Kedzie meanwhile had watched for the postman and hunted through her mail with frenzy. There was a vast amount of mail, for it is one of the hardships of the movie business that the actors are fairly showered with letters of praise, criticism, query, and flirtation.

But there was no letter ever from Gilfoyle.

Yet Gilfoyle was constantly within hailing distance. With the aid of his friend Connery he had concocted a scheme for keeping Kedzie and Dyckman under espionage. They had speedily learned that Dyckman was in constant attendance on Kedzie, and that they were careless of the hours alone, careless of appearances.

Gilfoyle never dreamed that the couple was chaperoned doubly by a certain lukewarmth of emotion and by an ambition to become man and wife. Gilfoyle imagined their relations to be as intimate as their opportunities permitted. He suffered jealous wrath, and would have assaulted Dyckman in public if Connery had not quelled him.

Connery kept a cool head in the matter because his heart was not involved. He saw the wealth of Dyckman as the true object of their attack, and he convinced Gilfoyle of the profitableness of a little blackmail. He convinced Gilfoyle easily when they were far from Kedzie and close to poverty; but when they hovered near Kedzie, Connery had the convincing to do all over again.

He worked up an elaborate campaign for gaining entrance to Kedzie's apartment without following the classic method of smashing the door down. He disliked that noisy approach because it would command notice; and publicity, as he well knew, is death to blackmail.

Connery adopted a familiar stratagem of the private detectives. He went to the apartment one day when he knew that Kedzie was out, and inquired for an alleged sister of his who had worked for Kedzie. He claimed to be a soldier on furlough. He engaged the maid in a casual parley which he led swiftly to a flirtation. She was a lonely maid and her plighted lover was away on a canal-boat. Connery had little difficulty in winning her to the acceptance of an invitation to visit a movie-show on her first evening off.

He paid the girl flattering attentions, and when he brought her back, gallantly asked for the key to unlock the door for her. He dropped the key on the floor, stooped for it, pressed it against a bit of soft soap he had in his left palm. Having secured the outline of the key, he secured also a return engagement for the next evening off. On this occasion he brought with him a duplicate of the key, and when he unlocked the door for the maid this time he gave her the duplicate and kept the original.

And now that he and Gilfoyle had an "open sesame" to the dovecote they grew impatient with delay. Gilfoyle's landlady had also grown impatient with delay, but Connery forced her to wait for what he called the psychological moment.

And thus Kedzie moved about, her life watched over by an invisible husband like a malignant Satan to whom she had sold her soul.



CHAPTER XXX

Jim Dyckman had many notes from Kedzie, gushing, all adjectives and adverbs, capitalized and underscored. He left them about carelessly, or locked them up and left the key. If he had not done that the lock on his desk was one that could be opened with a hairpin or with a penknife or with almost any key of a proper size.

There was no one to care except his valet. Dallam cared and read and made notes. He was horrified at the thought of Dyckman's marrying a movie actress. He would have preferred any intrigue to that disgrace. It would mean the loss of a good position, too, for while Dyckman was an easy boss, if he were going to be an easy marrier as well, Dallam had too much self-respect to countenance a marriage beneath them.

If he could only have known of Gilfoyle's existence and his quests, how the two of them could have collaborated!

But Dallam's interest in life woke anew when one evening, as he was putting away the clothes Dyckman had thrown off, he searched his master's coat and found a letter from Mrs. Cheever.

DEAR OLD JIM,—What's happent you? I haven't seen you for ages. Couldn't you spare this evening to me? I'm alone—as always—and lonelier than usual. Do take pity on

Your devoted CHARITY C.

That note, so lightly written in seeming, had been torn from a desperate heart and written in tears and blood.

Since she had learned that her husband really loved Zada and that she was going to mother him a child, Charity had been unable to adjust her soul to the new problem.

The Reverend Doctor Mosely had promised her advice, but the poor man could not match his counsel with the situation. He did not believe in divorce, and yet he did not approve of illegal infants. How happy he could have been with either problem, with t'other away! In his dilemma he simply avoided Charity and turned his attention to the more regular chores of his parish.

Charity understood his silence, and it served to deepen her own perplexity. She was sure of only one thing—that she was caged and forgotten.

Cheever came home less and less, and he was evidently so harrowed with his own situation that Charity felt almost more sorry for him than angry at him. She imagined that he must be enduring no little from the whims and terrors of Zada. He was evidently afraid to speak to Charity. To ask for her mercy was contrary to all his nature. He never dreamed that the dictagraph had brought her with him when he learned of Zada's intensely interesting condition, and her exceedingly onerous demands. He did not dare ask Charity for a divorce in order that he might legitimize this byblow of his. He could imagine only that she would use the information for some ruinous vengeance. So he dallied with his fate in dismal irresolution.

Charity had his woes to bear as well as her own. She knew that she had lost him forever. The coquetries she had used to win him back were impossible even to attempt. He had no use for her forgiveness or her charms. He was a mere specter in her home, doomed for his sins to walk the night.

In despising herself she rendered herself lonelier. She had not even herself for companion. Her heart had always been eager with love and eager for it. The spirit that impelled her to endure hardships in order to expend her surplusage of love was unemployed now. She had feasted upon love, and now she starved.

Cheever had been a passionate courtier and, while he was interested, a fiery devotee. When he abandoned her she suffered with the devastation that deserted wives and recent widows endure but must not speak of. It meant terribly much to Charity Coe to be left alone. It was dangerous to herself, her creeds, her ideals.

She began to be more afraid of being alone than of any other fear. She grew resentful toward the conventions that held her. She was like a tigress in a wicker cage, growing hungrier, lither, more gracefully fierce.

People who do not use their beauty lose it, and Charity had lost much of hers in her vigils and labors in the hospitals, and it had waned in her humiliations of Cheever's preference for another woman. Her jealous shame at being disprized and notoriously neglected had given her wanness and bitterness, instead of warmth and sweetness.

But now the wish to be loved brought back loveliness. She did not know how beautiful she was again. She thought that she wanted to see Jim Dyckman merely because she wanted to be flattered and because—as women say in such moods—men are so much more sensible than women. Often they mean more sensitive. Charity did not know that it was love, not friendship, that she required when at last she wrote to Jim Dyckman and begged him to call on her.

The note struck him hard. It puzzled him by its tone. And he, remembering how vainly he had pursued her, forgot her disdain and recalled only how worthy of pursuit she was. He hated himself for his disloyalty to Anita in comparing his fiancee with Charity, and he cursed himself for finding Charity infinitely Anita's superior in every way. But he hated and cursed in vain.

Kedzie, or "Anita," as he called her, was an outsider, a pretty thing like a geisha, fascinating by her oddity and her foreignness, but, after all, an alien who could interest one only temporarily. There was something transient about Kedzie in his heart, and he had felt it vaguely the moment he found himself pledged to her forever. But Charity—he had loved her from perambulator days. She was his tradition. His thoughts and desires had always come home to Charity.

Yet he was astonished at the sudden upheaval of his old passion. It shook off the new affair as a volcano burns away the weeds that have grown about its crater. He supposed that Charity wanted to take up the moving-picture scheme in earnest, and he repented the fact that he had gone to the studio for information and had come away with a flirtation.

One thing was certain: he must not fail to answer Charity's summons. He had an engagement with Kedzie, but he called her up and told her the politest lie he could concoct. Then he made himself ready and put on his festival attire.

* * * * *

Charity had grown sick of having people say, "How pale you are!" "You've lost flesh, haven't you?" "Have you been ill, dear?"—those tactless observations that so many people feel it necessary to make, as if there were no mirrors or scales or symptoms for one's information and distress.

Annoyed by these conversational harrowers, Charity had finally gone to her dressmaker, Dutilh, and asked him to save her from vegetation! He saw that she was a young woman in sore need of a compliment, and he flattered her lavishly. He did more for her improvement in five minutes than six doctors, seventeen clergymen, and thirty financiers could have done. A compliment in time is a heart-stimulant with no acetanilid reaction. Also he told her how wonderful she had been in the past, recalling by its name and by the name of its French author many a gown she had worn, as one would tell a great actress what roles he had seen her in.

He clothed her with praise and encouragement, threw a mantle of crimson velvet about her. And she crimsoned with pride, and her hard, thin lips velveted with beauty.

She responded so heartily that he was enabled to sell her a gown of very sumptuous mode, its colors laid on as with the long sweeps of a Sargent's brush. A good deal of flesh was not left to the imagination; as in a Sargent painting, the throat, shoulders, and arms were part of the color scheme. It was a gown to stride in, to stand still in, in an attitude of heroic repose, or to recline in with a Parthenonian grandeur.

This gown did not fit her perfectly, just as it came from Paris, but it revealed its possibilities and restored her shaken self-confidence immeasurably. If women—or their husbands—could afford it, they would find perhaps more consolation, restoration, and exaltation at the dressmakers' than at—it would be sacrilege to say where.

By the time Charity's new gown was ready for the last fitting Charity had lost her start, and when Dutilh went into the room where she had dressed he was aghast at the difference. On the first day the gown had thrilled her to a collaboration with it. Now she hardly stood up in it. She drooped with exaggerated awkwardness, shrugged her shoulders with sarcasm, and made a face of disgust.

Dutilh tried to mask his disappointment with anger. When Charity groaned, "Aren't we awful—this dress and I?" he retorted: "You are, but don't blame the gown. For God's sake, do something for the dress. It would do wonders for you if you would help it!" He believed in a golden rule for his wares: do for your clothes what you would have them do for you.

He threatened not to let Charity have the gown at all at any price. He ordered her to take it off. She refused. In the excitement of the battle she grew more animated. Then he whirled her to a mirror and said:

"Look like that, and you're a made woman."

She was startled by the vivacity, the authority she saw in her features so long dispirited. She caught the trick of the expression. And actors know that one's expression can control one's moods almost as much as one's moods control one's expressions.

So she persuaded Dutilh to sell her the dress. When she got it she did not know just when to wear it, for she was going out but rarely, and then she did not want to be conspicuous. She decided to make Jim Dyckman's call the occasion for the launching of the gown. His name came up long before she had put it on to be locked in for the evening.

When she thrust her arms forward like a diver and entered the gown by way of the fourth dimension her maid cried out with pride, and, standing with her fingertips scattered over her face, wept tears down to her knuckles. She welcomed the prodigal back to beauty.

"Oh, ma'am, but it's good to see you lookin' lovely again!"

While she bent to the engagement of the hooks Charity feasted on her reflection in the cheval-glass. She was afraid that she was a little too much dressed up and a little too much undressed. There in Dutilh's shop, with the models and the assistants about, she was but a lay figure, a clothes-horse. At the opera she would have been one of a thousand shoulder-showing women. For a descent upon one poor caller, and a former lover at that, the costume frightened her.

But it was too late to change, and she caught up a scarf of gossamer and twined it round her neck to serve as a mitigation.

Hearing her footsteps on the stairs at last, Dyckman hurried to meet her. As she swept into the room she collided with him, softly, fragrantly. They both laughed nervously, they were both a little influenced.

She found the drawing-room too formal and led him into the library. She pointed him to a great chair and seated herself on the corner of a leather divan nearly as big as a touring-car. In the dark, hard frame she looked richer than ever. He could not help seeing how much more important she was than his Anita.

Anita was pretty and peachy, delicious, kissable, huggable, a pleasant armful, a lapload of girlish mischief. Charity was beautiful, noble, perilous, a woman to live for, fight for, die for. Kedzie was to Charity as Rosalind to Isolde.

It was time for Jim to play Tristan, but he had no more blank verse in him than a polo score-card. Yet the simple marks on such a form stand for tremendous energy and the utmost thrill.

"Well, how are you, anyway, Charity? How goes it with you?" he said. "Gee! but you look great to-night. What's the matter with you? You're stunning!"

Charity laughed uncannily. "You're the only one that thinks so, Jim."

"I always did admire you more than anybody else could; but, good Lord! everybody must have eyes."

"I'm afraid so," said Charity. "But you're the only one that has imagination about me."

"Bosh!"

"My husband can't see me at all."

"Oh, him!" Jim growled. "What's he up to now?"

"I don't know," said Charity. "I hardly ever see him. He's chucked me for good."

Jim studied her with idolatry and with the intolerant ferocity of a priest for the indifferent or the skeptical. The idol made her plaint to her solitary worshiper.

"I'm horribly lonely, Jim. I don't go anywhere, meet anybody, do anything but mope. Nobody comes to see me or take me out. Even you kept away from me till I had to send for you."

"You ordered me off the premises in Newport, if you remember."

"Yes, I did, but I didn't realize that I was mistreating the only admirer I had."

This was rather startling in its possible implications. It scared Dyckman. He gazed at her until her eyes met his. There was something in them that made him look away. Then he heard the gasp of a little sob, and she began to cry.

"Why, Charity!" he said. "Why, Charity Coe!"

She smiled at the pet name and the tenderness in his voice, and her tears stopped.

"Jim," she said, "I told Doctor Mosely all about my affairs, and I simply spoiled his day for him and he dropped me. So I think I'll tell you."

"Go to the other extreme, eh?" said Jim.

"Yes, I'm between the devil and the high-Church. I've no doubt I'm to blame, but I can't seem to stand the punishment with no change in sight. I've tried to, but I've got to the end of my string and—well—whether you can help me or not—I've got to talk or die. Do you mind if I run on?"

"God bless you, I'd be tickled to death."

"It will probably only ruin your evening."

"Help yourself. I'd rather have you wreck all my evenings than—than—"

He had begun well, which was more than usual. She did not expect him to finish. She thanked him with a look of more than gratitude.

"Jim," she said, "I've found out that my husband is—well—there's a certain ex-dancer named L'Etoile, and he—she—they—"

Instead of being astounded, Dyckman was glum.

"Oh, you've found that out at last, have you? Maybe you'll learn before long that there's trouble in France. But of course you know that. You were over there. Why, before you came back he was dragging that animal around with him. I saw him with her."

"You knew it as long ago as that?"

"Everybody knew it."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because I'm a low-lived coward, I suppose. I tried to a dozen times, but somehow I couldn't. By gad! I came near writing you an anonymous letter. I couldn't seem to stoop to that, though, and I couldn't seem to rise to telling you out and out. And now that you know, what are you going to do about it?"

"That's what I don't know. Doctor Mosely wanted me to try to get him back."

"Doctor Mosely's got softening of the brain. To think of your trying to persuade a man to live with you! You of all people, and him of all people! Agh! If you got him, what would you have? And how long would you keep him? You can't make a household pet out of a laughing hyena. Chuck him, I say."

"But that means the divorce-court, Jim."

"What of it? It's cleaner and sweeter than this arrangement."

"But the newspapers?"

"Ah, what do you care about them? They'd only publish what everybody that knows you knows already. And what's the diff' if a lot of strangers find out that you're too decent to tolerate that man's behavior? Somebody is always roasting even the President, but he gets along somehow. A lot of good people oppose divorce, but I was reading that the best people used to oppose anesthetics and education and republics. It's absolutely no argument against a thing to say that a lot of the best people think it is outrageous. They've always fought everything, especially freedom for the women. They said it was dangerous for you to select your husbands, or manage your property, or learn to read, or go out to work, or vote, or be in a profession—or even be a war nurse. The hatred of divorce is all of a piece with the same old habit good people have of trying to mind other people's business for 'em."

"But Doctor Mosely says that marriage is a sacrament."

"Well, if a marriage like yours is a sacrament, give me a nice, decent white-slave market."

"That's the way it seems to me, but the Church, especially our Church, is so ferocious. Doctor Mosely preached a sermon against divorce and remarriage, and it was frightful what he said about women who change husbands. I'm afraid of it, Jim. I can't face the abuse and the newspapers, and I can't face the loneliness, either. I'm desperately lonely."

"For him?" Jim groaned.

"No, I've got over loving him. I'll never endure him again, especially now that she has a better right to him."

She could not bring herself at first to tell him what she knew of Zada, but at length she confessed that she had listened to the dictagraph and had heard that Zada was to be a mother. Dyckman was dumfounded; then he snarled:

"Thank God it's not you that's going to be—for him—Well, don't you call that divorce enough? How can you call your marriage a sacrament when he has gone and made a real sacrament with another woman? It takes two to keep a sacrament, doesn't it? Or does it? I don't think I know what a sacrament is. But I tell you, there was never a plainer duty in the world. Turn him over to his Zada. She's the worst woman in town, and she's too good for him, at that. I don't see how you can hesitate! How long can you stand it?"

"I don't know. I'm ready to die now. I'd rather die. I'd better die."

And once more she was weeping, now merely a lonely little girl. He could not resist the impulse to go to her side. He dropped down by her and patted her wrist gawkily. She caught his hand and clenched it with strange power. He could tell by her throat that her heart was leaping like a wild bird against a cage.

His own heart beat about his breast like a bird that has been set frantic by another bird, and his soul ached for her. He yearned to put his long arm about her and hold her tight, but he could not.

He had never seen her so. He could not understand what it was that made a darkling mist of her eyes and gave her parted lips such an impatient ecstasy of pain.

Suddenly, with an intuition unusual to him, he understood. He shrank from her, but not with contempt or blame. There was something divine about his merciful comprehension, but his only human response was a most ungodly wrath. He got to his feet, muttering:

"I ought to kill him. Maybe I will. I've got to beat him within an inch of his life."

Charity was dazed by his abrupt revolt. "What do you mean, Jim? Who is it you want to beat?"

He laughed, a bloodthirsty laugh. "I'll find him!"

He rushed out into the hall, caught up his hat and coat, and was gone. Charity was bewildered out of her wits. She could not imagine what had maddened him. She only knew that Dyckman also had abandoned her. He would find Cheever and fight him as one stag another. And the only result would be the death of one or both and a far more odious disgrace than the scandal she had determined to avoid.



CHAPTER XXXI

Dyckman was at least half mad, and half inspired. Charity had been his lifelong religion. He had thought of her with ardor, but also with a kind of awe. He had wanted to be her husband. Failing to win her, he had been horrified to see that Cheever, possessing her, was still not satisfied.

He had never dreamed what this neglect might mean to her. He had not thought of her as mere woman, after all, with more than pride to satisfy, with more than a mind to suffer. When the realization overwhelmed him her nobility was not diminished in his eyes, but to all her former qualities was added the human element. She was flesh and blood, and a martyr in the flames. And the ingrate who had the godlike privilege of her embrace abandoned her for a public creature.

Dyckman felt himself summoned to avenge her.

It happened that he found the Cheever limousine waiting outside. He said to the chauffeur:

"Where does Miss Zada L'Etoile live?"

The chauffeur was startled. He answered, with a touch of raillery:

"Search me, sir. How should I know?"

"I want none of your back talk," said Dyckman, ready to maul the chauffeur or anybody for practice. He took out his pocket-book and lifted the first bill he came to. It was a yellow boy. He repeated, "Where does Zada L'Etoile live?"

The chauffeur told him and got the bill. It was better than the poke in the eye he could have had instead.

Dyckman had sent his own car home. He had difficulty in finding a taxicab on Fifth Avenue along there. At length he stopped one and named the apartment-house where Zada lived.

The hall-boy was startled by his manner, amazed to hear the famous Dyckman ask for Miss L'Etoile. He telephoned the name while Dyckman fumed. After some delay he was told to come up.

Zada was alone—at least Cheever was not there. She had been astounded when Dyckman's name came through the telephone. Her first thought had been that Cheever had met with an accident and that Dyckman was bringing the news. She had given up the hope of involving Dyckman with Mrs. Cheever, after wasting Cheever's money on vain detectives.

When Dyckman was ushered in she greeted him from her divan.

"Pardon my negligee," she said. "I'm not very well."

He saw at a glance that the dictagraph had told the truth. She was entirely too well. He felt his wrath at Zada vanishing. But this also he transferred to Cheever's account. He spoke as quietly as he could, though his face revealed his excitement.

"Sorry to trouble you, but I had hoped to find Mr. Cheever here."

"Mr. Cheever?! Here?!" Zada exclaimed, with that mixture of the interrogation and exclamation points for which we have no symbol. She tried to look surprised at the unimaginable suggestion of Cheever's being in her environs. She succeeded as well as Dyckman did in pretending that his errand was trivial.

"Er—yes, I imagined you might happen to know where I could find him. I have a little business with him."

Zada thought to crush him with a condescension—a manicurial sarcasm:

"Have you been to the gentleman's home?"

Dyckman laughed: "Yes, but he wasn't there. He isn't there much nowadays—they say."

"Oh, do they?" Zada sneered. "Well, did They tell you he would be here?"

"No, but I thought—"

"Better try his office in the morning."

"Thanks. I can't wait. What club does he affect most now?"

"Ask They," said Zada, ending the interview with a labored yawn. But when Dyckman bowed and turned to go, her curiosity bested her indignation. "In case I should by any chance see him, could I give him your message?"

Dyckman laughed a sort of pugilistic laugh, and his self-conscious fist asserted itself.

"No, thanks, I'm afraid you couldn't. Good-by."

Zada saw his big fingers gathering—convening, as it were, into a fist like a mace, and she was terrified for her man. She scrambled to her feet and caught Dyckman in the hall.

"What are you going to do to Mr. Cheever?"

Dyckman answered in the ironic slang, "I'm not going to do a thing to him."

Zada's terror increased. "What harm has he ever done to you?"

"I didn't say he had done me any harm."

"Is it because of his wife?"

"Leave her out of it."

There was the old phrase again. Cheever kept hurling it at her whenever she referred to the third corner of the triangle.

Zada remembered when Cheever had threatened to kill Dyckman if he found him. Now he would be unarmed. He was not so big a man as Dyckman. She could see him being throttled slowly to death, leaving her and her child-to-be unprotected in their shameful folly.

"For God's sake, don't!" she implored him. "I'm not well. I mustn't have any excitement, I beg you—for my sake—"

"For your sake," said Dyckman, with a scorn that changed to pity as she clung to him—"for your sake I'll give him a couple of extra jolts."

That was rather dazzling, the compliment of having Jim Dyckman as her champion! Her old habit of taking everybody's flattery made her forget for the moment that she was now a one-man woman. Her clutch relaxed under the compliment just long enough for Dyckman to escape without violence. He darted through the door and closed it behind him.

She tugged at the inside knob, but he was so long that he could hold the outside knob with one hand and reach the elevator-bell with the other.

When the car came up he released the knob and lifted his hat with a pleasant "Good-night." She dared not pursue him in the garb she wore.

She returned terrified to her room. Then she ran to the telephone to pursue Cheever and warn him. They had quarreled at the dinner-table. He had left her on the ground that it was dangerous for her to be excited as he evidently excited her. It is one of the most craven shifts of a man for ending an endless wrangle with a woman.

Zada tried three clubs before she found Cheever. When she heard his voice at last she was enraptured. She tried to entice him into her own shelter.

"I'm sorry I was so mean. Come on home and make peace with me."

"All right, dear, I will."

"Right away?"

"After a while, darling. I'm sitting in a little game of poker."

"You'd better not keep me waiting!" she warned. The note was an unfortunate reminder of his bondage. It rattled his shackles. He could not even have a few hours with old cronies at the club. She was worse than Charity had ever dreamed of being. She heard the resentment in his answer and felt that he would stay away from her for discipline. She threw aside diplomacy and tried to frighten him home.

"Jim Dyckman is looking for you."

"Dyckman? Me! Why?"

"He wants to beat you up."

Cheever laughed outright at this. "You're crazy, darling. What has Dyckman got against me?"

"I don't know, but I know he's hunting you."

"I haven't laid eyes on him for weeks. We've had no quarrel."

Zada was frantic. She howled across the wire: "Come home, I beg and implore you. He'll hurt you—he may kill you."

Again Cheever laughed: "You're having hallucinations, my love. You'll feel better in the morning. Where the deuce did you get such a foolish notion, anyway?"

"From Jim Dyckman," she stormed. "He was here looking for you. If anybody's going crazy, he's the one. I had a struggle with him. He broke away. I begged him not to harm you, but he said he'd give you a few extra jolts for my sake. Please, please, don't let him find you there."

Cheever was half convinced and quite puzzled. He knew that Dyckman had never forgiven him for marrying Charity. The feud had smoldered. He could not conceive what should have revived it, unless Charity had been talking. He had not thought of any one's punishing him for neglecting her. But if Dyckman had enlisted in her cause—well, Cheever was afraid of hardly anything in the world except boredom and the appearance of fear. He answered Zada with a gruff:

"Let him find me if he wants to. Or since you know him so well, tell me where he'll be, and I'll go find him."

He could hear Zada's strangled moan. How many times, since male and female began, have women made wild, vain protests against the battle-habit, the duel-tribunal? Mothers, daughters, wives, mistresses, they have been seldom heard and have been forced to wait remote in anguish till their man has come back or been brought back, victorious or baffled or defeated, maimed, wounded, or dead.

It meant everything to Zada that her mate should not suffer either death or publicity. But chiefly her love of him made outcry now. She could not endure the vision of her beloved receiving the hammering of the giant Dyckman.

The telephone crackled under the load of her prayers, but Cheever had only one answer:

"If you want me to run away from him or anybody, you don't get your wish, my darling."

Finally she shrieked, "If you don't come home I'll come there and get you."

"Ladies are not allowed in the main part of this club, dearest," said Cheever. "Thank God there are a few places where two men can settle their affairs without the help of womanly intuition."

"He wants to pound you to death," she screamed. "If you don't promise me, I'll come there and break in if I have to scratch the eyes out of the doorkeeper."

He knew that she was capable of doing this very thing; so he made answer, "All right, my dear. I surrender."

"You'll come home?"

"Yes, indeed. Right away."

"Oh, thank God! You do love me, then. How soon will you be here?"

"Very shortly, unless the taxi breaks down."

"Hurry!"

"Surely. Good-by!"

He hung up the reverberant receiver and said to the telephone-boy: "If anybody calls me, I've gone out. No matter who calls me, I'm out."

"Yes, sir."

Then he went to the card-room, found that the game had gone on without him, cashed in his chips, and excused himself. He was neither winning nor losing, so that he could not be accused of "cold feet." That was one of the most intolerable accusations to him. He could violate any of the Commandments, but in the sportsman's decalogue "Thou shalt not have cold feet" was one that he honored in the observance, not the breach.

He went down to the reading-room, a palatial hall fifty yards long with a table nearly as big as a railroad platform, on a tremendous rug as wide and deep as a lawn. About it were chairs and divans that would have satisfied a lotus-eater.

Cheever avoided proffers of conversation and pretended to read the magazines and newspapers. He kept his eyes on the doors. He did not want to take any one into his confidence, as he felt that, after all, Zada might have been out of her head. He did not want any seconds or bottle-holders. He was not afraid. Still, he did not care to be surprised by a mad bull. He felt that he could play toreador with neatness and despatch provided he could foresee the charge.

Among the magazines Cheever glanced at was one with an article on various modes of self-defense, jiu-jitsu, and other devices by which any clever child could apparently remove or disable a mad elephant. But Cheever's traditions did not incline to such methods. He had the fisting habit. He did not feel called toward clinching or choking, twisting, tripping, knifing, swording, or sandbagging. His wrath expressed itself, and gaily, in the play of the triceps muscle. For mobility he used footwork and headwork. For shield he had his forearms or his open hands—for weapons, the ten knuckles at the other end of the exquisite driving-shafts beginning in his shoulder-blades.

He had been a clever fighter from childhood. He had been a successful boxer and had followed the art in its professional and amateur developments. He knew more of prize-ring history and politics than of any other. He often regretted that his inherited money had robbed him of a career as a heavy-weight. He was not so big as Dyckman, but he had made fools of bigger men. He felt that the odds were a trifle in his favor, especially if Dyckman were angry, as he must be to go roaring about town frightening one silly woman for another's sake.

He would have preferred not to fight in the club. It was the best of all possible clubs, and he supposed that he would be expelled for profaning its sacrosanctity with a vulgar brawl. But anything was better than cold feet.

Finally his hundredth glance at the door revealed Jim Dyckman. He was a long way off, but he looked bigger than Cheever remembered him. Also he was calmer than Cheever had hoped him to be, and not drunk, as he half expected.

Dyckman caught sight of Cheever, glared a moment, tossed his head as if it had antlers on it, and came forward grimly and swiftly.

A few members of the club spoke to him. An attendant or two, carrying cocktails or high-balls in or empty glasses out, stepped aside.

Dyckman advanced down the room, and his manner was challenge enough. But he paused honorably to say, "Cheever, I'm looking for you."

"So I hear."

"You had fair warning, then, from your—woman?"

"Which one?" said Cheever, with his irresistible impudence.

That was the fulminate that exploded Dyckman's wrath. "You blackguard!" he roared, and plunged. His left hand was out and open, his great right fist back. As he closed, it flashed past him and drove into the spot where Cheever's face was smirking.

But the face was gone. Cheever had bent his neck just enough to escape the fist. He met the weight of Dyckman's rush with all his own weight in a short-arm jab that rocked Dyckman's whole frame and crumpled the white cuirass of his shirt.

The fight was within an ace of being ended then and there, but Dyckman's belly was covered with sinew, and he digested the bitter medicine. He tried to turn his huge grunt into a laugh. He was at least not to be guilty of assaulting a weakling.

Dyckman was a bit of a boxer, too. Like most rich men's sons, he was practised in athletics. The gentleman of our day carries no sword and no revolver; he carries his weapons in his gloves.

Dyckman acknowledged Cheever's skill and courage by deploying and falling back. He sparred a moment. He saw that Cheever was quicker than he at the feint and the sidestep.

He grew impatient at this dancing duet. His wrath was his worst enemy and Cheever's ally. Cheever taunted him, and he heard the voices of the club members who were rushing from their chairs in consternation, and running in from the other rooms, summoned by the wireless excitement that announces fights.

There was not going to be time for a bout, and the gallery was bigger than Dyckman had expected. He went in hell-for-leather. He felt a mighty satisfaction when his good left hand slashed through Cheever's ineffectual palms, reached that perky little mustache and smeared that amiable mouth with blood.

In the counterblow the edge of Cheever's cuff caught on Dyckman's knuckles and ripped the skin. This saved Dyckman's eye from mourning. And now wherever he struck he left a red mark. It helped his target-practice.

Cheever gave up trying to mar Dyckman's face and went for his waistcoat. All is fair in such a war, and below the belt was his favorite territory. He hoped to put Dyckman out. Dyckman tried to withhold his vulnerable solar plexus by crouching, but Cheever kept whizzing through his guard like a blazing pinwheel even when it brought his jaw in reach of an uppercut.

Dyckman clinched and tried to bear him down, but Cheever, reaching round him, battered him with the terrific kidney-blow, and Dyckman flung him off.

And now servants came leaping into the fray, venturing to lay hands on the men. They could hear older members pleading: "Gentlemen! Gentlemen! For God's sake remember where you are." One or two went calling, "House Committee!"

Such blows as were struck now were struck across other heads and in spite of other arms. Both men were seized at length and dragged away, petted and talked to like infuriated stallions. They stood panting and bleeding, trying not to hear the voices of reason. They glared at each other, and it became unendurable to each that the other should be able to stand erect and mock him.

As if by a signal agreed on, they wrenched and flung aside their captors and dashed together again, forgetting science, defense, caution, everything but the lust of carnage. Dyckman in freeing himself left his coat in the grasp of his retainers.

There is nothing more sickeningly thrilling than the bare-handed ferocity of two big men, all hate and stupid power, smashing and being smashed, trying to defend and destroy and each longing to knock the other lifeless before his own heart is stopped. It seemed a pity to interrupt it, and it was perilous as well.

For a long moment the two men flailed each other, bored in, and staggered out.

It was thud and thwack, slash and gouge. Wild blows went through the air like broadswords, making the spectators groan at what they might have done had they landed. Blows landed and sent a head back with such a snap that one looked for it on the floor. Flesh split, and blood spurted. Cheever reached up and swept his nose and mouth clear of gore—then shot his reeking fist into Dyckman's heart as if he would drive it through.

It was amazing to see Dyckman's answering swing batter Cheever forward to one knee. Habit and not courtesy kept Dyckman from jumping him. He stood off for Cheever to regain his feet. It was not necessary, for Cheever's agility had carried him out of range, but the tolerance maddened him more than anything yet, and he ceased to duck and dodge. He stood in and battered at Dyckman's stomach till a gray nausea began to weaken his enemy. Dyckman grew afraid of a sudden blotting out of consciousness. He had known it once when the chance blow of an instructor had stretched him flat for thirty seconds.

He could not keep Cheever off far enough to use his longer reach. He forgot everything but the determination to make ruins of that handsome face before he went out. He knocked loose one tooth and bleared an eye, but it was not enough. Finally Cheever got to him with a sledge-hammer smash in the groin. It hurled Dyckman against and along the big table, just as he put home one magnificent, majestic, mellifluous swinge with all his body in it. It planted an earthquake under Cheever's ear.

Dyckman saw him go backward across a chair and spinning over it and with it and under it to the floor. Then he had only the faintness and the vomiting to fight. He made one groping, clutching, almighty effort to stand up long enough to crow like a victorious fighting cock, and he did. He stood up. He held to the table; he did not drop. And he said one triumphant, "Humph!"

And now the storm of indignation began. Dyckman was a spent and bankrupt object, and anybody could berate him. A member of the house committee reviled him with profanity and took the names of witnesses who could testify that Dyckman struck the first blow.

The pitiful stillness of Cheever, where a few men knelt about him, turned the favor to him. One little whiffet told Dyckman to his face that it was a dastardly thing he had done. He laughed. He had his enemy on the floor. He did not want everything.

Dyckman made no answer to the accusations. He did not say that he was a crusader punishing an infidel for his treachery to a poor, neglected woman. He had almost forgotten what he was fighting for. He was too weak even to oppose the vague advice he heard that Cheever should be taken "home." He had a sardonic impulse to give Zada's address, but he could not master his befuddled wits enough for speech.

The little fussy rooster who called Dyckman dastardly said that he ought to be arrested. The reception he got for his proposal to bring a policeman into the club or take a member out of it into the jail and the newspapers was almost annihilating. The chairman of the house committee said:

"I trust that it is not necessary to say that this wretched and most unheard-of affair must be kept—unheard of. But I may say that I have here a list of the members present, and I shall make a list of the club servants present. If one word of this leaks out, each gentleman present will be brought before the council, and every servant will be discharged immediately—every servant without regard to guilt, innocence, or time of service."

Dyckman would have liked to spend the night at the club, but its hospitable air had chilled. He sent for his big coat, turned up the collar, pulled his hat low, and crept into a taxicab. His father and mother were out, and he got to his room without explanations. His valet, Dallam, gasped at the sight of him, but Dyckman laughed:

"You ought to see the other fellow."

Then he crept into the tub, thence into his bed, and slept till he was called to the telephone the next morning by Mrs. Cheever.

As he might have expected, Charity was as far as possible from gratitude. The only good news she gave him was that Cheever had been brought home half dead, terribly mauled, broken in pride, and weeping like a baby with his shame. Dyckman could not help swelling a little at that.

But when Charity told him that Cheever accused her of setting him on and swore that he would get even with them both, Dyckman realized that fists are poor poultices for bruises, and revenge the worst of all solutions. Finally, Charity denounced Jim and begged him once more to keep out of her sight and out of her life.

Dyckman was in the depths of the blues, and a note to the effect that he had been suspended from his club, to await action looking toward his expulsion, left him quite alone in the world.

In such a mood Kedzie Thropp called him up, with a cheery hail that rejoiced him like the first cheep of the first robin after a miserable winter. He said that he would call that evening, with the greatest possible delight. She said that she was very lonely for him, and they should have a blissful evening with just themselves together.

But it proved to be a rather crowded occasion in Kedzie's apartment. Her father and mother reached there before Dyckman did, to Kedzie's horror—and theirs.



CHAPTER XXXII

Turn a parable upside down, and nearly everything falls out of it.

Even the beautiful legend of the prodigal son returning home to his parents could not retain its value when it was topsy-turvied by the Thropps.

Their son was a daughter, but she had run away from them to batten on the husks of city life, and had prospered exceedingly. It was her parents who heard of her fame and had journeyed to the city to ask her forgiveness and throw themselves on her neck. Kedzie was now wonderful before the nation under the nom de film of Anita Adair; but if her father had not spanked her that fatal day in New York she might never have known glory. So many people have been kicked up-stairs in this world.

But Kedzie had not forgiven the outrage, and her father had no intention of reminding her how much she owed to it. In fact, he wished he had thought to cut off his right hand, scripturally, before it caused him to offend.

When the moving-picture patrons in Nimrim, Missouri, first saw Kedzie's pictures on the screen they were thrilled far beyond the intended effect of the thriller. The name "Anita Adair" had meant nothing, of course, among her old neighbors, but everybody had known Kedzie's ways ever since first she had had ways. Her image had no sooner walked into her first scene than fellows who had kissed her, and girls who had been jealous of her, began to buzz.

"Look, that's Kedzie."

"For mercy's sake, Kedzie Thropp!"

Yep, that's old Throppie."

"Why—would you believe it?—that's old Ad Thropp's girl—the one what was lost so long."

In the Nimrim Nickeleum films were played twice of an evening. The seven-thirty audience was usually willing to go home and leave space for the nine-o'clock audience unless the night was cold. But on this immortal evening people were torn between a frenzy to watch Kedzie go by again and a frenzy to run and get Mr. and Mrs. Thropp.

A veritable Greek chorus ran and got the Thropps, and lost their seats. There was no room for the Thropps to get in. If the manager had not thrown out a few children and squeezed the parents through the crowd they would have lost the view.

The old people stood in the narrow aisle staring at the apotheosis of this brilliant creature in whose existence they had collaborated. They had the mythological experience of two old peasants seeing their child translated as in a chariot of fire. Their eyes were dazzled with tears, for they had mourned her as lost, either dead in body or dead of soul. They had imagined her drowned and floating down the Bay, or floating along the sidewalks of New York. They had feared for her the much-advertised fate of the white slaves—she might be bound out to Singapore or destined for Alaskan dance-halls. There are so many fates for parents to dread for their lost children.

To have their Kedzie float home to them on pinions of radiant beauty was an almost intolerable beatitude. Kedzie's mother started down the aisle, crying, "Kedzie, my baby! My little lost baby!" before Adna could check her.

Kedzie did not answer her mother, but went on with her work as if she were deaf. She came streaming from the projection-machine in long beams of light. This vivid, smiling, weeping, dancing, sobbing Kedzie was only a vibration rebounding from a screen. Perhaps that is all any of us are.

One thing was certain: the Thropps determined to redeem their lost lamb as soon as they could get to New York. Their lost lamb was gamboling in blessed pastures. The Nimrim people spoke to the parents with reverence, as if their son had been elected President—which would not have been, after all, so wonderful as their daughter's being a screen queen.

There is no end to the astonishments of our every-day life. While the Thropps had been watching their daughter disport before them in a little dark room in Missouri, and other people in numbers of other cities were seeing her in duplicate, she herself was in none of the places, but in her own room—with Jim Dyckman paying court to her.

Kedzie was engaged in reeling off a new life of her own for the astonishment of the angels, or whatever audience it is for whose amusement the eternal movie show of mankind is performed. Kedzie's story was progressing with cinematographic speed and with transitions almost as abrupt as the typical five-reeler.

Kedzie was an anxious spectator as well as an actor in her own life film. She did not see how she could get out of the tangled situation her whims, her necessities, and her fates had constructed about her. She had been more or less forced into a betrothal with the wealthy Jim Dyckman before she had dissolved her marriage with Tommie Gilfoyle. She could not find Gilfoyle, and she grew frenzied with the dread that her inability to find him might thwart all her dreams.

Then came the evening when Jim Dyckman telephoned her that he could not keep his appointment with her. It was the evening he responded to Charity Coe's appeal and met Peter Cheever fist to fist. Kedzie heard, in the polite lie he told, a certain tang of prevarication, and that frightened her. Why was Jim Dyckman trying to shake her? Once begun, where would the habit end?

That was a dull evening for Kedzie. She stuck at home without other society than her boredom and her terrors. She had few resources for the enrichment of solitude. She tried to read, but she could not find a popular novel or a short story in a magazine exciting enough to keep her mind off the excruciating mystery of the next instalment in her own life. Her heart ached with the fear that she might never know the majesty of being Mrs. Jim Dyckman. That almost royal prerogative grew more and more precious the more she feared to lose it. She imagined the glory with a ridiculous extravagance. Her theory of the life lived by the wealthy aristocrats was fantastic, but she liked it and longed for it.

The next day she waited to hear from Jim till she could endure the anxiety no longer. She ventured to call him at his father's home. She waited with trepidation while she was put through to his room, but his enthusiasm when he recognized her voice refreshed her hopes and her pride. She did not know that part of her welcome was due to the fierce rebuke Charity Coe had inflicted on him a little before because he had mauled her husband into a wreck.

That evening she waited for Jim Dyckman's arrival with an ardor almost akin to love. He had begged off from dinner. He did not explain that he carried two or three visible fist marks from Cheever's knuckles which he did not wish to exhibit in a public restaurant.

So Kedzie dined at home in solitary gloom. She had only herself for guest and found herself most stupid company.

She dined in her bathrobe and began immediately after dinner to dress for conquest. She hoped that Dyckman would take her out to the theater or a dance, and she put on her best bib and tucker, the bib being conspicuously missing. She was taking a last look at the arrangement of her little living-room when the telephone-bell rang and the maid came to say:

"'Scuse me, Miss Adair, but hall-boy says your father and mother is down-stairs."

Kedzie almost fainted. She did not dare refuse to see them. She had not attained that indifference to the opinions of servants which is the only real emancipation from being the servant of one's servants.

While she fumbled with her impulses the maid rather stated than asked, "Shall I have 'em sent up, of course?"

"Of course," Kedzie snapped.



CHAPTER XXXIII

The Thropps knew Kedzie well enough to be afraid of her. A parental intuition told them that if they wrote to her she would be a long while answering; if they telephoned her she would be out of town. So they came unannounced. It had taken them the whole day to trace her. They learned with dismay that she was no longer "working" at the Hyperfilm Studio.

Adna Thropp and his wife were impressed by the ornate lobby of the apartment-house, by the livery of the hall-boy and the elevator-boy, by the apron and cap of the maid who let them in, and by the hall furniture.

But when they saw their little Kedzie standing before them in her evening gown—her party dress as Mrs. Thropp would say—they were overwhelmed. A daughter is a fearsome thing to a father, especially when she is grown up and dressed up. Adna turned his eyes away from his shining child.

But the sense of shame is as amenable to costume as to the lack of it, and Kedzie—the shoulder-revealer—was as much shocked by what her parents had on as they by what she had off.

The three embraced automatically rather than heartily, and Kedzie came out of her mother's bosom chilled, though it was a warm night and Mrs. Thropp had traveled long. Also there was a lot of her.

Kedzie gave her parents the welcome that the prodigal's elder brother gave him. She was thinking: "What will Jim Dyckman say when he learns that my real name is Thropp and sees this pair of Thropps? They look as if their name would be Thropp."

Adna made the apologies—glad tidings being manifestly out of place.

"Hope we 'ain't put you out, daughter. We thought we'd s'prise you. We went to the fact'ry. Man at the door says you wasn't workin' there no more. Give us this address. Right nice place here, ain't it? Looks like a nice class of folks lived here."

Kedzie heard the rounded "r" and the flat "a" which she had discarded and scorned the more because she had once practised them. Children are generally disappointed in their parents, since they cherish ideals to which few parents may conform from lack of time, birth, breeding, or money. Kedzie was not in any mood for parents that night, anyway, but if she had to have parents, she would have chosen an earl and a countess with a Piccadilly accent and a concert-grand manner. Such parents it would have given her pleasure and pride to exhibit to Dyckman. They would awe-inspire him and arrange the marriage settlement, whatever that was.

But these poor old shabby dubs in their shabby duds—a couple who were plebeian even in Jayville! If there had not been such a popular prejudice against mauling one's innocent parents about, Kedzie would probably have taken her father and mother to the dumb-waiter and sent them down to the ash-can.

As she hung between despair and anxiety the telephone-bell rang. Jim Dyckman called her up to say that he was delayed for half an hour. Kedzie came back and invited her parents in. It made her sick to see their awkwardness among the furniture. They went like scows adrift. They priced everything with their eyes, and the beauty was spoiled by the estimated cost.

Mrs. Thropp asked Kedzie how she was half a dozen times, and, before Kedzie could answer, went on to tell about her own pains. Mr. Thropp was freshly alive to the fact that New York's population is divided into two classes—innocent visitors and resident pirates.

While they asked Kedzie questions that she did not care to answer, and answered questions she had not cared to ask, Kedzie kept wondering how she could get rid of them before Dyckman came. She thanked Heaven that there was no guest-room in her apartment. They could not live with her, at least.

Suddenly it came over the pretty, bewildered little thing with her previous riddle of how to get rid of a last-year's husband so that she might get a new model—suddenly it came over Kedzie that she had a tremendous necessity for help, advice, parentage. The crying need for a father and a mother enhanced the importance of the two she had on hand.

She broke right into her mother's description of a harrowing lumbago she had suffered from: it was that bad she couldn't neither lay nor set—that is to say, comfortable. Kedzie's own new-fangled pronunciations and phrases fell from her mind, and she spoke in purest Nimrim:

"Listen, momma and poppa. I'm in a peck of trouble, and maybe you can help me out."

"Is it money?" Adna wailed, sepulchrally.

"No, unless it's too much of the darned stuff."

Adna gasped at the paradox. He had no time to comment before she assailed him with:

"You see, I've gone and got married."

This shattered them both so that the rest was only shrapnel after shell. But it was a leveling bombardment of everything near, dear, respectable, sacred. They were fairly rocked by each detonation of fact.

"Yes, I went and married a dirty little rat—name's Gilfoyle—he thinks my real name's Anita Adair. I got it out of a movie, first day I ran off from you folks. I had an awful time, momma—like to starved—would have, only for clerkin' in a candy-store. Then I got work posln' for commercial photographers. Did you see the Breathasweeta Chewin' Gum Girl? No? That was me. Then I was a dancer for a while—on the stage—and—the other girls were awful cats. But what d'you expect? The life was terrible. We didn't wear much clo'es. That didn't affect me, though; some of those nood models are terribly respectable—not that I was nood, o' course. But—well—so I married Tommie Gilfoyle. I don't know how I ever came to. He must have mesmerized me, I guess."

"What did he work at?" said Adna.

"Poetry."

"Is poetry work?"

"Work? That's all it is. Poetry is all work and no pay. You should have seen that gink sweatin' over the fool stuff. He'd work a week for five dollars' worth of foolishness. And besides, as soon as he married me he lost his job."

"Poetry?" Adna mumbled.

"Advertising."

"Oh!"

"Well, we didn't live together very long, and I was perfectly miser'ble every minute."

"You poor little honey child!" said Mrs. Thropp, who felt her lamb coming back to her, and even Adna reached over and squeezed her hand and rubbed her knuckles with his rough thumb uncomfortably.

But it was good to have allies, and Kedzie went on:

"By an' by Gilfoyle got the offer of a position in Chicago, and he couldn't get there without borrowing all I had. But I was glad enough to pay it to him. I'd 'a' paid his fare to the moon if he'd 'a' gone there. Then I got a position with a moving-picture company—as a jobber—I began very humbly at first, you see, and I underwent great hardships." (She was quoting now from one of her favorite interviews.) "My talent attracted the attention of the director, Mr. Ferriday. He stands very high in the p'fession, but he's very conceited—very! He thought he owned me because he was the first one I let direct me. He wanted me to marry him."

"Did you?" said Adna, who was prepared for anything.

"I should say not!" said Kedzie. "How could I, with a husband in Chicago? He wasn't much of a husband—just enough to keep me from marrying a real man. For one day, who should come to the studio but Jim Dyckman!"

"Any relation to the big Dyckmans?" said Adna.

"He's the son of the biggest one of them all," said Kedzie.

"And you know him?"

"Do I know him? Doesn't he want to marry me? Isn't that the whole trouble? He's coming here this evening."

To Adna, the humble railroad claim-agent, the careless tossing off of the great railroad name of Dyckman was what it would have been to a rural parson to hear Kedzie remark:

"I'm giving a little dinner to-night to my friends Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Mr. Apostle Paul."

When the shaken wits of the parents began to return to a partial calm they remembered that Kedzie had mentioned somebody named Gilfoyle—Gargoyle would have been a better name for him, since he grinned down in mockery upon a cathedral of hope.

Adna whispered, "When did you divorce—the other feller?"

"I didn't; that's the trouble."

"Why don't you?"

"I can't find him."

Adna spoke up: "I'll go to Chicago and find him and get a divorce, if I have to pound it out of him. You say he's a poet?"

Adna had the theory that poetry went with tatting and china-painting as an athletic exercise. Kedzie had no reason to think differently. She had whipped her own poet, scratched him and driven him away in disorder. She told her people of this and of her inability to recall him, and of his failure to answer the letter she had sent to Chicago.

Her father and mother grew incandescent with the strain between the obstacle and the opportunity—the irresistible opportunity chained to the immovable obstacle. They raged against the fiend who had ruined Kedzie's life, met her on her pathway, gagged and bound her, and haled her to his lair.

Poor young Gilfoyle would have been flattered at the importance they gave him, but he would not have recognized himself or Kedzie.

According to his memory, he had married Kedzie because she was a pitiful, heartbroken waif who had lost her job and thrown herself on his mercy. He had married her because he adored her and he wanted to protect her and love her under the hallowing shelter of matrimony. He had given her his money and his love and his toil, and they had not interested her. She had berated him, chucked him, taken up with a fast millionaire; and when he returned to resume his place in her heart she had greeted him with her finger-nails.

Thus, as usual in wars, each side had bitter grievances which the other could neither acknowledge nor understand. Gilfoyle was as bitter against Kedzie as she was against him.

And even while the three Thropps were wondering how they could summon this vanquished monster out of the vasty deep of Chicago they could have found him by putting their heads out of the window and shouting his name. He was loitering opposite in the areaway of an empty residence. He did not know that Kedzie's father and mother were with her, any more than they knew that he was with them.



CHAPTER XXXIV

After a deal of vain abuse of Gilfoyle for abducting their child and thwarting her golden opportunity, Adna asked at last, "What does Mr. Dyckman think of all this?"

"You don't suppose I've told him I was married, do you?" Kedzie stormed. "Do I look as loony as all that?"

"Oh!" said Adna.

"Why, he doesn't even know my name is Thropp, to say nothing of Thropp-hyphen-Gilfoyle."

"Oh!" said Adna.

"Who does he think you are?" asked Mrs. Thropp.

"Anita Adair, the famous favorite of the screen," said Kedzie, rather advertisingly.

"Hadn't you better tell him?" Adna ventured.

"I don't dast. He'd never speak to me again. He'd run like a rabbit if he thought I was a grass widow."

Mrs. Thropp remonstrated: "I don't believe he'd ever give you up. He must love you a heap if he wants to marry you."

"That's so," said Kedzie. "He's always begging me to name the day. But I don't know what he'd think if I was to tell him I'd been lying to him all this time. He thinks I'm an innocent little girl. I just haven't got the face to tell him I'm an old married woman with a mislaid husband."

"You mean to give him up, then?" Mrs. Thropp sighed.

Adna raged back: "Give up a billion-dollar man for a fool poet? Not on your tintype!"

Kedzie gave her father an admiring look. They were getting on sympathetic ground. They understood each other.

Adna was encouraged to say: "If I was you, Kedzie, I'd just lay the facts before him. Maybe he could buy the feller off. You could probably get him mighty cheap."

Mrs. Thropp habitually resented all her husband's arguments. She scorned this proposal.

"Don't you do it, Kedzie. Just as you said, he'd most likely run like a rabbit."

"Then what am I going to do?" Kedzie whimpered.

There was a long silence. Mrs. Thropp pondered bitterly. She was the most moral of women. She had brought up her children with all rigidity. She had abused them for the least dereliction. She had upheld the grimmest standard of virtue, with "Don't!" for its watchword. Of virtue as a warm-hearted, alert, eager, glowing spirit, cultivating the best and most beautiful things in life, she had no idea. Virtue was to her a critic, a satirist, a neighborhood gossip, something scathing and ascetic. That delicate balance between failing to mind one's own business and failing to respond to another's need did not bother her—nor did that theory of motherhood which instils courage, independence, originality, and enthusiasm for life, and starts children precociously toward beauty, love, grace, philanthropy, invention, art, glory.

She had the utmost contempt for girls who went right according to their individualities, or went wrong for any reason soever. The least indiscretions of her own daughters she visited with endless tirades. Kedzie had escaped them for a long while. She had succeeded as far as she had because she had escaped from the most dangerous of all influences—a perniciously repressive mother. She would have been scolded viciously now if it had not been for Dyckman's mighty prestige.

The Dyckman millions in person were about to enter this room. The Dyckman millions wanted Kedzie. If they got her it would be a wonderful thing for a poor, hard-working girl who had had the spunk to strike out for herself and make her own way without expense to her father and mother. The Dyckman millions, furthermore, would bring the millennium at once to the father and mother.

Mrs. Thropp, fresh from her village (yet not so very fresh—say, rather, recent from sordid humility), sat dreaming of herself as a Dyckman by marriage. She imagined herself and the great Mrs. Dyckman in adjoining rocking-chairs, exchanging gossip and recipes and anecdotes of their joint grandchildren-to-be. Just to inhale the aroma of that future, that vision of herself as Mr. Dyckman's mother-in-law, was like breathing in deeply of laughing-gas; a skilful dentist could have extracted a molar from her without attracting her attention. And in the vapor of that stupendous temptation the devil actually did extract from her her entire moral code without her noticing the difference.

If Kedzie had been married to Gilfoyle and besought in marriage by another fellow of the same relative standard of income Mrs. Thropp could have waxed as indignant as anybody. If Kedzie's new suitor had earned as high as four thousand a year, which was a pile of money in Nimrim, she would still have raged against the immorality of tampering with the sacrament of marriage. She might have withstood as much as twenty thousand a year for the sake of home and religion. She abhorred divorce, as well as other people do (especially divorcees).

But to resist a million dollars and all that went with it was impossible. To resist a score of millions was twenty times impossibler. She made up her mind that Dyckman should not escape from this temporary alliance with the Thropps without paying at least a handsome initiation-fee. Suddenly she set her jaw and broke into the parley of her husband and their daughter:

"Well, I've made up my mind. Adna, you shut up awhile and get on out this room. I'm going to have a few words with my girl."

Adna looked into the face of his wife and saw there that red-and-white-striped expression which always puts a wise man to flight. He was glad to be permitted to retreat. When he was gone Mrs. Thropp beckoned Kedzie to sit by her on the chaise longue. She gathered her child up as some adoring old buzzard might cuddle her nestling and impart choice ideals of scavengery.

"Look here, honey: you listen to your mother what loves you and knows what's best for you. You've struck out for yourself and you've won the grandest chance any girl ever had. If you throw it away you'll be slappin' Providence right in the face. The Lord would never have put this op'tunity in your reach if He hadn't meant you to have it."

"What you talking about, momma?" said Kedzie.

"My father always used to say: 'Old Man Op'tunity is bald-headed except for one long scalplock in the middle his forehead. Grab him as he comes toward you, for there's nothing to lay holt on as he goes by.'"

"What's all this talk about bald-heads?" Kedzie protested.

"Hush your mouth and listen to a woman that's older'n what you are and knows more. Look at me! I've slaved all my life. I've been a hard-workin', church-goin' woman, a good mother to a lot of ungrateful children, a faithful, lovin' wife—and what have I got for it? Look at me. Do you want to be like me when you get my age? Do you?"

It was a hard question to answer politely, so Kedzie said nothing. Mrs. Thropp went on:

"You got a chance to look like me and live hard and die poor, and that's what'll happen if you stick by this low-life, good-for-nothing dawg you married. Don't do it. Money's come your way. Grab it quick. Hold on to it tight. Money's the one thing that counts. You take my word for it. It don't matter much how you get it; the main thing is Get it! People don't ask you How? but How Much? If you got enough they don't care How."

"That's all right enough," said Kedzie, "but the main question with me is How?"

"How is easy," said Mrs. Thropp, and her face seemed to turn yellow as she lowered her voice. "This Mr. Dyckman is crazy about you. He wants you. If he's willin' to marry you to get you, I guess he'll be still more willin' to get you without marryin' you."

"Why, momma!"

It was just a whisper. Kedzie had lived through village perils and city perils; she had been one of a band of dancers as scant of morals as of clothes; she had drifted through all sorts of encounters with all sorts of people; but she had never heard so terrible a thought so terribly expressed. She flinched from her mother. Her mother saw that shudder of retreat and grew harsher:

"You tell Mr. Dyckman about your husband, and you'll lose him. You will—for sure! If you lose him, you lose the greatest chance a girl ever had. Take him—and make him pay for you!—in advance. Do you understand? You can't get much afterward. You can get a fortune if you get your money first. Look at you, how pretty you are! He'd give you a million if you asked him. Get your money; then tell him if you want to; but don't lose this chance. Do you hear me?"

"Yes," Kedzie sighed. "Yes, momma."

"Promise me on your solemn honor!"

Kedzie giggled with sheer nervousness at the phrase. But she would not promise.

The door-bell rang, and the maid admitted Jim Dyckman, who had not paused to send his name up by the telephone. While he gave his hat and stick to the maid and peeled off his gloves Kedzie was whispering:

"It's Jim."

Mrs. Thropp struggled to her feet. "He mustn't find me here," she said. "Don't tell him about us."

But before she could escape Dyckman was in the doorway, almost too tall to walk through it, almost as tall as twenty million dollars.

To Mrs. Thropp he was as majestic as the Colossus of Rhodes would have been. Like the Colossus of Rhodes, he was a gilded giant.



CHAPTER XXXV

Kedzie was paralyzed. Mrs. Thropp was inspired. Unity of purpose guided her true. She had told her daughter to ignore Gilfoyle as an unimportant detail. She certainly did not intend to substitute a couple of crude parents as a new handicap.

No one knew Mrs. Thropp's cheapness of appearance better than she did. A woman may grow shoddy and careless, but she rarely grows oblivious of her uncomeliness. She will rather cherish it as the final cruelty of circumstances. Mrs. Thropp was keenly alive to the effect it would have on Dyckman if Kedzie introduced her and Adna as the encumbrances on her beauty.

Adna, hearing the door-bell and Dyckman's entrance, returned to the living-room from the bathroom, where he had taken refuge. He stood in the hall now behind the puzzled Dyckman.

There was a dreadful silence for a moment. Jim spoke, shyly:

"Hello, Anita! How are you?"

"Hello, Jim!" Kedzie stammered. "This is—"

"I'm the janitor's wife," said Mrs. Thropp. "My husband had to come up to see about the worter not running in the bathroom, and I came along to see Miss—the young lady. She's been awful good to me. Well, I'll be gettin' along. Good night, miss. Good night, sir."

To save herself, she could not think of Kedzie's screen name. To save her daughter's future, she disowned her. She pushed past Dyckman, and silencing the stupefied Adna with a glare, swept him out through the dining-room into the kitchen.

It amazed Mrs. Thropp to find a kitchen so many flights up-stairs. The ingenuity of the devices, the step-saving cupboard, the dry ice-box with its coils of cold-air pipes, the gas-stove, the electric appliances, were like wonderful new toys to her.

Adna was as comfortable as a cow in a hammock, and she would have sent him away, but his hat was in the hall and she dared not go for it. Besides, she wanted to wait long enough to learn the outcome of Kedzie's adventure with Dyckman.

As soon as he was alone with Kedzie, Jim had taken her into his arms. She blushed with an unwonted timidity in a new sense of the forbiddenness of her presence there.

Her upward glance showed her that Jim had been in trouble, too. His jaw had a mottled look, and one eyebrow was a trifle mashed.

"What on earth has happened to you?" she gasped.

"Oh, I had a little run-in with a fellow."

"What about?" said Kedzie.

"Nothing much."

"He must have hurt you terribly."

"Think so? Well, you ought to see him."

"What was it all about?"

"Oh, just a bit of an argument."

"Who was he?"

"Nobody you know."

"You mean it's none of my business?"

"I wouldn't put it that way, honey. I'd just rather not talk about it."

Kedzie felt rebuffed and afraid. He had spent an evening away from her and had reappeared with scars from a battle he would not describe. She would have been still more terrified if she had known that he had fought as the cavalier of Charity Coe Cheever. She would have been somewhat reassured if she had known that Jim smarted less under the bruises of Cheever's fists than under the rebuke he had had from Charity for his interference in her marital crisis.

Jim was the more in need of Kedzie's devotion for being discarded again by Charity. The warmth in Kedzie's greeting was due to her fear of losing him. But he did not know that. He only knew that she was exceedingly cordial to him, and it was his nature to repay cordiality with usury.

He noted, however, that Kedzie's warmth had an element of anxiety. He asked her what was worrying her, but she would not answer.

At length he made his usual remark. It had become a sort of standing joke for him to say, "When do we marry?"

She always answered, "Give me a little more time." But to-night when he laughed, "Well, just to get the subject out of the way, when do we marry?" Kedzie did not make her regular answer. Her pretty face was suddenly darkened with pain. She moaned: "Never, I guess. Never, I'm afraid."

"What's on your mind, Anita?"

She hesitated, but when he repeated his query she took the plunge and told him the truth.

Her mother had pleaded just a little too well. If Mrs. Thropp had begged Kedzie to do the right thing for the right's sake Kedzie would have felt the natural reaction daughters feel toward motherly advice. But the entreaty to do evil that evil might come of it aroused even more resistance, issuing as it did from maternal lips that traditionally give only holy counsel. It had a more reforming effect on Kedzie's crooked plans than all the exhortations of all the preachers in the world could have had.

Kedzie turned to honesty because it seemed the less horrible of two evils. She assumed the role of a little penitent, and made Jim Dyckman a father confessor. She told her story as truthfully as she could tell it or feel it. She was too sincere to be just.

She made herself the martyr that she felt herself to be. She wept plentifully and prettily, with irresistible gulps and swallowings of lumps and catches of breath, fetches of sobs, and dartings and gleamings of pearls from her shining eyelids. Her handkerchief was soon a little wad of wet lace, ridiculously pathetic; her lips were blubbered. She wept on and on till she just had to blow her little red nose. She blew it with exquisite candor, and it gave forth the heartbreaking squawk of the first toy trumpet a child breaks of a Christmas morning.

One radical difference between romance and realism is that in romance the heroines weep from the eyelashes out; in realism, some of the tears get into the nostrils. In real life it is reality that moves our hearts, and Dyckman was convinced by Kedzie's realism.

She did not need to tell him of her humble and Western birth. He had recognized her accent from the first, and forgiven it. He knew a little of her history, because Charity Coe had sent him to the studio to look her up, reminding him that she had been the little dancer he pulled out of Mrs. Noxon's pool.

At length Kedzie revealed the horrible fact that her real name was Kedzie Thropp. He laughed aloud. He was so tickled by her babyish remorse that he made her say it again. He told her he loved it twice as well as the stilted, stagy "Anita Adair."

"That's one of the reasons I wanted you to marry me," he said, "so that I could change your horrible name."

"But I changed it myself first," Kedzie howled; and now the truth came ripping. "The day after you pulled me out of the pool at Newport I—I—married a fellow named Tommie Gilfoyle."

Dyckman's smile was swept from his face; his chuckle ended in a groan. Kedzie's explanation was a little different from the one she gave her parents. Unconsciously she tuned it to her audience. It grew a trifle more literary.

"What could I do? I was alone in the world, without friends or money or position. He happened to be at the railroad station. He saw how frightened I was, and he had loved me for a long time. He begged me to take mercy on him and on myself, and marry him. He offered me his protection; he said I should be his wife in name only until I learned to love him. And I was alone in the world, without friends or money—but I told you that once, didn't I?"

Dyckman was thinking hard, aching hard. He mumbled, "What became of him?"

"When he saw that I couldn't love him he took some money I had left from my earnings and abandoned me. I had a desperate struggle to get along, and then I got my chance in the moving pictures, and I met you there—and—learned what love is—too late—too late!"

Dyckman broke in on her lyric grief, "What became of the man you married?"

"He never came near me till awhile ago. He saw my pictures on the screen and thought I must be making a big lot of money. He came here and tried to sneak back into my good graces. He even tried to kiss me, and I nearly tore his eyes out."

"Why?" Jim asked.

"Because I belong to nobody but you—at least, I did belong to nobody but you. But now you won't want me any more. I don't blame you for hating me. I hate myself. I've deceived you, and you'll never believe me again, or love me, or anything."

She wept ardently, for she was appalled by the magnitude of her deception, now that it stood exposed. She had no idea of the magnitude of Dyckman's chivalry. She slipped to the floor and laid her head on his knee.

It was Dyckman's nature to respond at once to any appeal to his sympathy or his courtesy. Automatically his heart warmed toward human distress. He felt a deeper interest in Kedzie than before, because she threw herself on his mercy as never before. His hand went out to her head and fell upon her hair with a kind of apostolic benediction. He poured, as it were, an ointment of absolution and acceptance upon her curls.

She felt in his very fingers so much reassurance that she was encouraged to unburden herself altogether of her hoard of secrets.

"There's one more awful thing you'll never forgive me for, Jim. I want to tell you that, and then you'll know all the worst of me. My father and mother came to town to-day, and—and that was my mother who said she was the janitor's wife."

"Why did she do that?" said Jim.

"I had been telling them how much I loved you, and poor dear mother was afraid you might be scared away if you knew how poor my people are."

"What kind of a ghastly snob do they take me for?" Jim growled.

"They don't know you as I do," said Kedzie; "but even I can't expect you to forgive everything. I've lied to you about everything except about loving you, and I was a long while telling you the truth about that. But now you know all there is to know about me, and I wouldn't blame you for despising me. Of course I don't expect you to want to marry me any longer, so I'll give you back your beautiful engagement ring."

With her arms across his knees, one of her delicate hands began to draw from the other a gold circlet knobbed with diamonds.

"Don't do that," Jim said, taking her hands in his. "The engagement stands."

"But how can it, darling?" said Kedzie. "You can't love me any more."

"Of course I do, more and more."

"But you can never marry me, and surely you don't want—"

Suddenly she ran plump into the situation her mother had imagined and encouraged. She blushed at the collision with it, and became a very allegory of innocence confronted with abhorrent evil.

"Of course I don't," said Dyckman, divining exactly what she meant. "I'll find this Gilfoyle and buy him up or beat him to a pulp."

Kedzie lifted her downcast eyes in gratitude for such a godlike resolution. But before she could cry out in praise of it she cried out in terror.

For right before her stood the long-lost Gilfoyle.



CHAPTER XXXVI

During his long wait this evening Gilfoyle had grown almost uncontrollable with impatience to undertake the assault. His landlady had warned him not to return to his room until he brought some cash on account. He was for making the charge the moment he saw Jim Dyckman enter the building, but Connery insisted on giving Dyckman time to get forward with his courtship. They had seen the maid come out of the servants' entrance and hurry up the street to the vain tryst Connery had arranged with her to get her out of the way.

At length, when time had passed sufficiently, they had crossed to the apartment-house and told the elevator-boy they were expected by the tenants above. He took them up without question. They pretended to ring the bell there, waited for the elevator to disappear, then walked down a flight of steps and paused at the fatal sill.

Connery inserted the key stealthily into the lock, turned it, opened the door in silence, and let Gilfoyle slip through. He followed and closed the door without shock.

They heard Kedzie's murmurous tones and the rumble of Dyckman's answer. Then Gilfoyle strode forward. He saw Kedzie coiled on the floor with her elbows on Dyckman's knees. He caught her eye, and her start of bewilderment held him spellbound a moment. Then he cried:

"There you are! I've got you! You faithless little beast."

Dyckman rose to an amazing height, lifted Kedzie to her feet, and answered:

"Who the devil are you, and what the devil do you want?"

"I'm the husband of that shameless woman; that's who I am," Gilfoyle shrilled, a little cowed by Dyckman's stature.

"Oh, you are, are you!" said Dyckman. "Well, you're the very chap I'm looking for. Come in, by all means."

Connery, seeing that the initiative was slipping from Gilfoyle's flaccid hand, pushed forward with truculence.

"None of that, you big bluff! You needn't think you can put anything over on me."

"And who are you?" said Dyckman.

"I'm Connery the detective, and I've got the goods on you."

He advanced on Dyckman, and Gilfoyle came with him. Gilfoyle took courage from the puzzled confusion of Dyckman, and he poured forth invectives.

"You think because you're rich you can go around breaking up homes and decoying wives away, do you? Not that she isn't willing enough to be decoyed! I wasn't good enough for her. She had to sell herself for money and jewelry and a gay time! I ought to kill you both, and maybe I will; but first I'm going to show you up in the newspapers."

"Oh, you are, are you!" was the best that Dyckman could improvise.

"Yes, he is," Connery roared. "I'm a newspaper man, and your name's worth head-lines in every paper in the country. And I'll see that it gets there, too. It will go on the wires to-night unless—"

"Unless what?"

"Unless you come across with—"

"Oh, that's it, is it!" said Dyckman. "Just a little old-fashioned blackmail!"

He had tasted the joys of violence in his bout with Cheever, and now he had recourse to it again. His long arms went out swiftly toward the twain of his assailants. His big hands cupped their heads as if they were melons, and he knocked their skulls together smartly.

He might have battered them to death, but he heard Kedzie's little cry of horror, and forbore. He flung the heads from him, and the bodies followed limply. Connery went to the floor, and Gilfoyle sprawled across a chair. They were almost unconscious, their brains reduced to swirling nebulae.

Kedzie thought for a moment that she and her love-affairs had brought about a double murder. She saw herself becoming one of those little women who appear with an almost periodic regularity in the annals of crime, and whose red smiles drag now this, now that great family's name into the mud and vomit of public nausea.

She would lose Jim Dyckman, after all, and ruin him in the losing. She clung to his arm to check him in his work of devastation. He, too, stood wondering at the amazing deed of his rebellious hands, and wondering what the result would be.

He and Kedzie rejoiced at seeing the victims move. Connery began to squirm on the floor and get to his wabbly knees, and Gilfoyle writhed back to consciousness with wits a-flutter.

There was a silence of mutual attention for a while. Connery was growling from all-fours like a surly dog:

"I'll get you for this—you'll see! You'll be sorry for this."

This restored Dyckman's temper to its throne. He seized Connery by the scruff of his coat, jerked him to his feet, and snarled at him:

"Haven't you had enough, you little mucker? You threaten me or Miss Adair again and I'll not leave enough of you to—to—"

He was not apt at phrases, but Connery felt metaphors enough in the size of the fist before his nose. He put up his hands, palms forward, in the ancient gesture of surrender. Then Gilfoyle turned cry-baby and began to sob.

"You call her Miss Adair! But she's my wife. Mrs. Gilfoyle is what she is, and you've taken her away from me. This is a rotten country, and you rotten millionaires can do nearly anything you want to—but not quite. You'll find that out. There are still a few courts and a few newspapers you can't muzzle."

Dyckman advanced against him, but Gilfoyle merely clung to the back of his chair, and his non-resistance was his best shelter. It was impossible for Dyckman to strike him. Secure in his helplessness, he took full advantage of the tyranny of impotence. He rose to his feet and went on with his lachrymose philippic.

"You're going to pay for what you've done, and pay high!"

The one thing that restrained Dyckman from offering to buy him out was that he demanded purchase. Like most rich people, Dyckman was the everlasting target of prayers and threats. He could be generous to an appeal, but a demand locked his heart.

He answered Gilfoyle's menace, bluntly, "I'll pay you when hell freezes over, and not a cent before."

"Well, then, you stand from under," Gilfoyle squealed. "There's a law in this State against home-wreckers like you, and I can send you to the penitentiary for breaking it."

Dyckman's rage blackened again; he caught Gilfoyle by the shoulder and roared: "You foul-mouthed, filthy-minded little sneak! You say a word against your wife and I'll throw you out of the window. She's too decent for you to understand. You get down on your knees and ask her pardon."