he tormented, poking at it with a fork, but not eating it.

Presently he asked for coffee, drank a cup and got up.

Jones, too, got up and, to stay him, put out a hand.

Lennox, treating it, and him, like a cobweb, went on.

Afterward, Jones thought of the Wild Women of whom AEschylus tells, the terrible Daughters of Hazard that lurk in the shadows of coming events which, it may be, they have marshalled.

Afterward he thought of them. But at the moment, believing that Lennox would do nothing and realising that, in any case, nothing can be more futile than an attempt to avert the inevitable, he was about to resume his seat, when something on the floor attracted him. He bent over, took it, looked at it and tucked it in a pocket.

Then, sitting down again, mentally he followed Lennox, whom later he was to follow farther, whom he was to follow deep in the depths where the Wild Women, lurking in wait, had thrown him.



XXVII

The Park that had taken Cassy and from which, at that hour, children and nursemaids had gone, was green, fragrant, quiet. Its odorous peace enveloped the girl who had wanted to cry. In hurrying on she had choked it back. But you cannot always have your way with yourself. The tears would come and she sat down on a bench, from behind which a squirrel darted.

Before her the grass departed, the trees disappeared, the path wound into nothingness. In their place was the empty vastness that sorrow is. The masquerade that had affected her physically, had affected her psychically and in each instance profoundly. It had first sickened and then stabbed. There had been no place for sorrow in the double assault. There had been no time for it either. Occupied as she had almost at once become with the misadventures of another, she had no opportunity to consider her own. Yet now the aspect that sorrow took was not that of disaster. What it showed was the loneliness of the soul, solitary as it ever is in that desert which, sooner or later, we all must cross. Vast, arid, empty, before her it stretched.

Nearby, on the bench, crouching there, eager, anxious, wary, a squirrel, its fluffy tail and tiny nostrils aquiver, watched her with eyes of bead. From the desert she turned and seeing the little gracious thing, stretched her hand. She would have liked to take it and pet it. It would have made her solitude less acute. At the movement, a ball of misty fur bounded. Where it had been, there was air.

The abrupt evaporation distracted her. Before her the desert lay, but in it now was her father. She had been going to him. Previously, she had thought that, when she did go, her hands would be filled with gifts. Instead they were bruised, bare to the bone. They would madden him and she wondered whether she could endure it. The long, green afternoon, that had been so brief, had been so torturesome that she doubted her ability. But he would have to be told. She could not lie to him and humanly she wished that it were to-morrow, the day after, the day after that, when it would be over and done for, put away, covered by woes of his own, though inevitably to be dragged out again and shown her, and shown her, too, with the unconscious cruelty that those who love you display.

It would be crucifying, but there was no help for it. Reaching for the bundle, she stood up and went her way, across the Park, to the subway, from which she got out in Harlem.

The loveliness of that land of love seemed to have changed, though the change, she then recognised, was in herself. But at least the walk-up was unaltered. In the grimy entrance was Mrs. Yallum, a fat Finn, who looked like a dirty horse, and who yapped at her volubly, incomprehensibly, but with such affection that Cassy, yapping back, felt less lonely as she ascended the stair.

The comfort was mediocre. In the afternoon she had gone from a ruin. Now she had the sensation of entering another, one from which she had also gone, but to which she was returning and with a spirit so dulled in the journey! Had she, she wondered, any spirit left at all? At least enough remained to prevent any wish for the reconstruction of the ruin behind her. About the fallen walls were forms of filth; in the crevices there were vermin, and though, before her, the desert stretched, it was clean. However arid, it was wholesome.

But now she was at the door. She let herself in, hurried to the living-room, where, with the feigned cheerfulness of the unselfish, she beamed at her father and bent over him.

"Here I am to look after you again! How well you look. I am so glad and oh! where is your sling?"

In speaking she stroked him. His skin was clearer, she thought, and the abandoned sling was a relief.

He looked up at her. "You got married without me. I ought to have been there. Why didn't you tell me? It was for me to give you away. Who did?"

"Who did what?"

"Who gave you in marriage?"

With the mimic of gaiety, Cassy laughed. "Why, you old dear, all that has gone out. Hereabouts, nowadays, a father never goes to a wedding—only to funerals."

She paused and, with the idea of breaking it to him in bits, resumed: "Besides, it was all done in a hurry, in too much of a hurry."

He took it in, but at the wrong end. "Sick of him already, eh? Well, it isn't because I did not warn you. Where is he?"

Cassy moved back. Should she give it to him then or later? But the question, repeating itself, followed her.

"Where is your husband?"

Now for it, she thought. But at once he switched. "There was nothing in the papers. Why is that? What is that package?"

Cassy looked at the bundle which she still held. It gave her courage.

"I am not married."

For a second he stared. It was obvious that he had not got it. "Where have you been, then?"

Cassy fingered the bundle. Always she had hated to explain and of all possible explanations what could be more hateful than this? If only he would guess it, flare up, stamp about, get it over, let it go. But the cup was there and she drank it.

"I thought I was married. I am a fool."

For the awaited curse, she braced herself. The explosion did not come, but his eyes had widened. They covered her. Then, with an intake of the breath and of understanding, he lowered them. Apparently he was weighing it and Cassy thought he was trying to restrain himself, and she blessed him for it. It was less terrible than she had feared. But immediately it occurred to her that instead of trying to restrain himself, he was seeking the strength wherewith to rend her. And I am so innocent, she despairfully thought.

Her eyes were upon him and he looked up into hers.

"Why did you think you were married?"

"I told you, because I am a fool. There was a clergyman and a ceremony. Afterwards I found that the clergyman was not a clergyman and that the ceremony was a sham."

"When was that?"

"This afternoon."

"What did you do?"

"What was there for me to do? I left him."

"Where is he now?"

Cassy put down the bundle. She had no idea. But she said: "This evening we were to go to the opera. I hardly fancy he will miss it on my account." She paused and with a little catch in her voice continued: "I know it is all my fault, I ought to have known better and I shall be so unhappy if you mind. Won't you try not to?"

As she spoke, he stood up and she thought that the delayed volcano of his wrath was about to burst. To smother it, she touched him. "Of course you will mind. But I would not have been such a fool if I had not believed that everything would be so much nicer for you. Can't you see that and, if you do, can't you forgive me?"

He had moved from her to the piano; there he turned and looked. "There is nothing to forgive, Cassy. You have been a good girl always. I am sorry, of course I am sorry, but you are not to blame."

Understanding instead of maledictions! Sympathy in lieu of abuse! Such things are affecting. The tears swam to her eyes and wretchedly and yet thankfully she wept.

He did not seem to notice. In the narrow space he was moving about, shifting things on the piano, displacing and replacing a score, which, finally, he let fall. He stooped for it. As he raised it, Cassy saw through her tears that his hand was shaking. He, too, may have seen it. He left the room and she heard him pottering in the kitchen.

She wiped her eyes. Across the court was another kitchen in which were a woman and a child. Often she had seen them there, but if she had seen them elsewhere she would not have recognised them. They were but forms, the perceptions of a perceiver, and though Cassy had never read Fichte and was unacquainted with Berkeley, the idea visited her that they had no real existence, that, it might be, she had none either, that all she had endured was a dream drifting by, with nothing past which to drift.

It was her father's attitude that had induced these metaphysical hysterics. She had expected that some demon within him would spring out and gibber. Instead of which he had told her, and so gently, that she was not to blame. It is words like these that bring tears swiftest. The tears had come, but the words had also sufficed to reduce the people across the way into baseless appearances, in which, for the moment, she included herself.

But now at least her father was actual. He was coming in with glasses and a bottle which he put on the table.

"You are tired," he said. "Have a little."

Seating himself, he drank and Cassy feared that if the liquor exerted the authority that liquor has, he might go back into it and exact from her details which it would revolt her to supply. In helping himself, he had poured a glass for her. She did not want it. What she wanted was bed and the blanket of long, dreamless sleep. It could not be too long. She was tired, as he had said, but more so than he knew, tired with the immense fatigue that emotions and their crises create.

She moved over to where he sat. Several minutes had gone since he spoke yet it seemed to her but the moment before.

"Yes, I am tired, but you're a good daddy and I love you."

She bent over him, went to the kitchen, got a glass of milk and a biscuit, which she carried to her room, where she opened the window and closed the door.

Long later, when she awoke, it was with the consciousness of something there, something waiting, something evil, something that had jeered and pummelled her in her sleep. But what? Then, instantly, she knew. A palace of falsehoods had tumbled about her and the lies had laughed and bruised her as they fell. They had been laughing and falling the whole night through.

The light distracted her. In the morning, because of the building opposite, her room was dark. Now it was bright. The sun had scaled the roof. A gleam looked in and told her it was noon.

How could I have slept so long? she wondered. She put some things on and opening the door smelled coffee. The poor dear! she thought, he had to make it himself.

She went on into the living-room. There her father sat. On the table before him was a paper.

Without speaking he pointed at a headline. The letters squirmed. They leaped and sprang at her. From before them she backed. But what nonsense! It was impossible. She could not believe it. Yet there it was! Abruptly there also was something else. An electric chair, the man of all men in it!

From before the horror of that she reeled, steadied herself, looked at her father, looked without seeing him.

"God of gods! And I did it!"



XXVIII

In high red boots, wide purple breeches and a yellow mandarin jacket, Jones entered the workshop.

His appearance did not alarm him. He was invisible. Lloyd George and Clemenceau might have called. Mr. Ten Eyck Jones was not at home, sir. If necessary he was dead. Always, while he dressed, his servant put, unseen, a tray on the workshop table and, still unseen, disappeared. With the tray was the morning paper and the usual letters, which Jones never read. Morning in the workshop meant work. No interruptions permitted. On one occasion the house got on fire. His servant did not venture to tell him, though the firemen did. Apart from such outrages, necessarily infrequent, the only intrusion was the morning paper and the cat that talked in her sleep. The cat had many privileges, the paper had few. Sometimes it was briefly considered, more often it was not even looked at, but its great privilege consisted in being stacked.

On this morning Jones did look, but quite involuntarily, and only because a headline caught his eye. It was the same headline from before which Cassy backed. The leaping words shouted at the girl. They shouted at the novelist, a circumstance which did not prevent him from breakfasting.

The fruit, the crescents, the coffee he consumed, not as was customary, with his thoughts on his own copy, but on that which the paper supplied. It was very colourful. At the opera, the night before, Monty Paliser had been killed.

In New York, many men are killed, but not so many are murdered and of those that are murdered, few are millionaires and fewer still have a box at the Metropolitan, where, apart from stage business, no one up to then had been done for. The case was therefore unique and, save for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, without a parallel. In the circumstances, the leaded line of leaping words was justified.

According to the story that followed and which, Jones realised, must have reached the city editor just as the paper was going to press, an attendant, whose duty it was to visit the boxes after the performance and see what, if anything, the occupants had forgotten, had, on entering Paliser's box, found him at the back of it, unconscious, on the floor. There were no external marks of violence, but a commandeered physician pronounced him dead and, on examination, further pronounced that death was due to internal hemorrhage, superinduced by heart-puncture, which itself had been caused by some instrument, presumably a stiletto.

A picturesque detail followed. The box at the right was owned by the Leroy Thompsons. The box at the left was the Harriwells'. At the late hour, an attempt to communicate with the former had failed, but over the wire, Mr. Legrand Harriwell stated that the deceased had come in during the third act, that he had spoken to Mrs. Harriwell, after which he had moved back and had either gone, or remained in the rear of the box. Mr. Harriwell knew nothing else, he had been unaware of anything occurring, he was not in the habit of spying about and he wished it distinctly understood that he must not be mixed up in the matter, or Mrs. Harriwell either.

The dear thing! thought Jones, who saw him, a tall, thin-lipped beast of a brute, with a haw-haw manner and an arrogant air. God bless him!

But, Jones resumed to himself, voyons! The opera was Aida. Paliser came in during the third act. The house then is brilliant. But during the fourth—the duo in the crypt—it is dark. It was then that he was done for and with what is assumed to have been a stiletto.

To cut out the account, Jones turned in search of a dagger, long, thin, wicked, which, one adventurous night in Naples, he had found—just in time—in his back. On the blade was inscribed a promise, Penetrabo. Now his eyes roamed the table. He lifted the tray, lifted his copy, looked on the floor. Yet only the evening before, when Lennox was there and Cassy Cara had come, he had seen it. Since then it had gone.

The disappearance did not disturb him. Occasionally, in hunting for an object, he found it in his hand. It is somewhere, he cogently reflected and, taking a pencil, set to work.

But the muse was timorous as a chicken. The metaphor is entirely metaphorical. Jones had no faith in the wanton. He believed in regular hours, in silence and no interruptions. No intrusions of any kind. A letter was an intrusion, so also was the news of the day. These things he considered, when he did consider them, after his work was done. Sometimes he ignored them entirely. Usually he had a bushel of letters that he had not opened, a bale of papers at which he had not looked. Of such is the life known as literary or, at any rate, such was the life led by Jones.

On this morning, his copy, ordinarily fluent enough, would not come. Ideas fluttered away just out of reach. The sequence of a chapter had been in his head. Like the dagger, it had gone. He could not account for that disappearance, nor did he try. It would turn up again. So, ultimately, would the ousted sequence. For the latter's departure he did not try to account either. The effort was needless. He knew. An interruption had occurred. The news of the day had intruded itself upon him. A headline had entangled his thoughts.

Abandoning the pencil, he lit a cigarette. Across the room, above the bookcase, was a stretch of silk, a flight of dragons that he had got in Rangoon. Above the silk was an ivory mask, the spoil of a sarcophagus, which he had found in Seville. He looked at them. The dragons fled on, the mask fell asleep. Something else took their place.

On the wall was the scene at the opera.

In the golden gloom of the darkened house, it showed Paliser, sitting back in his box, presumably enjoying the Terra addio, for which Caruso had, as usual, been saving himself. Without, in the corridor, a figure furtively peering at the names on the doors. Then the voice of the soprano blending with that of the tenor and, during the divine duo, the door of the box opening, letting in a thread of light; Paliser turning to look and beholding that figure and a hand which, instantly descending, deepened the gloom forever.

It was certainly Terra addio, Jones reflected. Certainly, too, the scene is easy enough to reconstruct But whose was the hand?

Flicking his ashes, he looked about and saw two hands, between which, he also saw, he was entirely free to pick and choose. One hand, slight and fragile, was Cassy Cara's. The other, firm and virile, was Lennox'.

Lennox had threatened. He had been acidly murderous. He had a motive. He had the opportunity. He knew where Paliser would be. He had been supplied with a seat in that box. The hand was his. It was a clear case. That was obvious, particularly to Jones, who regarded the obvious as very misleading.

Given the chance, he reflected, and Lennox might have done for Paliser, but he would have done for him with bare fists, never with a knife. It was not Lennox to use one. It was not Lennox at all.

Jones threw him out and pulled in Cassy Cara.

The case against her was equally clear. Presumably she owned the stiletto which a hat pin is. In addition, she also had a motive. If ever a girl had cause to up and do it, she had. Then, too, the risk was negligible. Any jury would acquit and tumble over each other to shake hands with her. For equity has justice that the law does not know. Moreover there are crimes that jurists have not codified. Some are too inhuman, others too human. Cassy's righting of her own wrongs belonged among the latter. Cassy's, that is, provided she had done it. But had she? Logically, yes. If the police could look behind the scenes, logically they would say to her, "Thou art the man."

But, Jones resumed, logic when pushed far enough becomes incoherence. The psychologist prefers vision and it would display none to believe that she did it. In the abstract, that is to be regretted. A lovely assassin! A beautiful girl slaying a recreant lover! A future prima donna killing a local millionaire! Monty Paliser murdered by the Viscountess of Casa-Evora! And at the opera! If I had ever put anything of the kind in my copy, reviewers would have indolently asked: "Why doesn't this imbecile study life?"

Jones laughed. The enjoyment of one's own ideas—or of the absence of them—is a literary trait. When Dumas wrote, he roared.

Here it is, then, Jones continued. If the police knew certain things they would nab Lennox. If they knew others, they would nab Cassy Cara. If they knew more, they would nab me. I should be held as a witness. This is cheerful, particularly as my sole complicity in the matter has been due to a desire to be of use. But that is just it. Through the enigmatic laws of life, any kindness is repaid in pain.

Pleasurably, for a moment, he considered the altruism of that aphorism. Then he got back at the murder which, he decided, must have been premeditated by some one who knew where Paliser would be. That conclusion reached, he groped for another. Lennox knew, but did Cassy know, and, if she did, had she utilised the knowledge?

To decide the point he reviewed the visit of the previous evening.

Ostensibly Cassy's visit had been occasioned not by any wish to relate what had happened to her, but to acquaint Lennox with the cause of what had happened to him. In view of what had befallen her, the proceeding was certainly considerate. In the misadventures of life, the individual is usually so obsessed by his own troubles that they blind him to those of another. But ostensibly Cassy had sunk her troubles and had pulled them up, not to exhibit them, but to show Lennox the lay of the land as it affected not her at all but him. The proceeding was certainly considerate—unless it were astute, unless her object had been to employ Lennox for the wreaking of her own revenge.

That was possible, but was it probable?

An ordinary young woman would have gone at it differently, gone at it hammer and tongs. Cassy's methods were merely finer. That was the common sense view. But was it psychology? The common sense view that is applicable to the average individual is inapplicable to a problematic nature and, consequently, not to Cassy, who must therefore have had another incentive for her visit, an incentive stronger than the primitive instinct for revenge.

But, Jones asked himself, what are the fundamental principles of human activity? They are self-preservation and the perpetuation of the species. Every idea that has existed, or does exist, in the mind of man is the result of the permutations and combinations of those two principles, of which the second is the stronger and its basis is sex. That is what actuated Cassy. She is, or was, in love with Lennox, and told him for no other reason.

That is it, Jones decided. But the course of her true love could not have run very smooth and, knowing that Lennox was otherwise interested, she took up with Paliser out of pique.

Pique! he repeated. But no, that is not Cassy Cara either. She——

Like a thread snapped suddenly, the novelist's meditations ceased. On the wall before him the dragons alighted, the mask awoke. Between them a canvas was emerging. Dim, shadowy, uncertain, it hesitated, wavered, advanced.

Then, as it hung unsupported in the air—far too unsupported, he presently thought—he looked it over.

To apparitions he was accustomed. They were part of his equipment. Unsummoned, without incantations they came, sent, one might think, by the muse whom he derided, but more naturally and very simply produced by the machinery in his brain.

Now, as he examined the canvas, its imprecision diminished, the shadows passed, the obscurity lifted, the penumbra brightened, outlines defined themselves, the colouring appeared, a colouring, after the manner of Rembrandt, composed of darkness in which there is light and which, as such, reveals.

Jones stood up, turned around and sat down again as gamblers, disquieted by their luck, will do.

Before him still the picture floated. He disavowed it, disowned it. Yet there it was, the child of his fancy, the first-born of the morning, the fruit of his concentrated thought, and as, surprisedly, he considered it, it took on such semblances of legitimacy, that the disavowals ceased. Then, slowly disintegrating, its consistence lessened. It was departing, vaporously as it had come. Jones waved at it, omitting out of sheer abstraction to say Au revoir, yet omitting also, and through equal modesty, to say Eureka!

He pressed a button. Instantly, as though sprung from a trap, his servant appeared.

"Get Mr. Lennox on the telephone."

The minutes lengthened. Finally the servant reappeared.

"Mr. Lennox is not at home, sir. His man says he's gone to Centre Street. He's been arrested. Mr. Lennox has been arrested. Yes, sir."

Pausing, the servant cocked an ear and added: "They're calling extras, sir. Would you wish one?"

Circuitously, through the open door, the cat, her tail in the air, approached and wowed.

Jones leaned over and tickled her in the stomach. The cat hopped up on him. He put a finger to his forehead, held it there, removed it and looked at the man.

"In war-time, with the price of everything going up, it is a criminal waste of money to buy an extra—particularly when you know what isn't in it."

"Yes, sir."

Jones motioned. "Look through the old newspapers. Among the March issues there is one that has an article entitled 'The Matter of Ziegler.' Let me have it."

The cat, now on his shoulder, purred profusely in his ear. Raising a hand, he tickled her again.

"Mimi-Meow, this Matter of Ziegler may interest us very much and after we have looked it over, I will attend to our friend von Lennox, who seems to have become a Hun."



XXIX

Already over the picked-up codfish, flapjacks, Hamburg steaks and cognate enticements on which the Bronx and Harlem breakfasts, the news of it had buttered the toast, flavoured the coffee, added a sweetness to this April day and provided a cocktail to people who did not know Paliser from the Pierrot in the moon. That he was spectacularly wealthy was a tid-bit, that he had been killed at the Metropolitan was a delight, the war news was nothing to the fact that the party with the stiletto had escaped "unbeknownst." These people were unacquainted with Paliser. But here was a young man with an opera-box of his own, and think of that! Here was the mythological monster that the Knickerbocker has become. Here was the heir to unearned and untold increments. These attributes made him as delectable to the majority who did not know him, as he had become to the privileged few who did.

Elsewhere, and particularly in and about fashion's final citadel which the Plaza is, solemn imbeciles viewed the matter vehemently. "Young Paliser! Why, there is no better blood in town! By Jove, I believe we are related!"

Or else: "That's M. P.'s son, isn't it? Yes, here it is. I never met the old cock but I heard of him long before we came East. A damned outrage, that's what I call it."

Or again: "Dear me, what is the world coming to? What a blessing it is we were not there. They might have come and murdered us all!"

Adjacently, in clubland, old men with one foot in the grave and the other on Broadway, exchanged reminiscences of the nights when social New York was a small and early family party and M. P. led the ball, and at a pace so klinking that he danced beyond the favours of the cotillon—the german as it, the cotillon, was then lovingly called—into assemblies, certainly less select, but certainly, too, more gay, and had horrified scrumptious sedateness with the uproar of his orgies.

The indicated obituaries followed. "Well, at any rate, they didn't murder him for it." "The son now, a chip of the old block, eh?" "Nothing of the kind, a quiet young prig." "The papers say——" "Damn the papers, they never know anything." "You mean they don't print what they do know." "I mean they don't give us the woman. For it was a woman. I'll eat my hat it was a woman." "Let's have lunch instead."

Generally, for the moment, that was the verdict, one in which the police had already collaborated. But what woman? And, assuming the woman, whence had she come? Where had she gone?—problems, momentarily insoluble but which investigations, then in progress, would probably decide.

At the great white house on upper Fifth Avenue, the servants knew only that they knew nothing. Nothing at all. Already coached, they were sure and unshakable in their knowledge of that. A Mr. Harvey—from Headquarters—could not budge them an inch. Not one!

The night before, at the first intelligence of it, M. P. came nearer to giving up the ghost than is commonly advisable. Suffocation seized him. An incubus within was pushing his life-springs out. So can emotion and an impaired digestion affect a father. The emotion was not caused by grief. It was fear. For weeks, for months, during the tedium and terror of the trial, his name, Paliser, would top the page! It had topped it before, very often, but that was years ago. Then he had not cared. Then the wine of youth still bubbled. No, he had not cared. But that was long ago. Since then the wine of youth had gone, spilled in those orgies which he had survived, yet, in the survival, abandoned more and more to solitude and making him seek, what the solitary ever do seek, inconspicuousness. For years he had courted obscurity as imbeciles court fame. And now!

If only the boy had had the decency to die of pneumonia!

It was then the incubus gripped him. For a second he saw the visage, infinitely consoling, that Death can display and possibly, but for an immediate drug, there too would have echoed the Terra addio!

He was then in white velvet. A preparation of menthe, dripping from a phial, spotted it green. He did not notice. At the moment the spasm had him. Then as that clicked and passed, he looked in the expressionless face of the butler who had told him.

The spasm had shaken him into a chair.

The room, an oblong, was furnished after a fashion of long ago. The daised bed was ascended by low, wide steps. Beyond stood a table of lapis-lazuli. A mantel of the same material was surmounted by a mirror framed in jasper. Beneath the mirror, a fire burned dimly. The lights too were dim. They were diffused by tall wax candles that stood shaded in high gold sticks. On the table there were three of them.

The chair was near this table, at which M. P. had been occupied very laboriously, in doing nothing, a task that he performed in preparation for the bed, which was always ready for him, and for sleep, which seldom was. There he had been told. It had shaken him to his feet, shaken apoplexy at him and shaken him back in the chair.

Now, as he looked at the servant's wooden mask, for a moment he relived an age, not a pleasant one either and of which this blow, had he known it, was perhaps the karma. He did not know it. He knew nothing of karma. None the less, with that curious intuition which the great crises induce, he too divined the woman and wished to God that he had kept his hands off, wished that he had not interfered and told Monty to put her in a flat and be damned to her! It was she, he could have sworn it. At once, precisely as he wished he had let her alone, he hoped and quite as fervently that she had covered her tracks, that there would be no trial, nothing but inept conjectures and that forgetfulness in which all things, good and bad, lose their way.

The futility of wishing passed. The time for action had come. He motioned. "Is Benny here?"

"He left this noon, sir."

"Did he say anything?"

The butler did not know whether to lie or not, but seeing no personal advantage in either course, he hedged. "Very little, sir."

That little, the old man weighed. A little is often enough. It may be too much.

"He spoke about a girl, eh?"

"He said a lady was stopping there. Yes, sir."

"What else?"

The butler shuffled. "He said she was very pretty, sir."

"Go on, Canlon."

"Well, sir, it seems there was a joke about it. The young lady thought she was married."

"How was that?"

"I'm not supposed to know, sir. But from what was let on, Benny was rigged out as a dominie and it made 'em laugh."

The old man ran his head out like a turtle. "Damnation, what has that to do with it?"

"Why, sir, he pretended to marry her."

"Benny did?"

"Yes, sir."

"He pretended that she was his wife."

"No, sir, he pretended to marry her to Mr. Monty."

"Good God!" the old man muttered and sank back. The blackness was blacker than any black he had entered. In days gone by, he had agreeably shocked New York with the splendid uproar of his orgies. He had left undone those things which he ought to have done and done those things which he should have avoided. He had been whatever you like—or dislike—but never had he been dishonest. Little that would avail him now. If this turpitude were published, it would be said that he had fathered it. At the prospect, he felt the incubus returning. In a moment it would have him and, spillingly, he drank the green drug.

The agony receded, but the nightmare confronted him. He grappled with it.

"The coat I had on at dinner. There is a card-case in the pocket. Give it to me."

Probably it was all very useless. Probably no matter what he contrived, the police would ferret her out. There was just one chance though which, properly taken, might save the situation.

The card-case, pale damask, lined with pale silk, the man brought him. He put it on the table.

"Canlon!"

"Yes, sir."

"Benny said nothing."

"Very good, sir."

"I have a few hundred for you here, between eight and nine, I think."

"Thank you, sir."

"To-morrow there will be more."

"I am sure I am very grateful, sir."

"Don't interrupt me. Recently my son returned from Cuba. Occasionally he went visiting. Where he went, he did not tell you. That is all you know. You know nothing else. You heard nothing. Nobody here heard anything. Nobody, in this house, knows anything at all. You understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then see to it. The police will come. You must be at the door. You know now what to say. They will want a word with me. I am too prostrated to see anybody."

"Thank you, sir."

"Telephone to the Place. Get Benny. Repeat my orders. Say I will do as well by him as I shall by you."

"Thank you, sir."

"Take the money. You may have the case also."

"I thank you, sir."

"Tell Peters to fetch me some brandy. The 1810. That will do."

Presently, when the police did come and, several hours later, in the person of Mr. Harvey, came again, they came upon the barriers, invisible and unscalable, which ignorance, properly paid, can erect. With an empty bag, Mr. Harvey made off; not far, however, a few squares below to the Athenaeum Club.

There, the hall-porter succeeded in being magnificent The strange and early visitor he rebuked. It was not customary for members to be murdered!

A badge, carelessly disclosed, disconcerted him. For a second only. However unusual a member might be, no information could be supplied concerning him. There was another rule, equally strict. Strangers were not admitted. Though, whether the rule applied to a bull, he was uncertain. Momentarily, the hall-porter, previously magnificent, became an unhappy man. Misery is fertile. A compromise surprised him.

He crooked a thumb. "Here! Go 'round by the back way and ask for Mr. Johnson—he's one of the captains."

From the steps, in the slanting rays of the morning sun, he saw him off. But the gaiety of the eager rays that charged the air with little gold motes, did not cheer him. The lustre of his office was tarnished. A member had been murdered! It was most unusual.

Meanwhile, down the area steps, a hostile and hasty youth in shirt-sleeves and a slashed waistcoat barred the way. The barring was brief. The badge and a smile demolished it. Within, beneath a low ceiling, at a long table, other youths, equally slashed but less hostile, were at breakfast.

Affably, the intruder raised a hand. "Gentlemen, don't let me disturb you. I'm just having a look-in on Mr. Johnson."

Mr. Johnson did not breakfast with slashed young men; it would have been subversive to discipline, and it was negligently, through a lateral entrance, that presently he appeared. In evening clothes on this early morning, he surveyed his visitor, a big fellow with a slight moustache, an easy way and a missing front tooth, who went straight at it.

"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Johnson. My name's Harvey. It's about young Paliser. There may be something in it for you. I'm from Headquarters."

The captain coughed. "It's awful. I can't tell you anything though. He wasn't here often. Doubt if I've seen him in a week." He looked about. The slashed youths were edging up. "Come in here."

In an adjoining room, he took a chair, waved politely at another, coughed again and resumed. "You say there may be something in it for me?"

Mr. Harvey sat down. "Cert. There'll be a reward—a big one."

The captain turned it over. "It is as much as my place is worth, but last evening one of the members was talking fierce about him."

"Yes, so I heard," said Mr. Harvey, who had heard nothing of the kind and who, not for an instant, had expected to tumble on a fierce-talking member. "I heard his name too. It's—er——"

"Lennox," the captain put in.

"Lennox, yes, that's it, and just to see how my account tallies with yours, what did he say?"

"He said he'd do for him. I could have laughed."

"It was funny, I laughed myself, and about a woman, wasn't it?"

"I don't know. But he was engaged to be married. I saw it in the papers."

"And this young Paliser butted in?"

"I couldn't say. But he threw up his business and sat around and last night he was going to do for him."

"At the opera?"

"He was talking random-like. He had just had a B. and S. I didn't hear anything about the opera. He wasn't got up for it. Just a business suit. But, Lord bless you, he didn't do it. He isn't that kind. Nice, free-handed feller."

"No, of course not. I wouldn't believe it, not if you told me so. Let me see. Where did I hear he lives?"

"I don't rightly know. Somewhere in the neighbourhood."

"So I thought and his first name is?"

"I've forgotten. Hold on! Keith! That's it. Keith Lennox. Are you going to see him? P'raps he can set you straight."

"P'raps he can."

"But don't let on about me, my friend."

"Not on your life," replied his friend, who added: "Where's your hat?"

"My hat!" Mr. Johnson surprisedly exclaimed.

Affably that friend of his nodded. "Ever been to Headquarters? Well, you're going there now!"

Then, presently, the captain and his friend ascended a stairway, down which, a few hours later, hoarse voices came.

"Extra! Extra!"



XXX

At the Athenaeum, that afternoon, members gathered together, buttonholed each other, talked it over and so importantly that, if you had not known better, you might have thought the war a minor event. It gave one rather a clear idea of the parochialism of clubland. But then, to discuss the affairs of people who never heard of you is, essentially, a social act.

Meanwhile the shouted extras had told of Lennox' arrest. The evening papers supplied the evidence.

In them you read that Lennox had said he would "do" for Paliser, that in his possession had been found a stiletto, an opera-check, together with a will, and that, when apprehended, he had been effecting what is called a getaway.

There you had the threat, the instrument, the opportunity and what more could you ask, except the motive? As for the rest, it was damning. On that point foregathering members agreed—with one exception.

In a seated group was Jones. His neighbours alarmed him. They belonged, he thought, to a very dangerous class, to a class which a sociologist defined as the most dangerous of all—to the stupid. According to them, Lennox was not merely guilty, he was worse. He had besplattered the club with the blood of a man who, hang it all, whether you liked him or not, was also a member. The Athenaeum would become a byword. Already, no doubt, it was known as the Assassin's. Et cetera and so forth.

The group thinned, increased, thinned again, scattered.

Jones, alone with a survivor, addressed him. "How is my handsome friend to-day?"

Verelst turned impatiently. "In no mood for jesting. I ought to have hurried him off. Now he is in jail."

Jones lit a cigarette. "There are honest men everywhere, even in jail, perhaps particularly in jail. Whom has he, do you know?"

"To defend him? Dunwoodie. Ogston told me. Ogston says——"

"I daresay he does. His remarks are always very poignant."

"But look here. Before the arrest was known, Ogston was in this room telling everybody that, last night, he gave Lennox a seat in Paliser's box. He will have to testify to it. He can't help himself."

"Perhaps I can help him though. I was with Lennox at the time."

"You were? That's awkward. You may have to corroborate him."

"I certainly shall. I have the seat."

"What?"

"Lennox dropped the ticket. After he had gone, I found it on the floor. It is in my shop now."

"Well, well!" Verelst astoundedly exclaimed. "But, here, hold on. The papers say he had a return check."

Jones flicked his ashes. "I have one or two myself. Probably you have. Even otherwise return checks tell no tales, or rather no dates."

"I never thought of that."

"Think of it now, then."

"Yes, but confound it, there is the stiletto."

"As you say, there it is and I wish it were here. It is mine."

Verelst adjusted his glasses. "What are you talking about?"

"The war," Jones answered. "What else? In my shop last evening, Lennox was drawing his will. In gathering up the sheets, the knife must have got among them and, without knowing it, he carried it off. This morning I missed it. The loss affected me profoundly. It is an old friend."

"You don't tell me."

"Don't I? I'll go so far as to lay you another basket of pippins that the police can't produce another like it. On the blade is inscribed Penetrabo—which is an endearing device."

"But see here," Verelst excitedly exclaimed. "You must tell Dunwoodie. You——" In sheer astonishment he broke off.

Innocently Jones surveyed him. "You think it important as all that?"

"Important? Important isn't the word."

With the same air of innocence, Jones nodded. "I thought it wasn't the word. I should have said trivial."

"But——"

Wickedly Jones laughed. "If you feel reckless enough to go another basket of pippins, I will wager that if I tell Dunwoodie anything—and mind the 'if'—he will agree that the paper-cutter is of no consequence—except to its lawful owner, who wants it back."

"But tell me——"

"Anything you like. For the moment, though, tell me something."

"What?"

Jones blew a ring of smoke. "Do you happen to know whether Paliser had anything?"

"What on earth has that to do with it?"

Jones blew another ring. "I had an idea that his mother might have left him something. You knew her, didn't you? Any way, you still know M. P. Did he ever say anything about it?"

"He did not need to. It was in the papers. He made over to him the Splendor, the Place, and some Wall Street and lower Broadway property that has been part of the Paliser estate since the year One."

"What is it all worth?" Jones asked. "Ten or twenty million?"

"Thirty, I should say. Perhaps more. But what has it to do with Lennox?"

Negligently Jones flicked his ashes. "Well, it changes the subject. I can't talk about the same thing all the time. It is too fatiguing."

As he spoke, he stood up.

Verelst put out a hand. "Dunwoodie is sure to look in. Where are you off to?"

Jones smiled at him. "I am going to gaze in a window where there are pippins on view."

"Go to the devil!" said Verelst, who also got up.

Fabulists tell strange tales. It is their business to tell them. Jones had no intention of looking at pippins. What he had in mind was fruit of another variety. It was some distance away. Before he could make an appreciable move toward it, Verelst, who had turned from him, turned back.

"There!"

Beyond, through the high-arched entrance, a man was limping. He had the battered face of an old bulldog and the rumpled clothes of a young ruffian.

"There's Dunwoodie!"

Verelst, a hand on Jones' elbow, propelled him toward the lawyer, who gratified them with the look, very baleful and equally famous, with which he was said to reverse the Bench.

But Verelst, afraid of nothing except damp sheets, stretched a hand. "You know Ten Eyck Jones. He has something very important to tell you."

"Yes," said Jones. "In March, on the eighth or ninth, I have forgotten which, but it must be in the 'Law Journal,' a decision was rendered——"

He got no farther. Other members, crowding about, were questioning, surmising, eager for a detail, a prediction, an obiter dictum, for anything they could take away and repeat concerning the murder, in which all knew that the great man was to appear.

But Dunwoodie was making himself heard, and not gently either. It was as though already he was at the district attorney's throat.

"Where is the evidence? Where is it? Where is the evidence? There is not a shred, not a scintilla. On the absence of facts adduced, I shall maintain what I assert until the last armed Court of Appeals expires. Hum! Ha!"

Fiercely he turned on Jones. "What were you saying, sir?"

Before Jones could reply, Verelst cut in. "The stiletto is his. He has the opera-ticket. He——"

"Imbeciles tell each other that great men think alike," Jones, interrupting, remarked at Dunwoodie. "I merely happened to be forestalling your views, when a recent decision occurred to me and——"

Jones' remarks were lost, drowned by others, by questions, exclamations, the drivel that amazement creates.

"But, I say——" "Tell me this——" "No evidence!" "The stiletto his!" "How did Lennox get it?" "Then what about——"

Dunwoodie, fastening on Jones, roared at him. "You tell me the instrument is yours?"

Jones patted his chin. "I did not, but I will."

"How do you know, sir?"

"It has a little love message on it."

"Hum! Ha!" Dunwoodie barked. "Come to my office to-morrow. Come before ten."

Dreamily Jones tilted his hat. "I am not up before ten. Where do you live? In the Roaring Forties?"

But, in the mounting clamour, the answer, if answer there were, was submerged. Jones went out to the street, entered a taxi, gave an address and sailed away, up and across the Park, along the Riverside and into the longest thoroughfare—caravan routes excepted—on the planet.

On a corner was a drug-shop, where anything was to be had, even to umbrellas and, from a sign that hung there, apparently a notary public also. Opposite was a saloon, the Ladies Entrance horribly hospitable. Jones' trained eye—the eye of a novelist—gathered these things which it dropped in that bag which the subconscious is. Meanwhile the car, scattering children, tooted, turned and stopped before a leprous door.

In the hall, a girl of twelve, with the face of a seraph, and the voice of a fiend, was shrieking at a switchboard. Jones fearing, if he addressed her, that she might curse him, went on and up, higher, still higher, and began to feel quite birdlike. On the successive landings were doors and he wondered what tragedies, what comedies, what aims, lofty, mean or merely diabolic, they concealed. They were all labelled with names, Hun or Hebrew, usually both. But one name differed. It caressed.

There he rang.

When it opened, a strawberry mouth opened also. "Oh!" Cassy's blue eyes were red. There was fright in them. "It is horrible! Tell me, do you think it was he?"

Jones removed his hat. "I know it was not."

That mouth opened again, opened for breath, opened with relief. Gasping, she stared. "Thank God! I was afraid——But are you sure? It was I who told him—I thought it my fault. It was killing me. Tell me. Are you really sure?"

Jones motioned. "His lawyer is. I have just seen him."

"He is! Thank God then! Thank God! And my father! It has made him ill. He liked him so! I am going for medicine now. Will you go in and speak to him?"

She turned and called. "It is Mr. Jones—a friend of Mr. Lennox." She turned again. "I will be back in a minute."

Beyond, in the room with the piano and the painted warrior, the musician lay on a sofa, bundled in a rug. There was not much space on the sofa, yet, as Jones entered, he seemed to recede. Then, cavernously, he spoke.

"Forgive me for not rising. This business has been too much for me. Sit down."

Jones put his hat on the table and drew a chair. "I am sorry it has upset you. It amounts to nothing."

Perplexedly the musician repeated it. "Nothing?"

"I was referring to our friend Lennox."

"You call his arrest nothing?"

"Well, everything is relative. It may seem unusual to be held without bail and yet, if we all were, it would be commonplace."

The musician plucked at the rug. "I suppose everybody thinks he did it?"

"Everybody, no. I don't think so and I am sure your daughter doesn't."

"I wish she would hurry."

"Nor do you."

"No, I don't think so."

"I doubt if the police do either."

"After jailing him!"

Jones, who had been taking in the room, the piano, the portrait, the table, sketched a gesture.

"We are all in jail. The opinion of the world is a prison, our own ideas are another. We are doubly jailed, and very justly. We are depraved animals. We think, or think we think, and what we think others have thought for us and, as a rule, erroneously."

From a phonograph somewhere, in some adjacent den, there floated a tenor aria, the Bella figlia del amore, pierced suddenly and beautifully by a contralto's rich voice.

Jones turned. "That's Caruso. I don't know who the Maddelena is. Do you remember Campanini?"

"Yes, I remember him. He was a better actor than Caruso."

"And so ugly that he was good-looking. Caruso is becoming uneven."

Vaguely the musician considered the novelist. "You think so?"

"It rather looked that way last night."

Angelo Cara plucked again at the rug.

"But," Jones continued, "in the 'Terra addio' he made up for it. What an enchantment that duo is!"

The musician's hand moved from the rug to his face. "You were there then?"

I was this morning, thought Jones, but he said: "How sinful Rigoletto is by comparison to Aida—by comparison I mean to the last act."

The other duo now had become a quartette. The voices of Gilda and Rigoletto were fusing with those of the figlia and the duke.

The musician appeared to be listening. His sunken eyes were lifted. Slowly he turned them on Jones.

"You didn't see anything, did you?"

"Last night? I did not see Lennox, if that is what you mean, or Paliser—except for a moment, during the crypt scene."

Chokingly the musician drew breath. In the effort he gasped. "Then you know."

"Yes, I know."

The rug rose and fell. It was as though there were a wave beneath it.

With an air of detachment, Jones added: "Paliser turned to see who was there. A sword-cane told him."

The musician's lips twitched, his face had contracted, his hand now was on his breast. "I wish Cassy would hurry. She's gone for amyl."

"Is it far?"

"The corner. Are you going to do anything?"

Jones shook his head. "I don't need to."

The sunken eyes were upon him. "Why do you say that?"

"You are an honest man."

The sunken eyes wavered. "At least I never supposed they would arrest Lennox. How could I?"

"No one could have supposed it. Besides, in your own conscience you were justified, were you not?"

"You know about that, too?"

"Yes, I know about that."

The Rigoletto disc now had been replaced by another, one from which a voice brayed, a voice nasal, jocular, felonious.

"That beast ought to be shot," Jones added.

The musician raised himself a little. "You don't misjudge her, do you?"

Jones, annoyed at the swill tossed about, had turned from him. He turned back. "Believe me, Mr. Cara, there is no one for whom I have a higher respect."

A spasm seized the musician. For a moment, save for the effort at breath, he was silent. Then feebly he said: "I wish she would hurry."

"Can I do anything?"

"Yes, tell me. Do you condemn me?"

The novelist hesitated. "There are no human scales for any soul. Though, to be sure——"

"What?"

"It might have been avoided. As it is, they will suspect her."

"Cassy?"

"Naturally. They can't hold Lennox on a paper-cutter—that belongs to me, and a few empty words said in my presence and which, if necessary, I did not hear. They can't hold him on that. But when they learn, as they will, the circumstances of your daughter's misadventure, they will arrest her."

"Merciful God!"

The jeopardy to her, a jeopardy previously undiscerned, but which then shaken at him, instantly took shape, twisted his mouth into the appalling grimace that mediaeval art gave to the damned.

"And you don't want that," Jones remotely resumed.

"Want it!" Galvanised by the shock, the musician sat suddenly up. "Last night, after I got back, I slept like a log. This morning, I felt if I had not done it, I would still have it to do and that satisfied me. But afterwards, when I learned about Lennox, it threw me here. Now——My God!"

He fell back.

The poor devil is done for, thought Jones, who, wondering whether he could get it over in time, leaned forward.

"Mr. Cara, don't you think you had best make it plain sailing for everybody, and let me draw up a declaration?"

The disc now had run out. The grunt of the beast was stilled. From beyond came the quick click of a key. Almost at once Cassy appeared.

She hurried to her father. "There were people ahead of me. They took forever. Has Mr. Jones told you? Mr. Lennox did not do it."

Breaking a tube in a handkerchief, she was administering the amyl and Jones wondered whether she could then suspect. But her face was turned from him, he could not read it, and realising that, in any event, she must be spared the next act, he cast about for an excuse to get her away. At once, remembering the notary, he produced him.

"Your father wants me to draw a paper on which his signature should be attested. If I am not asking too much, would you mind going back to the druggist for the notary whose sign I saw there?"

Cassy turned from her father. "A paper? What paper?"

Bravely Jones lied. "A will."

Cassy looked from one to the other. "The poor dear often has these attacks. He will be better soon—now that he knows. Won't you, daddy?"

Angelo Cara's eyes had in them an expression infinitely tender, equally vacant. It was as though, in thinking of her, he was thinking too of something else. Though, as Jones afterward decided, he probably was not thinking at all.

Cassy exclaimed at him. "Besides, what have you—except me?"

"Everybody has to make a will," Jones, lying again, put in. "There has been a new law passed. The eternal revenue collector requires it."

Cassy smoothed the rug, put the handkerchief on the table, opened a drawer, got out some paper, a pen, a bottle of ink.

In a moment she had gone.

Jones seated himself at the table. "Forgive me for asking, but may I assume that you believe in God, a life hereafter and in the rewards and punishments which, we are told, await us?"