Joan Thursday: A Novel

by Louis Joseph Vance

The door slammed. He was gone.

---

She knew the man too well not to know he would make instantly for the nearest bar; the only question was what guise intoxication would assume in him, this time. It was possible that he would drink himself raving mad and return fit for murder.

She must make her escape with all possible expedition....

Instantly Joan sat up, dried her eyes, convulsively swallowed her sobs, and felt of her bruised mouth.

Before her on the carpet the diamond ring winked sardonically in the sunset light.

She pondered savagely the wide and deep damnation it had wrought in her life.

It seemed impossible that only a few minutes had elapsed since she had entered this room, an affectionate, patient, and not unhappy wife. Now she sifted her heart and found in it not one grain of the love it had once held for Quard. This alone would have rendered irrevocable her decision to leave him.

The thing was over—settled—finished.

She gave a gesture of finality.

With all her heart she hoped that the sketch would go to the devil without her....

Rising, she went to the mirror, to stare incredulously at the face it presented for her inspection, a cruel caricature, lined, distorted, blowsy, stained with tears. At this vision, hysteria threatened again.

With a great effort she fought it down, and controlled and smoothed out the muscles of her face. Now she was more recognizable. Even her mouth was not seriously disfigured; he had struck with the flat of his hand only; her lips were sore and slightly but not markedly swollen. A veil would disguise them completely.

At the wash-stand she devoted some very valuable moments to sopping her face with cold water, and particularly her mouth and eyes. The treatment toned down the inflammation of weeping, rendered her flesh firm and cool once more, and left her with a feeling of spiritual refreshment, with nerves again under control and her will even more inalterably fixed than before.

Rouge and powder completed her rejuvenescence.

Turning to her trunk, she took out the tray—and paused with a low cry of consternation. From the tumbled and disordered state of its contents, it was plain that, having discovered the ring, Quard had searched diligently for further confirmation of his suspicions.

With quickening breath, the girl dropped to her knees and hastily but thoroughly ransacked and turned out upon the floor all her belongings. Within a brief period she satisfied herself of one appalling fact: Quard had not only insulted and struck her and cast her off—he had stooped to rob her. Her hands were tied: she had not money enough to leave him.

Probably, with the low cunning and fallacious reasoning of dipsomania, he had pouched her savings with that very thought in mind. Meaning to break with her, to have his scene and satisfy his lust for brutality, he had also planned to prevent Joan's leaving the cast of "The Lie" until a successor could be found and broken in. Penniless (he had argued) she would be obliged to play on, at least until Saturday, to earn her fare back East.

It was Quard's practice to carry his money in large bills folded in a belt of oiled silk which he wore buckled round his waist, beneath his underclothing—with a smaller fund for running expenses in a leather bill-fold more accessibly disposed. But Joan (finding a money-belt uncomfortable because of her corsets) had adopted the shiftless plan of secreting her savings in a pocket contrived for that purpose in an old underskirt. And since she had always held her husband rigidly to account for her individual fifty dollars per week, she had managed thus to set aside about three hundred dollars. Unfortunately, it had been their habit to carry duplicate keys to one another's luggage by way of provision against loss.

So that now she was left with less than twenty dollars in her pocket-book.

She paced the floor in wrathful meditation, pondering means and expedients. Once or twice she noticed the ring, but passed it several times before she paused, picked it up, and abstractedly placed it on her finger.

It did not once occur to her that she could raise money by hypothecating the jewel at a pawn-shop: by hook or crook she was determined to regain her own money. She was wondering what good it would do her to threaten Quard with arrest. Had a wife any right to her earnings, under the law?

After a time, she opened her handbag, found her personal bunch of keys, and unlocked her husband's trunk. Her pains, however, went for nothing; she investigated diligently every pocket of his clothing without discovering a piece of money of any description. But one thing she did find to make her thoughtful—Quard's revolver....

Removing this last, she relocked the trunk and rang for a bell-boy. Then she put the weapon on the bureau and covered it with her hat.

The youth who answered had an intelligent look. Joan appraised him narrowly before trusting him. She opened negotiations with a dollar tip.

"I want you to find my husband for me," she said. "If he's anywhere around the hotel, he'll probably be in the bar. But look everywhere, and then come and tell me. You needn't say anything to him. I just want to know where he is. Do you understand?"

"Yes, ma'm."

"You'd know him if you saw him—Mr. Quard, the actor?"

"Yes, ma'm."

"That's all. Hurry."

As soon as the boy was gone she turned again to her luggage, selecting indispensable garments and toilet articles and packing them in a suit-case. By the time a knock sounded again upon the door, she had the case strapped and locked.

"He ain't nowhere about the house, ma'm," the bell-boy reported. "He was in the bar a while, but he's went out."

Joan nodded, was dumb in thought.

"Do you want as I should go look for him, ma'am?"

"Can you leave the hotel?" Joan asked quickly.

"I'm just going off-duty now, ma'm; the night shift came on about ten minutes ago, at six o'clock."

"And you think you could possibly find him?"

"He took a cab, ma'm. The driver's stand is in front of the hotel. If I can find him, I can find where your husband went. Anyhow, it ain't hard to follow up a gentleman as—"

"As drunk!" Joan put in when the boy hesitated.

"Yes, ma'm."

Joan weighed the chance distrustfully; but it was at least a chance, and this was no time to be careful. Taking a five-dollar gold-piece from her scanty store, she gave it to the boy.

"Go find him," she said. "And if he seems to know what he's doing—just hang around until he doesn't: he won't keep you waiting long. Then bring him to me. But first take this suit-case down to the Union Ferry house, check it in the baggage-room, and give me the check when you bring him back. And—don't say anything to anybody."

"Yes, ma'm—no, ma'm."

Supperless, she sat down to wait, Quard's revolver ready to her hand.

Twilight waned; night fell; hours passed. Motionless and imperturbable, Joan waited on, the tensity of her mood betrayed only by the burning of her baleful, dangerous eyes.

At half-past nine a noise of scuffling feet, gruff voices and heavy breathing in the hallway, following the clash of an elevator gate, brought her to her feet. Going to the bureau, she opened a drawer and put the revolver away.

There would be no need of that, now.

Answering a knock, she threw the door wide. Two porters staggered in, one with the shoulders, one with the feet of Quard. The bell-boy followed. When they had lugged to the bed that inert and insensate thing she had once loved, Joan tipped the men and they departed. The boy lingered.

"Is there anything more I can do, ma'm?"

"Where did you find him?"

"Down on the Coast. I don't know what wouldn't've happened to him if you hadn't sent me after him. He was up an alley—had been stuck up by a couple of strong-arms. I seen 'em making their get-away just as I come in sight."

She uttered a cry of despair: "Robbed—you mean?"

"Yes, ma'm. He ain't got as much's a nickel on him."

Overwhelmed, Joan sank into a chair. The boy avoided her desolate eyes; he was a little afraid she might want part of the five dollars back.

"Hadn't I better send the hotel doctor up, ma'm?"

"Perhaps," she muttered dully.

"Yes, ma'm. And here's the check for your suit-case. Nothing else? Good night, ma'm."

The door closed.

Of a sudden, Joan jumped up and ran to the bed in the alcove.

Quard's condition was pitiable, but in her excited no compassion. His face was pallid as a death-mask save on one cheek-bone, where there was an angry and livid contusion. His hands were scratched, bleeding, and filthy, his clothing begrimed and torn, his pockets turned inside out. He seemed scarcely to breathe, and a thin froth flecked his slack and swollen lips.

With feverish haste she unbuttoned his shirt and trousers and tugged at his undershirt. Then she sobbed aloud, a short, dry sob of relief. She had discovered the money-belt. In another minute she had unbuckled and withdrawn it from his body. She took it to the other room, to the light, and hastily undid its fastenings.

There were perhaps two dozen fresh, new bills, for the most part of large denominations, folded once lengthwise to fit into the narrow silken tube; but someone knocked before she found time to reckon up their sum.

Hastily cramming the money, together with the tell-tale belt, into her handbag, Joan took a deep breath and said "Come in!"

There entered a grave man of middle-age, carrying a physician's satchel.

He said, with a slight inclination of his head: "Mrs. Quard, I believe?"

"Yes," Joan gasped. She nodded toward the alcove: "Your patient's in there."

He murmured some acknowledgment, turning away to the bedside. For several minutes he worked steadily over the drunkard. While she waited, her wits awhirl, Joan mechanically pinned on her hat.

Presently the physician stepped back into the room, removed his coat, turned back his cuffs, and produced a pocket hypodermic. With narrowing eyes he recognized Joan's preparations for the street.

"Is he all right, doctor?" she said with a feint of doubt and fear.

"He's in pretty bad shape, but I guess we can pull him round, all right. But I need your help. You were going out?"

She met his eyes steadily. "I was only waiting to hear how he was. I've got to hurry off to the theatre. I'm late now. If we miss the performance tonight, we may lose our booking. And he's just been held up—all we've got's what's coming to us next Saturday."

"I see. And you can do without him?"

"His understudy'll take his part—we'll manage somehow."

"Then I am afraid I shall have to call in assistance—a trained nurse."

"Do, please, doctor."

"Very well."

He moved toward the telephone.

"I'll be back in about an hour."

"Very well, Mrs. Quard."

He stared, perplexed, at the door, when she had shut it....

Avoiding the elevator and lobby, she slipped down the stairs and through a side door to the street.

In ten minutes she was at the Union Ferry.

Within an hour she was in Oakland, purchasing through tickets for her transcontinental flight.

---

XXVII

When he had finished breakfast, Matthias lighted a pipe, and setting his feet anew in the groove they had worn diagonally from door to window, began his matutinal tramp toward inspiration.

But this morning found his brain singularly sluggish: thoughts would not come; or if they showed themselves at all, it was only to peer mischievously at him round some distant corner which, when turned, discovered only an empty impasse.

Distressed, he tamped down his pipe, ran long fingers through his hair, and wrapped himself in clouds of smoke. Then a breath of cool, sweet air fanned his cheek, and he looked round in sharp annoyance. It was like that fool maid to leave the windows open and freeze him to death! And truly enough, they were both wide open from top to bottom; though, for all that, he wasn't freezing. And outside there was a bright crimson border of potted geraniums on the iron-railed balcony. He hadn't noticed them before; Madame Duprat must have set them out before he was up. Curious whim of hers! Curious weather!

Disliking inconsistencies, he stopped in one of the windows to investigate these unseasonable phenomena.

In one corner of the back-yard a dilapidated bundle of fur and bones, conforming in general with a sardonic Post-Impressionist's candid opinion of a tom-cat, lay blinking lazily in a patch of warm yellow sunlight.

In the next back-yard a ridiculous young person in bare-legs, blue denim overalls and a small red sweater, was industriously turning up the earth with a six-inch trowel, and chanting cheerfully to himself an improvisation in honour of his garden that was to be.

At an open window across the way a public-spirited and extremely pretty young woman appeared with a towel pinned round her shoulders and let down her hair, a shimmering cascade of gold for the sun's rays to wanton with and, incidentally, to dry.

Somewhere at a distance a cracked old piano-organ was romping and giggling rapturously through the syncopated measures of Tin Pan Alley's latest "rag."

A vision drifted before Matthias' eyes, of the green slopes of Tanglewood, the white château on its windy headland, the ineffable blue of the Sound beyond....

Incredulous, he turned to consult his calendar: the day was Wednesday, the seventeenth of April.

It was true, then: almost without his knowledge the bleak and barren Winter had worn away and Spring had stolen upon Town, flaunting, extravagant, shy and seductive, irresistible Spring....

For a little Matthias held back in doubt, with reluctant thoughts of his work. Then—all in a breath—he caught up hat and stick, slammed the door behind him, and blundered forth to fulfill his destiny....

She was seated on a bench, in a retired spot sheltered from the breeze, open to the sun, when Matthias, having swung round the upper reservoir, came at full stride down the West Drive, his blood romping, his eyes aglow, warm colour in his face: for the first time in half a year feeling himself again, Matthias the lover of the open skies divorced from Matthias of the midnight lamp and the scored and intricate manuscripts—that Matthias whom the world rejected.

At a word, her companion rose and moved to intercept him; and at the sound of his name, Matthias paused, wondering who she could be, this strange, sweet-faced woman, plainly dressed.

"Yes?" he said, lifting his hat. "I am Mr. Matthias—yes—"

"Mrs. Marbridge would like to speak to you."

His gaze veered quickly in the direction indicated by her brief nod. He saw Venetia waiting, and immediately went to her, in his surprise forgetful of the woman who had accosted him. This last moved slowly in the other direction and sat down out of earshot.

"This is awfully good of you, Venetia," he said, bending over her hand. "I didn't see you, of course—was thinking of something else—"

"But I was thinking of you," she said. "I've been wanting to see you for a long time, Jack."

"Surely Helena could have told you where to find me...."

"I knew we'd run across one another, somehow, somewhere, sometime—today or tomorrow, without fail. So I was content to do without the offices of Helena. Do sit down. I want so much to talk to you."

"Most completely yours to command," he said lightly, and took the place beside her.

But his heart was on his lips and in his eyes, and Venetia was far from blind.

"Then tell me about yourself," she asked. "It's been so long since I've had any news!"

"Is it possible? I should have imagined my doting aunt—"

She interrupted with a slight, negative smile and shake of her head: "Helena doesn't approve of me, you know, and of late there has been a decided coolness between the families. I'm afraid George fell out with Vincent for some reason—not too hard to guess, perhaps."

He looked away, colouring with embarrassment.

"So," she pursued evenly—"about yourself: are you married yet?"

Matthias started, laughed frankly. "You didn't know about that, either?... Well, it's true even Helena couldn't have told you much, for I told her nothing.... No, I'm neither married, nor like to be."

"She was so very sweet and pretty—"

"Joan was wholly charming," he agreed gravely, "but—well, I fancy it was inevitable. We were lucky enough to be obliged to endure a separation of some weeks before, instead of after, marriage; and so we had time to think. At least, she must have foreseen the mistake we were on the point of making, for the break was her own doing—not mine."

"You think it would have been a mistake?"

"Oh, unquestionably. I confess I'd not have known it, probably, until too late, if she hadn't made me think when she threw me over. I hope it doesn't sound caddish—but I was conscious of a distinct sense of relief when I got back from California and found she'd cleared out without leaving me a line."

"I think I understand. And did you never hear from her?"

"Not from—by accident, of her. She was predestined for the stage—I can see that clearly now, though I objected then. She was offered a chance during my absence, jumped at it, and made a sort of a half-way hit in a very successful sketch which, oddly enough, I happened to have written—under a pseudonym. It had been kicking round my agent's office for a year; he didn't believe in it any more than I did; and I disbelieved in it hard enough to be ashamed to put my own name to it. That's often the way with a fellow's work; one always believes in the cripples, you know.... Well, some actor chanced to get hold of the 'script one day, fell in love with it and put it on with Joan as his leading woman. If it had been anybody else's sketch, I'd never have known what became of her, probably. As it was, I knew nothing until I got back from the Coast.... I believe they got married very shortly after it was produced; and now they're playing it all over the country. Odd, isn't it?"

"Very," Venetia smiled. "And so your heart wasn't broken?"

He shook his head and laughed: "No!"

But a spasm of pain shot through his eyes and deceived the woman a little longer.

"And what have you been doing?" she pursued, meaning to distract him. "I mean, your work?"

He shrugged. "Oh, I've had an average luckless year. To begin with, Rideout fell down on his production of 'The Jade God'—the only time it ever had a chance to get over—and a man named Algerson bought his contract and put it on at his stock theatre in Los Angeles. That's why I went out there—to see it butchered."

"It failed?"

"Extravagantly!"

"But didn't you once have a great deal of confidence in it?"

"Every play is a valuable property until it's produced," he answered, smiling. "This one was killed by its production. Nothing was right: it needed scenery, and what they gave it had served a decade in stock; it needed actors, and what actors were accidentally permitted to get into the cast got the wrong rôles; finally, it needed intelligent stage direction, and that was supplied by the star, whose idea of a good play is one in which he speaks everybody's lines and his own. Then they rewrote most of the best scenes and botched them horribly."

"You couldn't stop them?"

"When I attempted to interfere, I was told civilly to go to the devil. Under my contract, I could have stopped them: but that meant suing out an injunction, which in turn meant putting up a bond, and—I didn't have the money."

"I'm so sorry, Jack!"

"Oh, it's all in the game. I learned something, at least. But the greatest harm it did me was to sap the faith of managers here. One man—Wylie—who was under contract to produce my 'Tomorrow's People,' paid me on January first a forfeit of five hundred dollars rather than run the risk after 'The Jade God.'"

"And so you lost both plays?"

"Oh, no; I still have 'Tomorrow's People,' and only a short time ago signed up with a manager who isn't afraid of his shadow. We'll put it on next Autumn."

"And you believe in that, too?"

"I know it will go," Matthias asserted with level confidence. "It's only a question of intelligence at the producing end—and I've arranged to get that."

"And meanwhile—you've been working?"

"Oh"—he spread out his hands—"one doesn't stop, you know. It's too interesting!"

And then he laughed again. "But, you see, you flatter a fellow into talking his head off about himself! Forgive me, and let me do a little cross-examining. How are you? And what have you been doing? You—you know, Venetia—you're looking more exquisitely pretty than ever!"

And so she was—more strangely lovely than ever in all the long span of their friendship: with a deeper radiance in her face, a clearer, more translucent pallor, in her eyes a splendour that lent new dignity to their violet-shadowed mystery.

"I'm glad of that," she said quietly. She folded listless hands in her lap, her eyes seeking distances. "I'm going to be very happy ... I think...."

He looked up sharply.

That she wasn't happy now, he could well understand: that Marbridge was behaving badly was something rather too broadly published by the very publicity of his methods. Marriage had not been permitted to interfere—at least, not after his return from Europe—with the ordinary tenor of his bachelor ways. Matthias himself had seen him not infrequently in theatres and restaurants, but only once in company with Venetia—most often he had been dancing attendance upon a Mrs. Cardrow: she who had given her lips to Matthias, thinking him Marbridge, that long-ago night at Tanglewood. She was said to be stage-struck; and Marbridge was rumoured to be deeply, though quietly, involved in the financing of certain theatrical enterprises.

Surely, then, Venetia must know what everybody knew, and be unhappy in that knowledge.

But now she was so calmly confident that she was "going to be happy"!

He wondered if she were contemplating divorce....

And then in a flash he understood. That woman who had stopped him was not of Venetia's caste; if he guessed not wildly, she was a nurse. And Venetia afoot instead of in her limousine....

She turned her eyes to his, smiling with a certain diffident, sweet sedateness. "You didn't know, Jack?"

He shook his head, looking quickly away.

"But you've guessed?"

"Yes," he replied in a low voice.

Her hand fell lightly over his for a single instant. "Then be glad for me, Jack," she begged gently. "It's—it's compensation."

"I understand," he said, "and I'm truly very glad. It's kind of you to—to tell me, Venetia."

"It changes everything," she said pensively: "all my world is changed, and I am a new strange woman, seeing it with new eyes. I have learned so much—and in so short a time—I can hardly believe it. To think, it's not a year since that time at Tanglewood—!"

"Please!" he begged.

"Oh, I didn't mean to hurt you, Jack. But it's that I wanted to talk to you about. You won't mind, when you understand, as I have learned to understand.... I tell you, I'm altogether another woman. Marriage is like learning to live in a foreign land, but motherhood is another world. I find it difficult to realize Venetia of a year ago: she's like some strange creature I once knew but never quite understood. And yet, little as I understood her, I can make excuses for her: I know her impulses were not bad. I know, better than she knew ... she loved you, Jack."

"You must not say that, Venetia!"

"But it's true, my dear, most true," she insisted in her voice of gentle magic. "The rest ... was just madness, the sort of madness that some men have the power to—to kindle in women. It's a deadly power, very terrible, and they—who have it—use it as carelessly as children playing with matches and gunpowder—"

"Oh, I understand, Venetia, I understand! Don't—"

"No—let me tell you. I've got to, Jack. I've had this so long in my heart to tell you!... You must be patient with me, this once, and listen.... You must know that I loved you then when I—ran to you—threw myself into your arms—made you ask me to marry you and promised I would and—and thought that I was safe from him because of my promise. But I didn't know myself—nor him. He seemed able to make his will my law so easily—so strangely!... Even when I ran away with him, I knew that happiness could never come of it.... It was just the madness ... I couldn't help myself ... I just could not help myself.... And then—ah, but I have paid for my madness—many times over!..."

For the moment he couldn't trust himself to speak. The woman bent forward to gain a glimpse of his half-averted face, and searched it anxiously with her haunted eyes.

"You do understand, Jack?... You forgive?..."

"There isn't any question of forgiveness," he said. "And I always understood—half-way. You know that—you must have known it, or you couldn't have said—what you have—to me."

The woman laughed a little, tender, broken laugh.

"I am so glad!" she said softly. "Perhaps it's wrong.... But you've made me a little happier. I have needed so desperately someone to confess to—someone on whose sympathy I could count. And—Jack—the only one in the world was you.... You—you've helped."

She rose, holding out both hands to him, and as he took them and held them tight he saw that her lovely eyes were wide and dim with tears.

"You've proved my faith in you," she said—"my gentle man—my knight sans peur et sans reproche!"

He bent his head to her hands, but before his lips could touch them, very gently she drew them away, and turned and left him.

Bareheaded and wondering, for a long time he stood staring at the spot where, in company with the nurse, she had disappeared.

---

XXVIII

As soon as the porter had made up the lower berth in the section Joan had reserved for her sole accommodation—in spite of the strain of thrift ingrained in her nature—she retired to it, buttoned securely the heavy plush portieres, and prepared for rest by reducing herself to that state of semi-undress in which she had learned to travel by night. Then, by the light of the small electric lamp above her pillow, she turned out the contents of her handbag and counted the money she had stolen from Quard.

The sum of it, more than twenty-one hundred dollars, staggered her. She hadn't dreamed that Quard possessed so much ready cash.

Carefully folding the bills of larger denomination into a neat, flat packet, she wrapped them in a handkerchief and hid them in the hollow of her bosom, secured by a safety-pin to her ribbed silk undervest. The remainder, more than enough to cover all ordinary expenses en route to New York, she disposed of more accessibly, half in her handbag, half in one of her stockings.

Then extinguishing the light, she lay back, but not to sleep. The pressure of her emotions was too strong to let her lose touch with consciousness. As a general rule, sleeping-cars had no terrors for Joan; never a nervous woman, her thoroughly sound and healthy organization permitted her to sleep almost at will, even under such discouraging circumstances as those provided by modern railway accommodations. But that night she lay awake till dawn flushed the windows with its wash of grey, awake and staring wide of eye into the gloom of her section, listening to the snores of conscienceless neighbours, and thinking, thinking—thinking endlessly and acutely.

But they were thoughts singularly uncoloured by remorse for what she had done or fear of its consequences.

She was not in the least sorry she had taken Quard's money; she was glad. The mere amount of it was proof enough for Joan that her husband had lied to her about the earnings of the sketch, had lied from the very beginning; otherwise he could by no means have laid by so much in the term of their booking to date. And for that, he deserved to suffer. She was only sorry he might not be made to understand how heavily he was paying for those months of deception. But that was something Quard would never know: with the story of the bell-boy he must be content; he must go through life placing the blame of his misfortune upon the heads of those nameless "stick-up men" of the Barbary Coast.

Nor was he likely to suffer otherwise. Joan was confident the man would manage somehow to find his feet financially, almost as soon as physically. A telegram to his agent, Boskerk, would bring him aid if all else failed; the play was too constant an earner of heavy commissions for Boskerk to let it fall by the wayside for lack of a few hundred dollars. So was it too strong a "draw" on the vaudeville circuits to be blacklisted and barred by managers because of the temporary break-down: something which Quard would readily explain and excuse (and Joan could imagine how persuasively) with his moving yarn of foot-pads and knock-out drops. Nor would it be more than a temporary break-down; with Quard restored to his senses, the absence of the leading woman would prove merely a negligible check. Joan entertained no illusions as to her indispensability: once, in Denver, when she had been out of the cast for two consecutive performances, suffering with an ulcerated tooth, another actress had gone on and actually read the part from manuscript without materially lessening the dramatic effect of the playlet as a whole. Other women by the score could be found to fill her place acceptably enough, if few as handsomely (Joan soothed her pride with this reservation). "The Lie" would go on its conquering way without her—never fear!

And Quard? Joan curled a lip: he wouldn't pine away for her. She had come to know too well his shallow bag of tricks; and life to him was not life if he lacked one before whose dazzled vision he could air his graces and accomplishments—strut and crow and trail a handsome wing in the dust. Looking back she could see very clearly, now, how love had waned as soon as lust was sated in the man. That night in Cincinnati had been the turning point: he had refrained from drink only as long as his wife continued to intoxicate his senses.

And Joan?... In the stifling gloom of her curtained section the girl stretched luxuriously, breathed deep, and smiled a secret, enigmatic smile. No more than he, would she waste herself away with grief and longing. She was no longer another's but now her own mistress: a free adventurer, by the gold band upon her finger licensed to cruise with letters of marque.

Shortly before sunrise she fell asleep, still smiling, and slept on sweetly well into mid-morning. Then, rising, she refreshed herself in the wash-room, and went to a late breakfast with countenance as clear and firm and bright as if she had never known a wakeful hour.

The eyes of men followed her wherever she moved, and when she was seated alone in her section, dreaming over a magazine or gazing pensively out of the window, men discovered errands that took them to and fro in her vicinity more often than was warranted by any encouragement she gave them. For she gave them none, she ignored them every one. She was through with Man for good and all!

It was a brand new rôle, and to play it diverted her immensely for the time being....

She spent the greater part of her waking hours, during the next few days, planning what she would do with all that money. Clothes, of course, figured ever first in these projections, and then a suite of rooms at some ostentatious hotel, and taxicabs when she went out to call on managers. How many times hadn't she heard Maizie Dean solemnly affirm that "a swell front does more to put you in right than anything else, with them lowlifers"?

And again she was pleasurably diverted by a vision of herself, extravagantly gowned, returning to recount her Odyssey to an admiring audience composed of Ma, Edna, and, perhaps, Butch; at the close of which she would distribute largesse, not forgetting to return Butch's loan with open-handed interest, and go on her way rejoicing, pursued by envious benedictions....

New York received her like a bridegroom, clothed in April sunshine as in a suit of golden mail, amazingly splendid and joyous. After that weary grind of inland towns and cities, differing one from another only in degrees of griminess, greyness, and dullness, New York seemed Paradise Regained to Joan. She had not believed it could seem so beautiful, so magnificent, so sensuously seductive.

In the exaltation of that delirious hour she plunged madly into a department store near the Pennsylvania Station, even before securing lodgings, and bought herself a pair of cheap white kid gloves, simply for the sheer voluptuousness of possessing once again something newly purchased in New York.

It was the beginning of an orgy. Joan hadn't thought how shabby and travel-worn she must seem until she donned those fresh and staring gloves and saw them in relief against the wrinkled and dusty garments she had worn across the continent.

Thoughtful, she sought a nearby mirror and looked herself over, then shook her head and turned away to check her suit-case at the parcels desk and surrender herself body and mind to the sweet dissipation of clothing herself afresh from top to toe....

But first of all she visited the hairdressing and manicuring department: she meant to be altogether spick-and-span before venturing forth to woo and win anew this old and misprized lover, her New York.

It was the head saleswoman of the suit department whose remote disdain led Joan deeper into extravagance.

The girl had selected a taffeta costume which, while by no means the most expensive or the handsomest in stock, possessed the advantage of fitting well her average figure, requiring no alterations. On paying for it she announced her desire to put it on at once and have her old suit sent home.

"Reully?" drawled the saleswoman, disappointed in her efforts to induce the girl to buy a higher-priced suit which did require alterations. Conjuring a pencil from the fastnesses of her back-hair, she produced an order pad. "Miss—what did you say? Ah, Thursday! Thanks. What numba, please? Is it in the city?"

Joan flushed, but controlled her impulse to wither and blast this insolent animal.

"The Waldorf-Astoria," she said quietly—though never once had she ventured within the doors of that establishment—and withdrew in triumph to make her change of clothing.

And having committed herself to this extent, she enjoyed ordering everything sent to that hotel, which in her as yet somewhat naïve understanding was synonymous with the last word in the sybaritism of metropolitan life.

Her long experience on the road had served thoroughly to break her in to the ways of hotels, however, and she betrayed no diffidence in the matter of approaching the room-clerk for accommodations. Nor did she, apparently, find anything dismaying in the price she was asked to pay for a bedroom with private bath. It was only when, at length relieved of the attentions of the bell-boy whose unconcealed admiration alone was worth the quarter Joan gave him as a tip, she had inspected first her new quarters and then herself in a pier-glass, that the girl gave herself over to alternate tremors of self-approval and trepidation. These last were only increased when she reckoned up the money she had left, and appreciated how much she had spent in that one wild afternoon of shopping.

On the other hand, she reminded herself, a complete new wardrobe was a necessity to one whose former outfit was lost beyond recall. Quard would never have forwarded the clothing she had left behind in San Francisco, even if she could have found the effrontery to write and demand it. And if she had expended upwards of five hundred dollars since reaching New York, there was less extravagance in that than might have been suspected; she had purchased cannily in almost every instance and, at worst, but few things that she could well have done without in that sphere of life to which she felt herself called.

The excitement of unwrapping those parcels which began presently to arrive in shoals, and of reviewing such purchases as she had not worn to the hotel on her back, in time completely reassured her. It was with the composure of restored self-confidence and esteem that she presently went down to dinner.

Conscious that she was looking her handsome best in a modish afternoon gown, she was able to receive the attentions of the head-waiter with just the proper degree of indifference, to order a simple meal and consume it appreciatively without seeming aware that she dined in strange surroundings.

But all the while she was consumed with admiration of herself for her audacity, as well as with not a little awe-stricken wonder at the child of fortune, who in the space of one brief year—of less, indeed, than that full period—had risen from the stocking-counter of a department store and the squalor and poverty of East Seventy-sixth Street to the dignity of a leading woman and the affluence of lodging at the Waldorf!

True, she now lacked an engagement; but she had to support her demands for new employment the prestige of a successful season with "The Lie"—"the vaudeville sensation of the year," as Quard had truthfully described it.

Need she fret herself with vain questionings of an inscrutable future, who had made such amazing progress in so short a time?

Surely she was justified in assuming that the end for her was not yet, that she was dedicated to some far richer and more gorgeous destiny than any she had ever conceived in her most wild imaginings.

She had only to watch herself: she was her own sole enemy, with her fondness for the admiration of men and their society. Let them realize that weakness, and she was lost, doomed to the way too many capable girls had gone, to the end of infamy and despair. But if only she had the wit and art to make men think her weakness theirs....

And that much Joan was sure she possessed: she believed she had learned to know Man better than herself.

She meant to go far, now, a great deal farther than she had ever thought to go in those quaint, far-off days when the crown of her ambition had been to paint her pretty face, wear silken tights upon her pretty legs, and beat a drum in the chorus of Ziegfield's Follies.

---

XXIX

After dinner Joan treated herself to the experience of lounging in one of the corridors of the hotel, the one (she fancied: she wasn't sure) known through the Town as "Peacock Alley."

She pretended to be waiting for somebody, made her gaze seem more abstracted than demure. Inwardly she quivered with the excitement, the exaltation of forming a part of that rich and sensuous scene.

There were women all about her, many women of all ages and from every grade of society, alike in one respect alone, that they were radiantly dressed and, like Joan, found pleasure in sunning themselves in the soft, diffused glow of the many shaded electric lamps as well as in the regard, as a rule less shaded, of that endless parade of men who moved, sometimes alone, again with other men, more commonly with women, continually from one part to another of the hotel.

Muted strains from an excellent orchestra, not too near, added the final touch of enchantment to this ensemble.

Entranced though, indeed, seeming little more conscious of her surroundings than one in a day-dream, Joan was acutely sensitive to all that passed in her vicinity. Not a woman came within the range of her vision without being critically inspected, dissected, analyzed, catalogued, both as to her apparel and as to the foundations for her pretensions to social position or beauty. Not a man strolled by, were he splendid in evening dress or merely "smart" in the ubiquitous "sack suit" of the period, without being scrutinized and appraised with a minute attention to detail that would have flattered him had it been less covert.

Joan felt the lust for this life burning like a fire through all her being: there was nothing she could imagine more desirable than to live always as lived, apparently, these hundreds of well-groomed, high-spirited, carefree people....

She had been steeping her soul in the blandishments of this atmosphere for fully half an hour, and was beginning to think it time to return to her room, when she was momentarily startled out of her assumed preoccupation by sight of one who hadn't been far from her thoughts at any time since her break with Quard.

He came walking her way from the general direction of the bar, with another man—both attired as richly as masculine conventions permit in America, and not altogether unconscious of the fact, each in his way guilty of a mild degree of swagger. Of the two, the one betraying the most ease and freedom from ostentation was one known to Joan, chiefly through the medium of his portraits published in The Morning Telegraph and other theatrical organs, as "Arlie" Arlington, a producing manager locally famous both for his wit and the shrewdness and success with which he contrived to gauge, year in, year out, public taste in musical comedies. Broadway had tagged him "the only trustworthy friend of the Tired Business Man." Infrequently Arlington adventured in plays without music or dancing, but as a rule with far less success.

His companion, the man whom, Joan felt, she had been subconsciously waiting for ever since entering the hotel, was Vincent Marbridge.

She was impressed with the appositeness of his appearance there to her unexpressed desire, this man who had been so plainly struck by her charms at first sight and who was credited with silent partnership in many of Arlington's enterprises. And comprehending for the first time fully how much she had been subjectively counting on meeting him again and enlisting his sympathies—his sympathies at least—she steeled herself against the shock of recognition, lest she betray her fast mounting anxiety. He must not for a moment be permitted to suspect she considered him anything but the most distant of acquaintances or believed him to have been the anonymous author of that magnificent gift of roses....

But Marbridge passed without seeing her, at all events without knowing that he saw her. Rolling a little as he walked, with that individual sway of his body from the hips, he leaned slightly toward Arlington and gesticulated with immense animation while recounting some inaudible anecdote which seemed to amuse both men mightily. And in the swing of his narrative his glance, wandering, flickered across Joan's face and on without in the least comprehending her as anything more than a lay figure in a familiar setting.

But Arlington, less distracted, looked once keenly, and after he had passed turned to look again.

In spite of this balm to her vanity, Joan flushed with chagrin. She knew in her heart that Marbridge had not other than inadvertently slighted her; yet she felt the cut as keenly as though it had been grossly intentional.

Nevertheless she waited there for many minutes more, in the hope that he would return and this time know her.

At length, however, she saw the two men again, at some distance, standing by the revolving doors at the Thirty-third Street entrance. Both now wore top-coats and hats. Marbridge was still talking, and Arlington listening with the same expression of faintly constrained but on the whole genuine amusement. And almost as soon as Joan discovered them, they were joined by two women in brilliant evening gowns and wraps. An instant later the party was feeding itself into the inappeasable hopper of the revolving door, and so disappeared.

A prey to a sudden sensation of intense loneliness and disappointment—and with this a trace of jealousy; for in spite of the distance she had been able to see that both women were very lovely—Joan got up and returned to her room....

An hour later she rose from a restless attempt to go to sleep, went to the telephone and asked the switchboard operator to find out whether or not Mr. Vincent Marbridge was a guest of the hotel.

The answer was in the affirmative, if modified by the information that the party wasn't in just then.

Intensely gratified, the girl went back to bed and promptly fell asleep formulating ingenious schemes to meet Marbridge by ostensible accident.

On the following day she lunched at the hotel, spent two fruitless hours in its public corridors between tea time and time to dress for dinner, and another in Peacock Alley after dinner, seeing nothing whatever of Marbridge.

And the day after provided her with a fatiguing repetition of this experience.

She began to be tremendously bored by this mode of existence, to sense the emptiness, the vapidity of hotel life for a friendless woman.

Once or twice she revived and let her fancy play about her project to revisit her family in the guise of Lady Bountiful, but only to defer its execution against the time when she could go to them with another engagement to drive home the stupendous proportions of her success.

Besides (she told herself) they seemed to be worrying along without her, all right. If they cared anything about her, they could have written, at least; Edna had the West Forty-sixth Street address....

Not once or twice but many a time and oft she found herself yearning back to the homely society of the Sisters Dean's salon in the establishment of Madame Duprat. And though she held back from revisiting the house through fear of meeting Matthias, she wasted many an hour promenading Broadway from Thirty-eighth Street north to Forty-eighth, in the hope of encountering Maizie or May or one of their friends.

But it was singularly her fate to espy not one familiar face among the multitude her wistful eyes reviewed during those dreary mid-afternoon patrols.

Everybody she knew, it would seem, was either busy or resting out of town.

On her fourth morning at the Waldorf, reading The Morning Telegraph over the breakfast tray in her room, Joan ran across an illuminating news item that carried a Buffalo date line. It chronicled the first performance of Arlington's most recent venture, "Mrs. Mixer," announced as a satirical comedy of manners by an author unknown either to Joan or to fame, and projected by Arlington as a vehicle to exploit the putative talents of Nella Cardrow, "the stage's latest recruit from the Four Hundred." The Buffalo performance was, it appeared, the first of a fortnight's trial on the road, following which the production was to be withdrawn pending a metropolitan début in the Autumn.

The story of the first night was infused with a thinly sarcastic humour.

"After the final curtain," it pursued, "the audience filed reverently from the house, omitting flowers, and Arlie Arlington broke a track record reaching the nearest Western Union office to summon several well-known ante-mortem specialists of New York to the bedside of the patient. Meanwhile, Vincent Marbridge was hastily organized into a posse of one to prevent Undertaker Cain from laying hands upon the sufferer and carting it off to what might prove premature interment in the mausoleum of his celebrated storage warehouses...."

Dropping the paper, Joan went directly to the telephone and asked the office to have her bill ready within an hour's time.

From this she turned to pack her new possessions in a trunk as new.

It had never occurred to her that Marbridge might have left the hotel.

Now she said that it was "just her luck!..."

By one o'clock that afternoon she had shifted bag and baggage to a stuffy and poorly furnished bedchamber in a crowded, noisy, and not overclean theatrical hotel situated on a corner of Longacre Square.

This establishment consisted of an old and rambling structure of four storeys, of which the street floor was given over to tradesmen. An all-night drug-store held the corner shop, while other subdivisions were occupied by a "tonsorial parlor," a dairy-lunch room in the favour of many taxicab chauffeurs, a boot-blacking business, and a theatrical hair-dresser's. Next door, off Broadway, stood one of those reticent brown-stone residences with perennially shuttered windows and a front-door to all appearances hermetically sealed, but negotiable, none the less, to those whom fortune had favoured with the password and sufficient money and witlessness to make them welcome with proprietors of crooked gambling layouts. Across the street rose the side wall of a theatre, decorated with an angular iron fire-escape.

The day was almost unseasonably warm, but the hour appointed when the city should blossom out in awnings had not arrived. Joan's room was hot with sunlight that mercilessly enhanced the shabbiness of all its appointments, from the stained and threadbare carpet to the cheap bureau with its mottled, dark mirror, and the scorched and blistered edges of its top where cigarettes had been suffered to burn out, forgotten.

But when Joan had unpacked and disposed of her belongings, she went to the window as she was, in a loose kimono generously open at the throat, and stood there for a long time, contentedly looking out.

Taxicabs darted or stood with motors sonorously rumbling in the street below. Round the corner, Longacre Square roared with the traffic of its several lines of surface-cars and its unending procession of motor-driven vehicles. The windows of the theatre across the way were open, and through them drifted the clatter of a piano with the surge of half a hundred feminine voices repeating over and over the burden of a chorus—betraying the fact that a rehearsal was in progress. At one of the open fire-escape exits lounged a youth in his shirt-sleeves, smoking a cigarette, and conversing amiably with a young woman in a stiffly-starched white shirtwaist, ankle-length skirt, and brazen hair: principals, Joan surmised, waiting for their turn, when the chorus had learned its business acceptably.

Nearer at hand, in the room to the right of Joan's, a woman with a good voice was humming absently an aria from "La Tosca," while to the left another woman was audible, her strained and nervous accents stuttering on in an endless monologue of abuse, evidently aimed at the head of a husband who, if he had been "drinking again," retained at least wit enough to attempt no sort of interruption or rejoinder.

Joan smiled in comprehension.

Breathing long and deep of tepid air flavoured strongly with dust and the effluvia of dead cigars and cigarettes, she turned away from the window, lifted her arms and spread them wide, luxuriously.

"Thank God!" she murmured with profound sincerity—"for a place you can stretch in!"

---

XXX

With scant delay Joan began to pick up acquaintances: nothing is easier in that milieu to which the girl dedicated herself.

The process of widening her circle began with meeting the girl whom Joan had heard singing in the adjoining bedchamber. They passed twice in the corridors of the Astoria Inn before Joan had been resident there twenty-four hours, and on the second occasion the girl with the voice nodded in a friendly way and enquired if Joan didn't think the weather was simply awf'ly lovely today. Joan replied in the affirmative, and their acquaintanceship languished for as long as twelve hours. Then, toward six in the evening, the girl presented herself at Joan's door in a condition of candid deshabille, wishing to borrow a pair of curling-irons. Being accommodated, she came on into the room, perched herself on the edge of the bed, and made herself known.

Her name was Minnie Hession and she had been singing in the chorus for seven years. Originally a prettyish, plump-bodied brunette, she was at present what she herself termed "black-and-tan": in the middle of the process of "letting her hair go back." Her father was Chief of Police of some Western city (name purposely withheld: Joan was, however, assured that she would be surprised if she knew what city) and her folks had heaps of money and had been wild with her when she insisted on going on the stage.

"But, goodness, dearie, when you've got tempryment, whatcha goin' to do? Nobody outsida the business ever understands."

All the same, much as the folks disapproved of her carving out a career for herself, whenever she got hard up all she had to do was telegraph straight back home....

She was, of course, at present without employment; but Joan was advised to wait until Arlie Arlington got back into Town; Arlie never forgot a girl who had not only a good voice but some figure, if Miss Hession did say it herself.

They went shopping together the following afternoon, and in the evening dined together at a cheap Italian restaurant, counterpart of that to which Quard had first introduced Joan and the Sisters Dean. Joan paid the bill, by no means a heavy one, and before they went home stood treat for "the movies."

After that their friendship ripened at a famous rate, if exclusively at Joan's expense.

Before it had endured a week Joan had loaned Minnie ten dollars. Toward the end of its first fortnight she mortally offended the girl by refusing her an additional twenty, and the next day Minnie moved from the Astoria Inn without the formality of paying her bill or even of giving notice. The management philosophically confiscated an empty suit-case which she had been too timorous to attempt to smuggle out of the house—everything else in her room had mysteriously vanished—and considered the incident closed. In this the management demonstrated its wisdom in its day and generation: it never saw Miss Hession again.

Nor did Joan.

But through the chorus girl, as well as independently, Joan had contracted many other fugitive friendships. She never lacked society, after that, whether masculine or feminine. Men liked her for her good looks and unaffected high spirits; women tolerated her for two reasons, because she was always willing to pay not only her own way but another's, and because she was what they considered a "swell dresser": her presence was an asset to whatever party she lent her countenance.

Frankly revelling in freedom regained, and intoxicated by possession of a considerable amount of money, she let herself go for a time, quite heedless of expense or consequence. Within a month she had become a familiar figure in such restaurants as Burns', Churchill's, and Shanley's; and her laughter was not infrequently heard in Jack's when all other places of its class boasted closed doors and drawn blinds.

Inevitably she acquired a somewhat extensive knowledge of drink. Most of all she learned to love that champagne which Matthias had been too judicious to supply her and from which she had abstained out of consideration for Quard's weakness. But now there was no reason why she should not enjoy it in such moderation as was practised by her chosen associates. She preferred certain sweetish and heady brands whose correspondingly low cost rendered them more easy to obtain....

But with all this she never failed to practise a certain amount of circumspection. In one respect, she refrained from growing too confidential about herself. That she had been the leading woman with "The Lie" was something to brag about: the very cards which she had been quick to have printed proclaimed the fact loudly in imitation Old English engraving. But that she had been wife to its star was something which she was not long in discovering wasn't generally known. The success of the sketch was a by-word of envy among actors facing the prospect of an idle summer; and the route columns of Variety told her that, in line with her prediction, Quard had somehow surmounted his San Francisco predicament and was continuing to guide the little play upon its triumphal course. But Quard himself had always been too closely identified with stock companies of the second class to have many friends among those with whom his wife was now thrown: actors for the most part of the so-called legitimate stage, with scant knowledge or experience (little, at least, that they would own to) of theatrical conditions away from Broadway and the leading theatres of a few principal cities. So Joan kept her own counsel about her matrimonial adventure: its publication could do her no good, if possibly no harm; and she preferred the freedom of ostensible spinsterhood. Her wedding-ring had long since disappeared from her hand, giving place to the handsome diamond with which Matthias had pledged her his faith.

Furthermore, such dissipation as she indulged in was never permitted to carry her beyond the border-line which, in her understanding, limited discretion in her relations with men. She enjoyed leading them on, but marriage had made her too completely cognizant of herself to permit of any affair going beyond a certain clearly defined point: she couldn't afford to throw herself away. And more than once she checked sharply and left an undrained glass, warned by her throbbing pulses that she was responding a trace too ardently to the admiration in the eyes of some male companion of the evening.

But there were only two whom she held dangerous to her peace of mind, one because she was afraid of him, the other because she admired him against her will.

The first was an eccentric dancer and comedian calling himself Billy Salute. A man of middle-age and old beyond his years in viciousness, the gymnastic violence of his calling in great measure counteracted the effects of his excesses and kept him young in body. He was a constant and heavy but what was known to Joan's circle as a safe drinker; drunkenness never obliterated his consciousness or disturbed his physical equilibrium; in spite of its web of wrinkles, his skin remained fair and clear as a boy's, and retained much of the fresh colouring of youth. But his eyes were cold and hard and profoundly informed with knowledge of womankind. His regard affected Joan as had Marbridge's, that day at Tanglewood; under its analysis she felt herself denuded; pretence were futile to combat it: the man knew her.

He made no advances; but he watched her closely whenever they were together; and she knew that he was only waiting, patient in the conviction that he had only to wait.

And thus he affected her with such fear and fascination that she avoided him as much as possible; but he was never far out of her thoughts; he lingered always on the horizon of her consciousness like the seemingly immobile yet portentous bank of cloud that masks the fury of a summer storm....

The other man pursued her without ceasing. He was young, not over twenty-five or six—an age to which Joan felt herself immeasurably superior in the knowledge and practice of life—and happened to be the one man of her acquaintance who was neither an actor nor connected with the business side of the stage. By some accident he had blundered from newspaper reporting to writing for cheaply sensational magazines, and from this to writing for the stage. It is true that his achievements in this last quarter had thus far been confined to collaboration with a successful playwright on the dramatization of one of his stories; but that didn't lessen his self-esteem and assertiveness. He claimed extraordinary ability for himself in a quite matter-of-fact tone, and on his own word was on terms of intimacy with every leading manager and star in the country. Nobody Joan knew troubled to contradict his pretensions, and despite that wide and seasoned view of life she believed herself to possess she was still inexperienced enough to credit more than half that he told her, never appreciating that, had the man been what he claimed, he would have had no time to waste toadying to actors.

He might, if not discouraged, prove very useful to her.

In fact, he promised to—repeatedly.

More than this, his attentions flattered her more than she would have cared to confess even to herself. He didn't lack wit, wasn't without intelligence, and the power of his imagination couldn't be denied; thus he figured to her as the only man of mental attainments she had known since Matthias. It was something to be desired by such as this one, even though his abnormally developed egotism sometimes seemed appalling.

It manifested itself in more ways than one: in his strut, in the foppishness of his dress, in his elaborate affectation of an English accent. He was a small person by the average standard, and slender, but well-formed, and wore clothing admirably tailored if always of an extreme cut. His cheeks were too fleshy, almost plump: something which had the effect of making his rather delicate features seem pinched. Near-sighted, he wore customarily a horn-rimmed pince-nez from which a wide black ribbon dangled like a mourning-band.

His name was Hubert Fowey.

So Joan tolerated him, encouraged him moderately through motives of self-interest, checked him with laughter when he tried to make love to her, secretly admired him even when his conceit was most fatiguing, and wondered what manner of women he had known to make him think that she would ever yield to his insistence....

She had been nearly six weeks in New York when she awoke one morning to rest in languorous regret of a late supper the preceding night, and to wonder whither she was tending, spurred to self-examination by that singularly clear introspective vision which not infrequently follows intemperance—at least, when one is young.

She was reminded sharply that, since returning to Town, she had made hardly a single attempt to find work, beyond having her professional cards printed.

And this was the edge of Summer....

Where would the Autumn find her?

Slipping quickly out of bed, she collected her store of money, and counted it for the first time in several weeks.

The sum total showed a shocking discrepancy between cold fact and the small fortune she had all along been permitting herself to believe she possessed. Even allowing for these heavy initial purchases on returning to New York, her capital had shrunk alarmingly.

She began anew, that day, the rounds of managers' offices.

Also, she laid down for her guidance a rigid schedule of economies. Only by strict observance thereof would she be able to scrape through the Summer without work or financial assistance from some quarter.

Characteristically, she mourned now, but transiently, that she had so long deferred going to see her mother and Edna—something now obviously out of the question; they would want money, to a certainty, and Joan had none to spare them.

A few days later she moved to share, half-and-half, the expenses of a three-room apartment on Fiftieth Street, near Eighth Avenue, with a minor actress whom she had recently met and taken a fancy to. Life was rather less expensive under this régime; the young women got their own breakfasts and, as a rule, lunches that were quite as meagre: repasts chiefly composed of crackers, cold meats from a convenient delicatessen shop, with sometimes a bottle of beer shared between two. If no one offered a dinner in exchange for their society, they would dine frugally at the cheaper restaurants of the neighbourhood. But their admirers they shared loyally: if one were invited to dine, the other accompanied her as a matter of course.

An arrangement apparently conducive to the most complete intimacy; neither party thereto doubted that she was in the full confidence of the other. There were, none the less, reservations on both sides.

Harriet Morrison, Joan's latest companion, was a girl whose very considerable personal attractions and innate love of pleasure were balanced by greenish eyes, a firm jaw, and the sincere conviction that straight-going and hard work would lead her to success upon the legitimate stage. She knew Joan for an incurable opportunist with few convictions of any sort other than that she could act if given a chance, and that men, if properly managed, would give her that chance. For one so temperamentally her opposite, Hattie couldn't help entertaining some unspoken contempt. On the other hand, she believed Joan to be decent, as yet; and halving the cost of living permitted her to indulge in the luxury of a week-end at the seaside once or twice a month.

One day near the first of July the two, happening to meet on Broadway after a morning of fruitless search for engagements, turned for luncheon into Shanley's new restaurant—by way of an unusual treat.

They had barely given their order when Matthias came in accompanied by a manager who had offices in the Bryant Building, and sat down at a table not altogether out of speaking-distance.

To cover her discomfiture, which betrayed itself in flushed cheeks, Joan complained of the heat: an explanation accepted by Hattie without question, since Matthias had not yet looked their way.

Joan prayed that he might not; but the thing was inevitable, and it was no less inevitable that he should look at the precise instant when Joan, unable longer to curb her curiosity, raised her eyes to his.

For a moment she fancied that he didn't recognize her. But then his face brightened, and he nodded and smiled, coolly, perhaps, but civilly, without the least evidence of confusion. They might have been the most casual acquaintances.

And, indeed, the incident would probably have passed unremarked but for the promptings of Joan's conscience. She was sure the glance of Matthias had shifted from her face to the hand on which his diamond shone, and had rested there for a significant moment.

As a matter of fact, nothing of the sort had happened. Matthias was absorbed in negotiations concerning an old play which had caught the fancy of the manager. Joan, though he knew her at sight, was now too inconsiderable a figure in his world for him to recall, off-hand, that he had ever made her a present.

Nevertheless the girl coloured furiously, and blushed again under the inquisitive stare of her companion.

"Who's that?"

"Who?" Joan muttered sullenly.

"The fellow who bowed to you just now."

"Oh, that?" Joan made an unconvincing effort at speaking casually: "A man named Matthias—a playwright, I believe."

"Oh," said the other girl quietly. "Never done anything much, has he?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know him very well?"

There was a touch of irony in the question that struck sparks from Joan's temper.

"That's my business!"

"I'm sure I beg your pardon," Hattie drawled exasperatingly.

And the incident was considered closed, though it didn't pass without leaving its indelible effect upon their association.

With Joan it had another result: it made her think. Retrospectively examining the contretemps, after she had gone to bed that night, she arrived at the comforting conclusion that she had been a little fool to think that Matthias "held that old ring against her." He hadn't been her lover for several weeks without furnishing the girl with a fairly clear revelation of his character. He was simple-hearted and sincere; she could not remember his uttering one ungenerous word or being guilty of one ungenerous action, and she didn't believe he could make room in his mind for an ungenerous thought.

Now if she were to return it, he would think that fine of her....

Of course, she must take it back in person. If she returned it by registered mail, he would have reason to believe her afraid to meet him—that she had been frightened by his mere glance into sending it back.

Not that she hadn't every right in the world to keep it, if she liked: there was no law compelling a girl to return her engagement ring when she broke with a man.

But Matthias would admire her for it.

Moreover, it was just possible that he hadn't as yet arrived at the stage of complete indifference toward her. And he had "the ear of the managers."

Nerving herself to the ordeal, two days later, she dressed with elaborate care in the suit she had worn on her flight from Quard. Newly sponged and pressed, it was quite presentable, if a little heavy for the season; moreover, it lacked the lustre and style of her later acquisitions. It wouldn't do to seem too prosperous....

It was a Saturday afternoon, and Hattie had taken herself off to a nearby ocean beach for the week-end; something for which Joan was grateful, inasmuch as it enabled her to dress her part without exciting comment.

To her relief, a servant new to the house since her time, answered her ring at the bell of Number 289, and with an indifferent nod indicated the door to the back-parlour.

Behind that portal Matthias was working furiously against time, carpentering against the grain that play to discuss which he had lunched at Shanley's; the managerial personage having offered to consider it seriously if certain changes were made. And the playwright was in haste to be quit of the job, not only because he disapproved heartily of the stipulated alterations, but further because he was booked for some weeks in Maine as soon as the revision was finished.

Humanly, then, he was little pleased to be warned, through the medium of a knock, that his work was to suffer interruption.

He swore mildly beneath his breath, glanced suspiciously at the non-committal door, growled brusque permission to enter, and bent again over the manuscript, refusing to look up until he had pursued a thread of thought to its conclusion, and knotted that same all ship-shape.

And when at length he consented to be aware of the young woman on his threshold, waiting in a pose of patience, her eyes wide with doubt and apprehensions, his mind was so completely detached from any thought of Joan that he failed, at first, to recognize her.

But the alien presence brought him to his feet quickly enough.

"I beg your pardon," he said with an uncertain nod. "You wished to see me about something?"

Closing the door, Joan came slowly forward into stronger light.

"You don't remember me?" she asked, half perplexed, half wistful of aspect. "But I thought—the other day—at Shanley's—"

"But of course I remember you," Matthias interrupted with a constrained smile. "But I wasn't—ah—expecting you—not exactly—you understand."

"Oh, yes," Joan replied in subdued and dubious accents—"I understand."

She waited a moment, watching narrowly under cover of assumed embarrassment, the signs of genuine astonishment which Matthias felt too keenly to think of concealing. Then she added an uneasy:

"Of course...."

"Of course!" Matthias echoed witlessly. "You wanted to see me about something," he iterated, wandering. With an effort he pulled himself together. "Won't you sit down—ah—Joan?"

"Thank you," said the girl. "But I'm afraid I'm in the way," she amended, dropping back into the old, worn, easy-chair.

"Oh, no—I—"

The insincerity of his disclaimer was manifest in an apologetic glance toward the manuscript and a hasty thrust of fingers up through his hair. Joan caught him up quickly.

"Oh, but I know I am, so I shan't stay," she said, settling herself comfortably. "I only ask a minute or two of your time. You don't mind?"

"Mind? Why, I—certainly not."

She looked down as if disconcerted by his honest, perplexed, questioning eyes.

"I was afraid you might, after—after what's happened—"

He fumbled for a cigarette, beginning to feel more calm, less nervous than annoyed. The fact of her unruffled self-possession had at length penetrated his understanding.

"No," he said slowly, rolling the cigarette between his palms, "I don't mind in the least, if I can be of service to you."

"But I was very foolish," Joan persisted, "and—and unkind. I've been sorry ever since...."

"Don't be," Matthias begged, his tone so odd that she looked up swiftly and coloured.

Thus far everything had gone famously, quite as rehearsed in the theatre of her optimistic fancy; but the new accent in his voice made her suddenly fear lest, after all, the little scene might not play itself out as smoothly as it had promised to.

"Don't be," Matthias repeated coolly. "It's quite all right. Take my word for it: as far as I'm concerned you've nothing at all to reproach yourself with."

Her flush deepened. "You mean you didn't care—!"

Matthias smiled, but not unkindly. "I mean," he said slowly—"neither of us really cared."

"Speak for yourself—" Joan cut in with a flash of temper; but he obtained her silence with a gentle gesture.

"Please ... I mean, we both lost our heads for a time. That was all there was to it, I think. Naturally it couldn't last. You were wise enough to see that first and—ah—did the only thing you decently could, when you threw me over. I understood that, at once."

"But I," she began in a desperate effort to regain lost ground—"I was afraid you'd hate and despise me—"

"Not a bit, Joan—believe me, not for an instant. When I had had time to think it all out, I was simply grateful. I could never have learned to hate or despise you—as you put it—whatever happened; but if you hadn't been so sensible and far-sighted, the affair might have run on too far to be remedied. In which case we'd both have been horribly unhappy."

This was so far from the attitude she had believed he would adopt, that Joan understood her cause to be worse than forlorn: it was lost; lost, that is, unless it could be saved by her premeditated heroic measure.

Fumbling in her bag, she found his ring.

"Perhaps you're right," she said with a little sigh. "Anyhow, it's like you to put it that way.... But what I really came for, was to return this."

She offered the ring. He looked, startled, from it to her face, hesitated, and took it. "O—thanks!" he said, adding quite truthfully: "I'd forgotten about that"; and tossed it carelessly to his work-table where, rolling across the face of a manuscript, it oscillated momentarily and settling to rest, seemed to wink cynically at its late possessor.

Joan blinked hastily in response: there was a transient little mist before her eyes; and momentarily her lips trembled with true emotion. The scene was working out more painfully than she had ever in her direst misgivings dreamed it might.

Deep in her heart she had all along nursed the hope that he would insist on her retaining the ring. That would have been like the Matthias of her memories!

But now he seemed to think that she ought to be glad thus to disburden her conscience and by just so much to modify her indebtedness to him!

Struck by this thought, Joan gasped inwardly, and examined with startled eyes the face of Matthias. It was her first reminder of the fact that he had left her one hundred and fifty unearned dollars. She had forgotten all about that till this instant. Otherwise, she would have hesitated longer about calling. She wondered if he were thinking of the same thing; but his face afforded no index to his thoughts. He wasn't looking at her at all, in fact, but down, in abstraction, studying the faded pattern of the carpet at his feet.

She wondered if perhaps it would advance her interests to offer to return the money, to pay it back bit by bit—when she found work. But wisely she refrained from acting on this suggestion.

"I'm sorry I was so long about bringing it back," she resumed with an artificial manner. "I was always meaning to, you know, and always kept putting it off. You know how it is when you're on the road: one never seems to have any time to one's self."

"I quite understand," Matthias assured her gravely.

She grew sensitive to the fact that he was being patient with her.

"But I really mustn't keep you from your work," she said, rising. "You—you knew I was working, didn't you?"

"I heard," Matthias evaded—"in a roundabout way—that you were playing in vaudeville."

The girl nodded vigorously. "Oh, yes; I was all over, playing the lead in a sketch called 'The Lie.' It was a regular knock-out. You ought to have seen how it got over. It's still playing, somewhere out West, I guess."

"You left it, then?" Matthias asked, bored, heartily wishing her out of the house.

She was aching to know if he had learned of her marriage. But then she felt sure he couldn't possibly have heard about it. Still, she wondered, if he did know, would it modify his attitude toward her in any way?

"Yes," she resumed briskly, to cover her momentary hesitation, "I left it the week we played 'Frisco. I had to. The star and I couldn't seem to hit it off, somehow. You know how that is."

"And yet you must have managed to agree with him pretty well, from all I hear."

"What did you hear?"

(Did he really know, then?)

"Why," Matthias explained ingeniously, "you must have been with the sketch for several months, by your own account. You couldn't have been bickering all that time."

Confidence returned.... "Oh, that! Yes, of course. But I could see it coming a long ways ahead. So I quit, and came back to look for another engagement. You—"

She broke off, stammering.

"Beg pardon?" Matthias queried curiously.

Joan flushed again. "You don't know of anything I could do, just now, I suppose?"

He shook his head. "Not at present, I'm afraid."

"If you should hear of anything, it would be awful' good of you to let me know."

"Depend upon me, I shall."

"Care of The Dramatic Mirror will always get me."

"I shan't forget."

"Well...." She offered him her hand with a splendidly timid smile. "I suppose it's good-bye for good this time."

Matthias accepted her hand, shook it without a tremor, and released it easily.

"I've a notion it is, Joan," he admitted.

She turned toward the door, advanced a pace or two, and paused.

"They say Arlington's going to make a lot of new productions next Fall...."

"Yes?"

"Well, I was wondering if you wouldn't mind putting in a good word for me."

"I would be glad to, but unfortunately I don't know Mr. Arlington."

"But you know Mr. Marbridge, and everybody says he's Arlington's silent partner."

Matthias looked as uncomfortable as he felt.

"I am not sure that is true," he said slowly, "and—well, to tell the truth, Marbridge and I aren't on the best of terms. I'm afraid I couldn't influence him in any way—except, perhaps, to prejudice him."

"Oh!" Joan said blankly....

It came to her, in a flash, that the two men might have quarrelled about her, thanks to the obvious fascination she had exerted over Marbridge, that age-old day at Tanglewood.

"I suppose," she ventured pensively, "I might go to see him—Mr. Marbridge—myself—?"

"I'm afraid I can't advise you."

This time the accent of finality was unmistakable. Joan bridled with resentment. After all, he'd no real call to be so uppish, simply because she hadn't let him stand between her and her career....

"You don't really think I ought to go and see him, do you?"

"I wish you wouldn't ask me, Joan."

"But I've got no one to advise me.... If you don't think it wise, I wish you'd say so. I thought perhaps it was a chance...."

Matthias shrugged, excessively irritated by her persistence. "I can only say that I wouldn't advise any woman to look to Marbridge for anything honourable," he said reluctantly.

"Oh!" the girl said in a startled tone.

"But—I'm sorry you made me say that. It's none of my affair. Please forget I said it."

"But you make it so hard for me."

"I?" he cried indignantly—"I make it hard for you!"

"Well, I come to you for advice—friendly advice—and you close in my very face the only door I can see to any sort of work. It's—it's pretty hard. I can act, I know I can act! I guess I proved that when I was with Charlie—Mr. Quard—the star of 'The Lie,' you know. I couldn't've stuck as long as I did if I hadn't had talent.... But back here in New York, all that doesn't seem to count. Here I've been going around for two months, and all they offer me is a chorus job with some road company. But Arlington ... he employs more girls than anybody in the business. I know he'd give me a chance to show what I can do, if I could only get to him. And then you tell me not to try to get to him the only way I know."

Abruptly Joan ceased, breathing heavily after that long and, even to her, unexpected speech. But it had been well delivered: she could feel that. She clenched her hands at her sides in a gesture plagiarized from a soubrette star in one of her infrequent scenes of stage excitement; and stood regarding Matthias with wide, accusing eyes.

His own were blank....

He was trying to account to himself for the fact that this girl seemed to have the knack of making him feel a heartless scoundrel, even when his stand was morally impregnable, even though it were unassailable.

Here was this girl, evidently convinced that he had not dealt squarely with her, believing that he deliberately withheld—out of pique, perhaps—aid in his power to offer her....

He passed a hand wearily across his eyes, and turned back toward his work-chair.

"You'd better sit down," he said quietly, "while I think this out."

Without a word the girl returned to the arm-chair and perched herself gingerly upon the edge of it, ready to rise and flee (she seemed) whenever it should pardonably suggest itself to Matthias that the only right and reasonable thing for him to do was to rise up and murder her....

On his part, sitting, he rested elbows upon the litter of manuscript, and held his head in his hands.

He was sorry now that he had yielded to the temptation to be plain-spoken about Arlington and Marbridge. But she had driven him to it; and she was an empty-headed little thing and ought really to be kept out of that galley. On the other hand, he was afraid that if he allowed himself to be persuaded to help her find a new engagement, she would misunderstand his motives one way or another—most probably the one. He couldn't afford to have her run away with the notion that his affection for her had been merely hibernating. He had not only himself, he had Venetia to think of, now. To her he had dedicated his life, to a dumb, quixotic passion. Some day she might need him; some day, it seemed certain, she would need him. She was presently to have a child; and Marbridge was going on from bad to worse; things could not forever endure as they were between those two. And then she would be friendless, a woman with a child fighting for the right to live in solitary decency....

But Joan!... If she were headed that way, toward the Arlington wheel within the wheel of the stage, even at risk of blame and misunderstanding Matthias felt that he ought to do what could be done to set her back upon the right road. It was too bad, really. And it was none of his business. The girl had given herself to the theatre of her own volition, after all. Or had she? Had the right of choice been accorded her? Or was it simply that she had been designed by Nature especially for that business, to which women of her calibre seemed so essential? Was she, after all, simply life-stuff manufactured hastily and carelessly in an old, worn mould, because destined solely to be fed wholesale into the insatiable maw of the stage?

He shook his head in weary doubt, and sighed.

"Probably," he said, fumbling with a pen and avoiding her eyes—"I presume—you'd better come back in a day or two—say Tuesday. That will give me time to look round and see what I can scare up for you. Or perhaps Wednesday would be even better...."

He dropped the pen and rose, his manner inviting her to leave.

"Wednesday?" she repeated, reluctantly getting up again.

"At four, if that's convenient."

"Yes, indeed, it is. And ... thank you so much ... Jack."

"No, no," Matthias expostulated wearily.

"No, I mean it," she insisted. "You're awf'ly sweet not to be—unkind to me."

"Believe me, I could never be that."

"Then—g'dafternoon."

"Good afternoon, Joan."

But as he moved to open the door, his eyes were caught by the flash from a facet of the diamond; and the thought came to him that its presence there assorted ill with his latest assurance to the girl. Catching it up, he offered it to Joan as she was about to go.

"And this," he said, smiling—"don't forget it, please."

Automatically her hand moved out to take it, but was stayed. Her eyes widened with true consternation, and she gasped faintly.

"You—you don't mean it?"

"Oh, yes, I do. Please take it. I've really no use for it, Joan, and—well, you and I know what professional life means." He grinned awry. "It might be of service to you some day."

With a cry of gratitude that was half a sob, but with no other acknowledgment, the girl accepted the gift, stumbled through the door in a daze, and so from the house.

---

XXXI

So it seemed that all men were much alike. Joan knew but two types, the man who lived by his brains and the man who lived by his wits, but had no more hesitation in generalizing from these upon masculine society as a whole than a scientist has in constructing a thesis upon the habits of prehistoric mammalia from the skull of a pterodactyl and the thigh-bone of an ichthyosaurus....

They were all much alike: if you knew how to get round one kind, you knew how to win over the other; there was a merely negligible difference in the mode of attack. You appealed to their sympathies, or to their sentiments, or their appetites, and if these failed you appealed to their pride in their self-assumed rôle of the protectors.

It was no great trick, once you had made yourself mistress of it.

By this route Joan achieved the feat of looking down on Matthias; and that was not wholesome for the girl, leaving her world destitute of a single human soul that commanded her respect.

She had needed only to stir up his jealousy of Marbridge and his innate chivalry....

As if she didn't know what Arlington's companies were like! The facts were notorious; nobody troubled to blink them; Arlington's employees least of all. It wasn't their business to blink the facts; a girl without following had as little chance of securing a place in one of his choruses as a girl without a pretty figure.

But, of course, a handsome girl with a good figure....

Joan glanced in a shop window, en passant; but she saw nothing of the display of wares. The plate glass made a darkling mirror for the passers-by: Joan could see that her refurbished travelling suit fitted her becomingly, even though it was a trifle passé.

She hurried home and changed it, and hurried forth again to keep an appointment with Hubert Fowey.

They dined at a pretentious hotel, in an "Orange Garden" whose false moonlight and tinkling, artificial fountain manufactured an alluring simulacrum of romantic night, despite the incessant activities of a ragtime-bitten orchestra and the inability of the ventilating system to infuse a hint of coolness into the heavy, superheated air.

Joan had little appetite—the day had been too over-poweringly hot—but she was very thirsty; and Fowey provided a brand of champagne less sweet and heady than she would have chosen, and consequently more insinuative.

During the meal Billy Salute appeared at a table across the room and invisible to Fowey, whose back was toward it, but still not far enough removed to prevent Joan from recognizing that look in the dancer's eyes which she resented so angrily. She didn't once look at the man; but she never quite lost sight of him, and was well aware that he was ridiculing Fowey to his companion—an actor, by many an indication, but a stranger to Joan.

Provoked, she demonstrated her contempt of Salute by flirting outrageously with Fowey. Unconscious of her motive, that aspiring little dramatic author lost his head to some extent. Now and again his voice trembled when he spoke to her, and once he mumbled something about marriage, but checked at discretion, and let his words trail off inarticulately.

Joan was not to be denied.

"What did you say?" she demanded, with her most distracting smile.

"Oh, nothing of any importance," muttered Fowey, his face reddening.

"But you did say something. I only caught part of it. Hubert, I want to know!"

It was the first time she had used his given name.

"I—I only wondered if you were married," he stammered. "You talk so cursed little about yourself!"

"Does it matter?" she parried, surrender in her eyes.

He choked and gulped on his champagne.

"But you're not, are you?" he persisted.

"What's that to you?"

He hesitated and changed the subject, fearful lest his tongue compromise him.

"What shall we do now? Don't say a roof garden. Let's get out of this infernal smother. I vote for a taxi ride to Manhattan Beach."

Joan assented.

Leaving, they passed Salute's table. Joan gave the dancer a distant and chilling greeting, and swept haughtily past, ignoring his offer to rise. The insolent irony of his eyes was incredibly offensive to her. They said: "I am waiting, I am patient, I make no effort, I am inevitable."

She swore in her soul that she would prove them wrong.

In the taxicab Fowey made some slighting reference to the dancer.

"He's the devil!" Joan declared with profound conviction.

But she wouldn't explain her reasons for so naming him.

When occasion offered, in the more shadowed stretches of their course to the sea, Fowey attempted to kiss her. But she would have none of him then, fending him off by main strength and raillery; and she was pleased with the discovery that she was stronger than he. Yet another evidence of the inferiority of man!

At the beach, Fowey ordered a claret cup. Joan demanded an ice and drank sparingly; but when again in the motor-car, homeward-bound, she was abruptly smitten with amazement to find herself in Fowey's arms, submitting to his kisses if not returning them.

For a time she remained so and let him talk love to her.

It was pleasant, to be—wanted....

Arrived at the little flat, she had to prevent Fowey's following her in, again by main strength, slamming the door in his face.

Bolting the door, she turned to a mirror "to see what a fright she must have looked." But it seemed a radiant vision that smiled back at her.

She thought hazily of Hubert Fowey.

"That kid!" she murmured, not altogether in contempt, but almost compassionately.

It was a shame to tease him so....

Not until the next day, that dawned upon her consciousness amid the thunders of a splitting headache, did she appreciate how far the affair had gone.

Penitent, she vowed reformation. She wasn't going to let any man think he could make a fool of her, much less that conceited little whippersnapper.

As it happened, she didn't see the amateur dramatist again for some days. He, too, had vowed reformation, and on much the same moral grounds.

Her appointment with Matthias, for Wednesday at four, Joan failed to keep. And since that was her own affair, and since she had not left him her address, Matthias kept to himself the word that he had for her and, in accordance with his original intention, boarded the Bar Harbor Express that same evening, and forgot New York for upwards of ten weeks.

It had rained all day Tuesday, and Wednesday was overcast but dry and, by contrast with what had been, cool. Dressing for her interview with Matthias, Joan donned a summery gown of lawn, liberally inset with lacework over her shoulders and bosom: a frock for the country-house or the seashore, never for the Broadway pavements. None the less it was quite too pretty to be wasted on Matthias alone. She set out to keep her appointment with an hour to spare, purposing to employ the interval by running, at leisure, the gauntlet of masculine admiration on Broadway as far south as Thirty-eighth Street. For this expedition she would have preferred company; but Hattie, having looked her over, announced that she couldn't dress up to Joan's style, didn't mean to try, and didn't care to be used as a foil; furthermore, it was much more sensible to loaf round the flat in little or no clothing at all, and read up on Pinero.

From the Astor Theatre corner Joan struck across Broadway to the eastern sidewalk, chiefly to avoid the throng of loungers in front of the Bryant Building: it is good to be admired, but Joan had little taste for the form of admiration that becomes vocal at once intimately and publicly.

Half-way down the New York Theatre Building block, she turned abruptly and scuttled like a frightened quail into the lobby, from the back of which, turning, she was able to see, without being seen by, Quard.

Brief as the term of their dissociation was, in mere point of elapsed time, Joan had so completely divorced herself from her husband that she was actually beginning to forget him; physically no less than mentally she was beginning to forget him. An outcast from her life, he no longer had any real existence in her world. By some curious freak of sophistry she had even managed to persuade herself she was never to see him again. Thus it seemed the most staggering shock she had ever experienced, to recognize the man's head and shoulders looming above the throng before the entrance to the moving-picture show, just south of the lobby to the New York Theatre proper.

But Quard hadn't seen her. He was with companions, a brace of vaudeville actors whom Joan knew through him. But while she waited for them to pass, two other friends accosted the three, directly before the lobby entrance, and they paused to exchange greetings. Quard slapped both newcomers on their shoulders, and kept his hand on the last he slapped, bending forward and engaging their interest with some intimate bit of ribaldry. He had been drinking—Joan saw that much at a glance—not heavily, but enough to render his good-fellowship boisterous.

Otherwise he looked well. He was hardly to be identified with that sodden wreck which had been brought from the Barbary Coast back to the woman he had insulted and abused. His colour was good, his poise assured. He was wearing new clothing—a loud shepherd's-plaid effect which Joan couldn't possibly have forgotten. No one could possibly have forgotten it. And he had acquired a dashing Panama hat which at least looked genuine at that slight distance. Useless to have wasted pity on the man: he had fallen, but not far, and he had fallen on his feet.

Joan eyed him with fear, despair, and loathing.

Had he come to render New York too small to contain them both?

She skulked in the farthest corner of the lobby, in shadows, not quite round the corner of the elevator shaft—where she could just see and ran least risk of being seen—and waited. But the group on the sidewalk seemed to have settled down to a protracted session. When Quard had finished talking, and the laughter had quieted down, another fixed the attention of the group with a second anecdote, of what nature Joan could well surmise.

Of course, it was only a question of time before Quard would propose a drink.

Then she would be free to proceed to her appointment.

But through some oversight the suggestion remained temporarily in abeyance; and Joan was unlucky in that none of the policemen appeared, who are assigned to the business of keeping actors moving in that neighbourhood.

After a minute or two Quard shifted his position so that he could, by simply lifting his eyes, have looked directly into the lobby.

At this Joan turned in desperation and entered the cage of an elevator, which happened just then to be waiting with an open gate.

There were several theatrical enterprises with offices on one of the upper floors: no reason why Joan shouldn't wait in one of these until it would be safe to venture forth again. There was Arlington's, for instance.

Joan's was no strange figure there. She had long since made several attempts to see Arlington or one of his lieutenants; but her professional cards, borne in to them by a disillusioned office-boy, had educed no other response than "Mist' Arlington says they's nothin' doin' just' present."

But it was as good a place as any for Joan's purpose, and there could be no harm trying again.

The same world-weary boy received her card when she entered the suite of offices. He considered it, and Joan as well, dispassionately.

"Whoja wanna see?" he mumbled with patent effort.

Joan's prettiest smile was apparently wasted upon the temperament of an anchorite.

"Mr. Arlington, please."

The boy offered to return the card: "He ain't in."

"That's what you always tell me."

"He ain't never in."

"Very well," said Joan sweetly: "I'll wait."

The boy started to say something pointed, hesitated, regarded her with dull suspicion, and suddenly enquired:

"Whaja wanna see 'm 'bout?"

"A matter of private business."

"Ah," drawled the boy with infinite disgust, "tha's what they all say!" An embittered grimace shaped upon his soiled face. "Lis'n!" he said, almost affably—"if yuh'll think up a good one, I'll fetch this inta his sec't'ry. Now cud anythin' be fairer 'n that?"

"I'll go you," Joan retorted, falling in with his spirit. "Tell him a friend of Mr. Marbridge's wants to see him."

She esteemed this a rather brilliant bit of diplomacy, and at the same time considered herself stupid not to have thought of it before. But it failed to move the office-boy. His head signalled a negative.

"Havta do better'n that," he announced. "If I fell for ev'ry wren what claims she's a nintimate frien' of Mista Marbridge—"

"But I am a friend of his—truly I am!" Joan insisted warmly.

The boy rammed a hand into a trouser's-pocket. "Betcha—" he began; but reconsidered. "Yuh never can tell 'bout a skirt," he reminded himself audibly. "But, jus' to prove I'm a sport, I'll go yuh."

Motioning Joan through the door of the reception room, he shambled off with an air of questioning his own sanity.

The reception room was perhaps thirty feet long by fifteen wide: an interior room, lighted, and none too well, by electricity, ventilated, when at all, through the doorways of adjoining offices. A row of cane-seated chairs was aligned against the inner wall. In the middle of the floor stood a broad and substantial table of oak; it was absolutely bare. Here and there a few unhappy lithographs, yellowing "life-size" photographs of dead or otherwise extinguished stars, and a framed play-bill or two of Arlington's earlier ventures, decorated the dingy drab wall. There was no floor-covering of any description.

In this room herded some two-score people of the stage, waiting hopefully for interviews that were, as a rule, granted to not more than one applicant in ten: a heterogeneous assemblage, owning a single characteristic in common: whenever, at the far end of the room, the door opened leading to the offices of the management, every head turned that way, and every voice was hushed in reverence.

Yet it was seldom that the door disclosed anything more unique than a second office-boy, even more dejected than the first, who, peering through, would, after examining the card in his hand for the name of the applicant, painfully recite some stereotyped phrase worn smooth—"Mista Brown? Y'ur party says t' come back next week!" "Miss Holman? Y'ur party's went out 'n' won't be back th'safternoon!" "Miss Em'rson? Mista Arlington says ever'thin's full up just'present. Call 'n ag'in!" or more infrequently: "Mista Grayson's t' step in, please...."

Joan found a vacant chair.

She had no hope whatever of being admitted to the Presence, despite the unexpected condescension of the office-boy. Marbridge's name might prove the Open Sesame; but she doubted that vaguely: "it wouldn't be her if that happened!"

The atmosphere was stifling with heat complicated by stale human breath and the reek of perfumery, all stratified with layers of tobacco smoke which entered over the transoms of the communicating offices. Above the muted murmurings of the unemployed's apprehensive voices could be heard the brisk chattering of two or three type-writing machines; and telephone bells rang incessantly, near and far, one taking up the tune as soon as another ended. The throng of applicants shuffled their feet uneasily, expectantly, morosely.

Joan was so uncomfortable and oppressed that she was tempted to rise and go without waiting for the discounted answer. Only dread of encountering Quard restrained her. The longer she delayed, the slighter the chance of finding him still in front of the theatre....

Her thoughts drifted into reverie dully coloured with misgivings. She thought of Charlie Quard as a bird of ill-omen whose appearance could presage nothing but suffering and disaster; ignoring altogether the truth, that through his good offices alone, however tainted with self-interest, she had been suffered to enter into the profession whose ranks she had elected to adorn; with that other truth, that she owed him for the clothing she wore, the food she ate, the very roof that sheltered her—and meant never to repay....

The voice of the second office-boy chanted her name twice before she heard it.

"Miss Thursd'y?... Miss Joan Thursd'y?"

Joan started to her feet.

"Yes—?"

"Th' party you ast for says please t' step this way!"

---

XXXII

Between gratification and misgivings, Joan followed her guide in a flutter of emotion. When intending nothing more than to provide an excuse for using the anteroom as a temporary refuge, she hadn't for an instant questioned her right to use Marbridge's name. But now that it appeared she was to gain thereby the boon of an audience with Arlington, she was torn by doubts.

After all, her acquaintance with Marbridge had been one of the most tenuous description. True, the man had seemed attracted by her at the time; but that was many months ago; and only recently he had looked her fair in the face without knowing her. She had really gained her advantage through false pretences. And when Marbridge learned of this, would he not resent it? Had she not, through her presumption, put herself in the way of defeating her own ends?

She brought up before a closed door in a state of nervousness not natural with her.

"You're to wait a minute," her guide advised.

She was thankful he wasn't the guardian of the outer defences: just at present she was in no fit mood to bandy persiflage successfully.

But she was uncomfortably conscious that this present boy eyed her curiously as he threw open the office door.

She entered, and he closed it after her.

The room was untenanted, but a haze of cigar smoke in the air indicated that it had been only recently vacated. It was handsomely furnished, carpeted and decorated. The broad, flat-topped desk in one corner boasted an elaborate display of ornate desk hardware. In the middle of the blotting-pad a sheaf of letters lay beneath a bronze paperweight of unique design. All in all, an office owning little in common with the generality of those to which Joan had theretofore penetrated....

She sat herself down uneasily.

A door communicating with the adjoining office, though a solid door of oak, was an inch or so ajar. Through it penetrated sounds of masculine voices in conversation—but nothing distinguishable.

Five minutes passed. Then the conference in the next room broke up amid laughter; the doorknob rattled; and Joan rose automatically.

Marbridge entered.

For a moment, in her surprise and consternation, Joan could only stare and stammer. But obvious though her agitation was, Marbridge ignored it gracefully. Shutting the door tight, he advanced with an outstretched hand and a smile there was no resisting—with, in short, every normal evidence of friendly pleasure in their meeting.

"Well, Miss Thursday!" he said, gratification in his carefully modulated voice. "This is public-spirited of you!"

Joan shook hands limply, her face crimson beneath his pardonably admiring stare.

"I—thank you—but—"

"Really," he went on smoothly, "I consider it mighty nice of you to look me up. Fancy your remembering me! Do sit down. We must have a chat. Fortunately, you've caught me in an off-hour."

Retaining her hand coolly enough, he introduced the girl to a capacious lounge-chair beside the desk, then settled himself behind it.

Joan shook her wits together.

"You're awf'ly kind—"

"I—kind?" Marbridge denied the implication with an indulgent smile. "My dear Miss Thursday, if you get to know me well—and I sincerely hope you will some day—you'll find there's not a spark of human generosity in my system. I think only of my own pleasure. How can there be kindness to you in my seizing this chance to improve our acquaintance? I declare, I thought you'd forgotten me!"

"Oh, no!" Joan protested.

"Really? That's charming of you. But tell me about yourself. How long have you been back?"

"Not long," Joan replied instinctively to the first stock question that marks every other similar meeting in the theatrical district of New York. "That is—I mean—a couple of months."

"Oh, then you didn't stay with 'The Lie'?"

"You knew about that?"

Marbridge nodded briskly. "Indeed, I did! Pete Gloucester told me all about you—how splendidly you were doing at rehearsals—and then, one afternoon in Chicago, I saw the sketch billed and dropped in at the theatre for the sole purpose of seeing you. And if I hadn't had a train to catch, I'd have come right round back to congratulate you. Fact! You were wonderful. You were more than wonderful: you were downright adorable, and no mistake!"

Under the tonic stimulus of his flattery, Joan recovered her self-possession with surprising readiness—so swiftly that she almost forgot to cover the phenomenon with prolonged evidences of pretty confusion.

She looked down, her colour high, and smiling traced with a gloved forefinger an invisible seam in her skirt; and then, looking up shyly, she appraised Marbridge with one quick, shrewd, masked glance.

Her instinct had not misled her: this man esteemed her at a high value.

"It's awf'ly kind of you to say so," she murmured demurely.

Marbridge bent forward, leaning on the desk, his gaze ardent.

"I only say what I think, Miss Thursday. I watched you act that afternoon—and so far as I was concerned, you were the whole sketch!—and made up my mind then and there you were a girl with a great big future."

"Oh, but really, Mr. Marbridge—"

"Give you my word! I said to myself then and there: 'Here's a little woman worth watching, and if ever I get a chance to lend her a helping hand and don't do it, I'd better quit fussing with this theatrical game.' And that was the effect of seeing you play just once, mind you!"

"I'm afraid you're a dreadful kidder, Mr. Marbridge."

His injured look was eloquent of the injustice that she did him.

"You don't believe me? Very well, Miss Thursday—wait! Some day I'll surprise you." He swung back in his chair, smiling genially. "Some one of these days you'll set your heart on something I have the say in—and then you'll be able to judge of my sincerity."

"If I dared believe you," Joan told him boldly, "I might put you to the test sooner than you think."

"Well, and why not? I'm ready."

But as Joan would have gone on, the desk-telephone rang sharply, and Marbridge, excusing himself with a mumbled apology, turned to the instrument and lifted the receiver to his ear.

"Hello.... Who?... Oh, send her in to see Mr. Arlington.... Oh, he did, eh?... Well, say I'm not in either.... Yes, gone for the day."

Replacing the instrument, he swung round again. "There's proof already," he informed her cheerfully. "That was Nella Cardrow—one of the biggest propositions on our list—star of 'Mrs. Mixer.' And I'm putting her off solely to show you how sincerely I'm interested in what you have to say to me." He bent forward again, confidentially. "Now tell me: what can I do for you?"

"Give me a job," Joan informed him honestly. "That's all I want just now—work—a part in anything you have influence with."

"Then you have left 'The Lie'?" Marbridge persisted incredulously.

Joan nodded. "I had to. I couldn't stand it any longer."

"But—without you—why, I don't know what they were thinking of, to let you go!"

"I just couldn't get along with the star, and that's all there was to it," Joan declared. "He was a boozer and—well, I had to quit."

"And the sketch—"

"Oh, it went on, all right, I guess."

"Without you! Well, that's hard to credit. However...." Marbridge leaned back and for a moment stared thoughtfully out of the window. "I really can't think of anything we've got open just now that's good enough to offer you."

"Please don't think of me that way, Mr. Marbridge," Joan pleaded earnestly, more than half deceived. "I'm ready for anything, to get a chance to show these people what I can do. Anything—however small—just so it gives me a show—I don't care what!"

Marbridge preserved admirably his look of intent gravity. "Let me think a moment," he requested, pursing his full lips.

Joan watched him closely through that brief silence, her mood one of curious texture, compounded in almost equal parts of hope and doubt, of wonder and misgivings, of appreciation of her own courage and shrewdness, and of admiration for Marbridge.

He was by no means what she would have termed handsome, but he was uncommonly individual, a personality that left an ineffaceable impression of strength and masculinity; and with this he had an air of being finished and complete, as though he not only knew better than most how to take care of himself in all ways, but slighted himself in none. She thought his mode of dress striking, combining distinction and taste to an extraordinary degree.... And when in his abstraction he pinched his chin gently between thumb and forefinger, she was impressed with the discovery that a man's hand could be at once well-manicured and muscular....

He turned back abruptly with a sparkle of enthusiasm in his bold and prominent eyes.

"By George, I think I have it!..."

"Yes—?" she breathed excitedly.

He considered an instant longer, shook his head, and jumped up. "I must consult Arlington first," he declared. "I wouldn't care to commit him without his consent. No—don't get up. Just excuse me one minute. I'll be right back."

And before she could protest—had she entertained the faintest idea of doing anything of the sort—he left the room by the same door which had admitted him.

Immediately she was again aware of a rumble of voices in the next office, but now it was even more indefinite.

And again she waited a full five minutes alone....

When Marbridge rejoined her, it was with an air apologetic and disappointed.

"It's too bad," he announced, aggrieved, "but it seems Arlington has really gone for the day. I shan't see him before evening, likely, possibly not until tomorrow. So I must ask you to trouble yourself to come back, if you don't mind."

"Mind!" Joan laughed, rising. "Oh, I guess not."

"Well," Marbridge assured her, "I don't think you'll have any wasted time to regret. But I can't promise anything until I'm sure Arlington hasn't made other arrangements, or until I've managed to put a crimp into 'em if he has."

"But you mustn't do that—"

"Hush!" Marbridge paused to chuckle infectuously. "There's one trouble," he amended, more gravely, "and that is, I haven't got any too much time. I'm booked to sail for Europe Saturday, and have got so many little things to attend to, I'm running round in circles. But don't you fret: I've got this matter right next to my heart, Miss Thursday, and I'm going to put it through if it humanly can be done. Now let me think when I can ask you to call again."

"Any time that suits your convenience, Mr. Marbridge."

"Well, it's a question. I'd like mighty well to have you lunch with me before I go, but.... The truth is, I haven't got hardly a minute unengaged. You just happened to catch me right, today.... I wonder if you could call in Friday, say, about half-past three?"

"Of course I can, but I don't want you to—"

"Didn't I tell you, hush!" Marbridge interrupted, mock-impatient. "Not another word. Remember what I told you about how I felt that day I saw you act, out in Chicago. The time's coming when I'm going to be powerful' glad you gave me this chance to give you a lift, Miss Thursday. And then"—he paused in the act of opening the door, and took Joan's hand, subjecting it to a firm, friendly pressure before continuing—"and then, perhaps, I'll be coming round and begging favours of you."

For an instant Joan's eyes endured, without a tremor, the quick searching probe of the man's.

She nodded quietly, saying in a grave voice: "I guess you won't have to beg very hard—not for anything I could ever do for you, Mr. Marbridge."

His smile was as spontaneous and bright as a child's. "It's a bargain!" he declared spiritedly. "And you can bet your life I won't forget my end of it!... Good afternoon, Miss Thursday. Remember—Friday at three-thirty...."

---

XXXIII

As one result of her interview with Marbridge, Joan returned to her quarters in a state of thoughtfulness which was responsible not only for her forgetting the appointment with Matthias and the risk she ran of encountering Quard at every corner, but also for her unquestioning acceptance of Hattie's absence from the flat in the face of her expressed determination not to go out that afternoon.

Hattie, however, was nothing loath to explain her change of mind when she blew in cheerfully shortly before dinner-time.

"Hello!" she exclaimed, tossing her hat one way and her parasol another. "Did you miss me?"

Joan looked up blankly from the depths of her musing. "No," she said dully. "Why?"

"Well, you went off half-peeved because I wouldn't go trapesing with you—and then I went out after all."

"Oh—I'd forgotten," Joan admitted without much interest.

"Well, I didn't mean to go out, but Billy Emerson sent me a tip and ... I bet you can't guess who I've seen."

Joan shook her head.

"Arlington!"

"Arlington!" Joan exclaimed.

"Well, and why not?"

"Nothing—only I thought you weren't looking for anything in musical shows."

"No more am I, and it wasn't a musical show I went to see him about. Billy sent me a card of introduction with the tip, and Arlington saw me and—well, I guess it's just about settled. I'm to understudy Nella Cardrow in 'Mrs. Mixer.' Arlington wouldn't promise, but told me to come in Saturday morning, and the understanding is he'll have contracts ready to sign then. I do believe my luck's turned at last!"

"But," Joan argued, perplexed, "I don't understand.... Of course, it's fine to get the job, and all that—and I'm awf'ly glad for you, Hattie—but you act as excited as if it was the title rôle you expected to play."

"Maybe I do," Hattie retorted. "That's what an understudy's for, isn't it—to play the star part in case of an emergency?"

"Yes, but—"

"Anyhow, I don't mind telling you that's what I'm looking forward to."

"You mean you think Mrs. Cardrow—?"

"Now don't you ask me any questions; I can't tell you what I think; it's a secret." Having made this statement, Hattie sat down on the edge of the bed, lighted a cigarette, vacillated one second, and proceeded to divulge the secret: "You see, I called around to thank Billy Emerson, after my talk with Arlington, and he told me the whole story in confidence. Nobody's to know it yet, so you mustn't breathe a word to anybody; but the thing's all fixed, and Nella Cardrow's never going to play 'Mrs. Mixer' before a Broadway audience. She couldn't play it anyhow—'s just a plain-boiled dub—never did anything before she persuaded Marbridge to put her on in this show. It's his money that's behind it, mostly—Arlington's too wise to risk much on an uncertain proposition like the Cardrow. Marbridge just hides behind Arlington."

"What for?"

"Well, I guess he figures home would be none the happier if Friend Wife knew he was footing the bills for Nella Cardrow's show. He and Cardrow, Billy Emerson says, are just about as friendly as the law allows—and that isn't all."

"But," Joan persisted stupidly, "if that's the case, I don't see what makes you think he'll throw her down to give you the part—"

"If they ever caught anybody on Broadway as innocent as you pretend to be," Hattie commented with a scorn for grammar as deep as for Joan's obtuseness—"they'd arrest 'em, that's all! Who ever told you Marbridge was the kind of a guy to stick to a woman forever—not to say when she's losing money for him? Billy Emerson saw the show when they put it on up in Buffalo, a while ago, and he says the play's a wonder but Cardrow can't even look the part, much less act it. He says if they ever let her loose on the stage of a Broadway theatre—well, Marbridge and Arlington can just kiss their investment a fond farewell. For reasons of his own, Marbridge isn't ready to break with Cardrow yet, but he knows he's got a big success on his hands in this 'Mrs. Mixer' with her out of it. So they're going right ahead, just as if she was to be the star, but when the show opens it'll be little Miss Understudy who'll do all the acting."

The actress tossed aside her cigarette and bent forward, regarding Joan with mock solicitude.

"Does it begin to penetrate, dearie?"

"It sounds to me like a pretty mean trick to play on Mrs. Cardrow," Joan suggested.

"Don't you worry about her. She'll survive, all right. And anyhow, when you've been as long in this game as I have, you'll realize that the motto of the profession is 'Everybody for himself and the devil take the hindermost'! I've waited seven years for this chance, and I'm not going to let it get past me through any sentimental considerations, not if I know myself. And you'd do just the same thing in my place, too."

"I don't see what right you've got to say that—"

"Then you don't know yourself as well as I know you," Hattie laughed. "But listen: I oughtn't to have told you all this. You won't say anything, will you, dear?"

"No, I won't say anything...."

Nor did Joan consider it necessary to repay confidence with confidence by confessing the fact of her coincidental interview with Marbridge. The reflection that they must have been in adjoining offices at much the same time, in spite of Marbridge's assertion that Arlington was out, counselled reticence, even if envy hadn't served to impose silence upon Joan. And she was profoundly envious of Hattie's good fortune.

Why could it not have been her own, instead?

If Marbridge honestly esteemed her abilities one-half as highly as he had pretended to, why could he not have seen to it that Joan Thursday rather than Hattie Morrison was selected for Mrs. Cardrow's understudy?

Still, the matter was not yet definitely settled. Hattie's contract remained a thing of the future, and she might be congratulating herself prematurely.

Struck by this reflection, Joan withdrew even more jealously into her reserve....

But she anticipated her appointment for Friday afternoon with an impatience that lent each hour the length of three, and when the time drew near prepared herself for it with such exacting attention to the minutiæ of her toilet that a final survey in a cheval-glass sent her forth radiant with consciousness that she had never looked more charming.

To her surprise and somewhat to her disappointment, Marbridge didn't receive her alone. She was shown into Arlington's office, finding there Marbridge in company with the great man himself.

Entrenched behind his desk, Arlington didn't move when she entered, and only when Marbridge formally presented Joan deigned to rise half out of his chair and extend to her, across the mahogany barrier, a hand almost effeminately white, soft, and bedizened with rings.

"Pleasure to meet you, Miss Thursday, I'm sure," he drawled, his clasp as languid as the glance with which he looked Joan over; and sank wearily back into his chair. "I've been hearing wonderful things about you—ah—from Mr. Marbridge."

"He's very kind," said Joan in her best manner.

"Not at all," Marbridge protested. "I've only been describing how splendid your work was in 'The Lie.' But Mr. Arlington is the original of the gentleman from Missouri: you've got to show him. However, I know you can—so that's all right."

"Oh, I hope so," Joan replied with becoming diffidence—"if I ever get a chance."

"You'll get that, never fear," Arlington observed dispassionately. "Marbridge has fixed it all up for you. It's a risk, a pretty big risk to take with an actress of your—ah—comparative inexperience, but as a rule I find it advisable to give Marbridge his head when he sets his heart on anything."

"You're awf'ly good," Joan murmured.

"Don't think it," Arlington returned in a tone of remote amiability, teetering in his chair. "I've nothing whatever to do with it, beyond engaging you and being responsible for your salary. It's all Marbridge's doing."

He examined with a perplexed air his highly polished fingernails....

"You're to have a small part in a new comedy we're putting on next September," he announced, "and at the same time you will understudy the star—Nella Cardrow in 'Mrs. Mixer.' Your salary will be sixty a week unless through some accident you're called upon to play the title rôle regularly—and accidents will happen in the best regulated theatrical enterprises. In which case you'll draw one-hundred a week for the first season. There are some details which Marbridge will explain to you—and if you'll drop in any time Monday and ask for Mr. Grissom he will have your contracts ready. And now if you'll excuse me, I've an appointment."

Consulting his watch, he rose and moved round from behind his desk. "Good day, Miss Thursday," he said with a shadow of a formal smile. "I shall see much of you, no doubt, when the rehearsals begin."

"Oh, thank you—thank you!" Joan cried.

Arlington disclaimed title to her gratitude with a weary gesture. "Don't thank me, please—thank Marbridge.... You won't be long, Vin?" he added, at the door.

"I'll be with you in ten minutes."

"Right you are. Good afternoon, Miss—ah—Thursday...."

Alone with Marbridge, Joan began impulsively to protest her thanks, but on glancing up, fell silent, abashed by an expression that glowed in the man's eyes like a reflection of firelight.

She lowered demure lashes to cloak her confusion, a smile about her lips at once sophisticated and timid: a distractingly pretty woman fully conscious of her allure and of his attraction for her: a vision of provoking promise.

Marbridge drew a deep breath.

"If you persist in looking like that," he said in a voice that trembled between laughter and a sigh—"don't blame me if I forget myself and take you in my arms and kiss you. There are limits to my endurance...."

Joan looked up, smiling.

"Well—" she said with a little nervous laugh—"Well, what of it?"

---

XXXIV

Before Joan left Marbridge, they had arrived at an understanding which was not less complete and satisfactory in that it was largely implicit.

Without receiving any definite explanation of the circumstances complicating the production of "Mrs. Mixer," Joan carried away with her a tolerably clear notion thereof, both confirming and supplementing the second-hand information of Hattie Morrison.

Mrs. Cardrow owned a heavy interest in the play, Joan had gathered; and there existed, as well, a contract between her and Arlington which would have to be eliminated before it would be possible to go ahead and make the production with another actress in place of the erstwhile star. Some very delicate diplomatic manœuvring was indicated....

Interim, Joan was to be privately drilled by Peter Gloucester for some weeks prior to calling together the full company to rehearse for the September production. Gloucester was just then out of Town, but she would be advised when and where to meet him on his return.

Marbridge was to be absent from New York until the middle of September or longer; but he promised to be back a week or two before the opening performance.

There were other promises exchanged....

With her future thus schemed, the girl was very well content, who had attained by easy stages to one of mental development in which those primary moral distinctions upon which she had been reared were no longer perceptible—or, if perceptible, had diminished to purely negligible stature.

It was not in nature for her to disdain or reject her bargain on moral grounds: she knew, or recognized, none that applied.

For over a year during the most impressionable period of her life, Joan Thursday had breathed the atmosphere of the stage. She had become thoroughly accustomed to recognize without criticism those irregular unions and regular disunions that characterized the lives of her associates. She had observed many an instance where the most steadfast and loyal love existed without bonds of any sort, and as many where it existed in matrimony, and as many again where neither party to a marriage made aught but the barest pretence of fidelity.

She had remarked that material and artistic success seemed to depend upon neither the observance nor the disregard of sexual morality. She knew of husbands and wives against whom scandal uttered no whisper and whose talents were considerable, but who had struggled for years and would struggle until the end without winning substantial recognition. And she knew of the reverse. The one unpardonable sin in her world was the sin of drunkenness, and even it was venial except when it "held the curtain" or prevented its rising altogether.

As far as concerned her attitude toward herself, she considered Joan Thursday above reproach, seeing that she had withdrawn from her marriage long before even as much as contemplating any man other than her husband. She held that she was now free, at liberty to do as she liked, untrammelled by opinion whether public or private: that she had outgrown criticism.

True, Quard might divorce her. But what of that? If he did, Joan Thursday wouldn't suffer. If he didn't, he himself would be the last to pretend he was leading a life of celibacy because of her defection.

Marbridge she really liked; his appeal to her nature was stronger than that of any man she had as yet encountered. He attracted her in every way, and he excited her curiosity as well. He was a new type—but in what respect different from other men? He was famously successful with women: why? He had wealth, cultivation of a certain sort (real or spurious, Joan couldn't discriminate) and social position; and this flattered, that such an one should reject the women of his own sphere for Joan Thursday—late of the stocking counter.

And if she could turn this infatuation of his to material profit, while at the same time satisfying the several appetites Marbridge excited in her: why not? Other women by the score did as much without censure or obvious cause for regret. Why not she?

How many women of her acquaintance—women whose interests, running in grooves parallel to hers, were intelligible to Joan—would have refused the chance that was now hers through Marbridge? Not one; none, at least, who was free as Joan was free; not even Hattie Morrison, whose views upon the subject of such arrangements were strong, whom Joan considered straitlaced to the verge of absurdity. Hattie, Joan believed, would have jumped at the opportunity.

But of course, denied, Hattie would be sure to decry it, and with the more bitterness since Joan had won it in the wreck of Hattie's hopes.

And here was the only shadow upon the fair prospect of Joan's contentment. She who had questioned Hattie's right to become a party to the conspiracy against Mrs. Cardrow—how could she ever go home and face the girl, with this treachery on her conscience?

True: Hattie didn't know, wouldn't know before morning, might never learn the truth during the term of their association.

None the less, to be with Hattie that night would be to sit with a skeleton at the feast of her felicity....

On impulse Joan turned to the left on leaving the New York Theatre building, and moved slowly, purposelessly, down Broadway.

It was an afternoon of withering heat: the pavements burning palpably through the paper-thin soles of her pretty slippers, and the air close with the smell of hot asphaltum. The rays of the westering sun made nothing of the fabric of Joan's white parasol, their heat penetrating its sheer shield as though it were glass. Mankind in general sought the shadowed side of the street and moved only reluctantly, with its coat over its arm, a handkerchief tucked in between neck and collar—effectually choking off ventilation and threatening "sun-stroke."

Waiting upon the northeast corner of Forty-second Street for the traffic police to check the cross-town tide, Joan felt half-suffocated and thought longingly of the seashore....

Once across the street, she turned directly in beneath the permanent awning of the Knickerbocker Hotel, and entered the lobby, making her way round, past the entrance to the bar, to the recess dedicated to the public telephone booths.

A semi-exhausted and apathetic operator looked up reluctantly as Joan approached, with one glance appraising her from head to heels. At any other time the dainty perfection of Joan's toilet would have roused antagonism in the woman; today she found energy only sufficient for a perfunctory mumble.

"What numba, please?"

Joan hesitated, feeling herself suddenly upon the verge of dangerous indiscretion, but stung by the operator's look of jaded disdain, took her courage in hand and pursued her original intention.

"One Bryant," she said.

The operator jammed a plug into one of the rows of sockets before her and iterated the number mechanically.

In another moment she nodded, indicating the rank of booths.

"Numba five—One Bryant," she said.

Joan shut herself in with the sliding door and took up the receiver.

"Hello—Lambs' Club?" she enquired.... "Is Mr. Fowey in the club?... Will you page him, please.... Miss Thursday.... Yes, I'll hold the wire."

The booth was hermetically sealed. Perspiration was starting out all over her body. And somewhere in that airless box, probably at her feet, lurked a long unburied cigar. She thrust the door ajar, but only to close it immediately as Fowey's voice saluted her.

"Hello?"

"Hello, Hubert," Joan drawled, with a little touch of laughing mockery in her accents.

"Is that you, Joan—really?" the voice demanded excitedly.

"Real-ly!" she affirmed. "What're you doing there, shut up all alone by yourself in that stupid club, Hubert?"

Prefaced by a brief but intelligible pause, the man's response came briskly: "Where are you now, anyway?"

"That doesn't matter," she retorted. She had meant to ask him to meet her at the hotel, but reconsidered, fearing lest Marbridge might chance to see them. "What really matters is that this is my birthday and I'm going to give a party. Have you got anything better to do?"

"No—"

"Then meet me in half an hour on the southbound platform of the Sixth Avenue L at Battery Place."

"Battery Place! What in thunder—"

"Never mind—tell you all about it when we meet. Will you come?"

"Will I! Well, rawther!"

"Half an hour, then—"

"I'll be there, with bells on!"

"Then good-bye for a little—Hubert."

"Good-bye."

Fowey reached the point of assignation only one train later than Joan.

As he hurried down the platform, almost stumbling in his impatience to join her, the girl surveyed with sudden dislike and regret his slight, dandified figure fitted with finical precision into clothing so ultra-English in fashion that it might have belonged to his younger brother. And the confident smile that lighted up his pinched, eager countenance seemed little short of offensive. She was sorry now that she had yielded to the temptation to make use of him: he was so insignificant in every way, so violently the opposite in all things of the man who now filled all her thoughts—Marbridge; and so transparent that even she could read his mind: he entertained not the least tangible doubt that now, after the manner in which they had last parted, she had at length wakened to appreciation of his irresistible charms, that her requesting him to meet her was but the preface to surrender.

But she permitted nothing of her thoughts to become legible in her manner. After all, she had only wanted an escort for the evening, an excuse to postpone that unavoidable return to the company of the girl she had betrayed; and Fowey had seemed the most convenient and the least dangerous man she could think of. If in the inflation of his insufferable conceit he dreamed for an instant another thing.... Well, Joan promised herself, he'd soon find out his mistake!...

Keeping up the fiction of her imaginary birthday, she outlined her plans: they would take one of the Iron Steamboat Company's boats from Pier 1, North River—a short walk from the station—to Coney Island. When that resort palled, they would drive to Manhattan Beach and dine, perhaps "take in" Pain's Fireworks; and return to New York by the same route.

Fowey's objections were instant and sincere and well-grounded: the boats would be crowded beyond endurance with an unwashed rabble liberally sown with drunks and screaming children. If she would only let him, he'd get a taxicab—or even a touring-car.

Quietly but firmly Joan overruled him. It must be her party or no party, as she proposed or not at all.

He yielded in the end, but the event proved him right in all he had foretold. Joan was very soon made sorry she hadn't suffered herself to be gainsaid.

They had half an hour to wait for the boat, and the waiting-room upon the second-storey of the pier was like an oven, packed with a milling, sweating mob exactly fulfilling Fowey's prediction. They were elbowed, shouldered, walked upon, and at one time openly ridiculed by a gang of hooligans, any one of whom would have made short work of Fowey had he dared show any resentment.

Upon the boat, when at length it turned up tardily to receive them, conditions were little better, save that the open air was an indescribable relief after the reeking atmosphere of the pier. Fowey managed to secure two uncomfortable folding stools, upon which they perched, crowded against the rail of the upper deck; a wretched "orchestra" wrung infamous parodies of popular songs from several tortured instruments; children scuffled and howled; burly ruffians in unclean aprons thrust themselves bodily through the throng, balancing dripping trays laden with glasses of lukewarm beer and "soft drinks" and bawling in every ear their seductive refrain—"Here's the waiter! Want the waiter? Who wants the waiter?"—and an alcoholic, planting his chair next to Joan's, promptly went to sleep, snoring atrociously, and threatened every instant to topple over and rest his head in her lap.

A single circumstance modified in a way Joan's regret that she hadn't heeded Fowey's protests.

As the boat swung away from the pier, a larger steamship of one of the coastwise lines, outward bound from its dock farther up the North River, passed with leeway so scant that the dress and features of those upon its decks were clearly to be discerned. And at the moment when the two vessels were nearest, Joan discovered one who stood just outside an open cabin door, leaning upon the rail with an impressively nonchalant pose, and smoking a heavy cigar. He wore clothing of a conspicuous shepherd's-plaid, and his pose was an arrested dramatic gesture.

In a moment a woman emerged from the open door behind him and joined him at the rail, placing an intimate hand on his forearm and saying something which won from him a laugh and a look of tender admiration: a handsome, able-bodied woman, expensively but loudly dressed, her connection with the stage as unquestionable as was his.

Joan dissembled the odd emotion with which she recognized the man, and turned to Fowey.

"What boat is that, do you know, Hubert?"

Fowey raked her with an indifferent glance, fore and aft. "Belongs to the New Bedford Line," he announced—"can't make out her name—connects at New Bedford for the boats to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Ever been up that way?"

"No. What's it like?"

"Pretty islands. Don't know Martha's Vineyard very well, but Nantucket's my old stamping-ground. Go up there in the middle of the summer—about now—and you'll find every actor and actress you ever heard of, and then some. Great place. Wish we were going there."

"Don't be silly...."

The boats were drawing apart. Joan looked back for the last sight she was ever to have of her husband.

Though she couldn't have known this, she sighed a little, in strange depression.

Perplexed, she tried vainly to analyze her emotion: was it regret—or jealousy?

Of a sudden, in the heart of that immense crowd, with Fowey attentive at her elbow, she was conscious of a feeling of intense loneliness.

---

XXXV

When, after a long and tedious voyage over a sea as flat as a plate and unflawed by a single cooling drift of air, the steamboat was made fast to the end of that long iron pier which juts out from the flat, low coast of Coney Island, its passengers rose en masse and crowded toward the gangways. Joan and Fowey, attempting to hang back until the crowd had thinned out sufficiently to enable them to go ashore in comfort, were caught in the swirl of it and swept along willy-nilly.

Once on the pier-head the multitude had more elbow room and spread out, the main body streaming headlong shorewards, keen-set for the delights promised by the two great amusement parks which had grown up in the heart of that frontier settlement of gin-mills, dance-halls, side-shows, eating-houses, and dives unspeakable.

Joan and Fowey followed more at their leisure, constraint and silence between them like a wall. The girl was deeply disappointed with the expedition, as far as it had gone, doubting whether anything better would follow, and still labouring under that unaccountable depression which had settled down upon her spirits at sight of Quard on the New Bedford boat. Fowey, no less disgusted, was puzzled by his companion's attitude, at once tolerant and aloof, keenly watchful for an opening through which to pursue his conquest, and wondering how it would end. If she were simply bent on tantalizing him again, for her own amusement....

He swore angrily but inaudibly.

Near the shore end of the pier they delayed to watch the antics of the hundreds of bathers churning the shallows in front of huge and hideous bathing establishments. In countless numbers, they dotted the sea like flies and darkened the sun-baked, unclean sands, into which their feet had trodden the wreckage of ten thousand lunches.

Fowey said something inexpressively cynical about the resemblance of the scene below to a congregation of bacilli crawling upon a slide beneath a microscope.

Joan heard without response, either vocal or mental. She resented bitterly the superior attitude adopted by her companion. For her part, she would have asked nothing better than to mingle with the throng and taste those crude pleasures so dear to its simple heart and, had she but dared admit it, to her own. But she had Fowey to live up to.

Very heartily she regretted the impulse which had dictated her invitation. She had been far happier alone—though it would have been strange had she been suffered to remain long alone.

By the time they left the pier, the evening was so far advanced that the myriad lights of the tawdry town were flashing into being. They debouched into a roaring mob which filled the wide avenue from curb to curb, packed so densely, though in constant motion, that trolley cars and automobiles forced a way through it only at a snail's pace and with great difficulty. Encouraged by the excessive heat which rendered Town intolerable to all who had the means to escape it, the week-end swarming had begun in all sincerity. In spite of the terrific congestion which already obtained in all the streets and avenues and beaches, piers, amusement parks, catch-penny shows, saloons, and restaurants, scarcely a minute passed without the arrival at some one of the trolley terminals of a car packed to the guards with more visitors.

A good-natured if rowdy mob, for the most part, with only a minimum element of the downright vicious in its composition, it was none the less bent on amusement in its cheapest form, that is to say, at somebody else's expense. It gathered thickest round the places of free entertainment, where acrobats performed on open-air stages or crawled upon high, invisible wires, or where slides were supplied gratis for public diversion: grinning always, but howling with delight when treated to real misadventure, as when some girl, negotiating a bamboo slide upon a grass mat, her skirts wrapped tight about her, would lose balance and shoot headlong, sprawling, to the level; the greater the exposure, the greater the diversion....

Nor was Fowey permitted to escape unteased: his conspicuous clothing, and the broad black ribbons dangling from his horn-rimmed glasses were too tempting to be resisted. Once his Panama was smashed down over his eyes; and his glasses were so frequently jerked by their moorings from his nose that he was fain at length to pocket them and poke owlishly along at Joan's guidance.

Dazzled to blindness by those ten million glaring bulbs which lifted up tier upon tier against the blank purple skies; deafened by an indescribable cacophony of bands, organs, bells, horns, human tongues incessantly clattering; suffering acutely from the collective heat of the multitude added to that of the still and muggy night; buffeted and borne hither and yon at the will of the mass: they contrived in the end to engage an open, horse-drawn vehicle, of the type colloquially known in those days as "low-neck hack," and ordered themselves driven to the Manhattan Beach Hotel.

When presently they had gained the darkling peace of a long road between marsh-lands, Fowey resumed with his glasses his hateful cynicism.

"That was considerable treat, all right," he said pensively.

"Glad you liked it," Joan replied with the curtness of chagrin.

"We'll go back and have some more after dinner," he suggested.

"Thanks—I've had plenty."

"No, but really!" he insisted. "We haven't seen half of it—"

"Oh, shut up!"

Her anger was real; and when he would have mollified the girl with soft words and an arm that sought to steal round her waist, she repeated her injunction with added coarseness and struck his hand away with a force that he felt.

In spite of this, he schooled himself to patience.

Dinner, served perfunctorily by a weary waiter and consumed upon the verandah of the hotel at a table, the best they could command, far removed from the comparative coolness and ease of those beside the railing, did little if anything to modify Joan's temper.

She, who had set out, believing herself the happiest of mortals, to spend an evening of real enjoyment, felt utterly wretched and forlorn.

Moment by moment her distaste for Fowey was gaining strength. She was put to it to listen to his bragging and to make response civilly. She did not relish her food, her company, or her surroundings; and in utter ennui tried to stimulate herself with her favourite brand of sweet champagne, insisting on another bottle when they had emptied one between them. It served only to stimulate a fictitious gaiety in her, one swift to wane.

For all this, she was reluctant to contemplate going home. Anything were preferable to that—at least until she could feel reasonably sure of finding Hattie abed and asleep.

They finished their meal at an hour too late to make it worth while to patronize one of the open-air entertainments with which she had promised herself diversion; and since she would neither go home nor, at Fowey's mischievous suggestion, return to Coney Island, they moved to another table, nearer the railing, and whiled away one more hour listening to the band music over their cigarettes and liqueurs.

Toward eleven o'clock, Joan suddenly announced that she was sick of it all and ready to go. Fowey revived his preference for a motor-car, and got his way against scanty opposition. In a saner humour, Joan would have stuck to her original plan. As it was, she accepted the motor ride with neither gratitude nor graciousness.

Curiously enough, once established in the car, her hat off, the swift rush of night air cooling her moist brows, her head resting back against the cushions, she permitted Fowey to repeat his ardent love-making which had made their previous ride together memorable. Her dislike of him was no less thorough-paced, but had passed from an active to a passive stage; she was at once too indifferent to resist him and so bored that she welcomed anything that promised excitement. She suffered his kisses, confident in her power to control him, and drew a certain satisfaction from reminding him, now and again forcibly, that there were limits to her toleration. But for the most part she lay in his arms in passive languor, her eyes half closed, and tried to forget him, or rather to believe him someone else, one whose embraces she could have welcomed....

When they came to lighted streets, she bade Fowey "behave," and would not permit him even so slight a lapse from decorum as that of "holding hands."

She sat up, rearranging the disorder of her hair, adjusted her hat, surreptitiously restored the brilliance of her lips with a stick of rouge.

The man drew back sullenly into his corner, fuming....

At her door, dismissing the car, he followed her up to the stoop.

"Joan—" he began angrily.

She turned back from using her latch-key, with a wondering, child-like stare.

"Yes, Hubert?" she enquired with hidden malice.

"You're not—you're not going to send me off like this?"

"Why not?" she demanded with fine assumption of simplicity. "It's awful' late."

Fowey seized her wrist.

"Now, listen to me!"

Joan broke his grasp with little or no effort.

"Silly boy!" she said. "Do you really want to come in and visit a while before you say good night?"

Her look was false with a winning softness. Fowey stammered.

"You—you know—"

"Then come along!" she said, with a laugh; and turning fled lightly before him up the darkened stairway.

She had opened the door to the tiny private hallway of the flat when he overtook her, panting. She paused, with a warning finger to her lips.

"S-sh!" she warned. "Don't wake Hattie!"

He swore viciously, discountenanced; and she laughed and, leaving the door wide, went on into the small sitting-dining-room, meanly exulting in the discomfiture she had planned, knowing quite well that he had either forgotten Hattie or believed her to be spending this week-end out of Town, as before.

In the act of lighting the gas, she heard the door close and saw Fowey come, white and shaken, into the room.

"Hush!" she said gaily. "I'll make sure she isn't awake—"

Removing her hat, she passed on into the adjoining bedroom, and stopped short with a sensation of sinking dismay. The room was empty, the bed she shared with Hattie untouched. So much was visible in the faint light entering through windows that opened on a well.

Wondering, Joan struck a light. Its first glimmer revealed to her the fact that Hattie's trunk was gone. The flare of the gas-jet disclosed greater changes in the aspect of the room, due to the disappearance of Hattie's toilet articles and knick-knacks.

Hattie had left, bag and baggage—had gone for good!

But why?

Had she discovered Joan's treachery? Or what had happened?

And in her surprise and perplexity, the girl was conscious anew of that sense of loneliness. She had been afraid to return to the one whom she had betrayed so lightly; but now she was afraid to be without her.

Going back to the adjoining room, she found Fowey standing beside the table and with a slight smile examining a sheet of paper.

"I found this lying here," he announced, handing it over—"didn't realize it was anything until I'd read half of it."

His smile was again confident, bright with premature pride of conquest. But Joan didn't heed it. She was reading rapidly what had been written, swiftly and in a sprawling hand, upon the half sheet of note-paper.

"By rights I ought to stay until you come back, whenever you have the cheek to, and tell you what I think of you—I saw B. E. this evening and he told me all about it—but I want never to see you again—the rent's paid up till next Wednesday—then you can stick or get out—I don't care which—and I wish you joy of your bargain!—H. M."

"You've been scrapping with Hattie, eh?" Joan heard Fowey say in an amused voice.

Without answering, she let the sheet of paper fall to the table, and stood with head bowed in thought, suffering acutely the humiliation inspired by Hattie's contemptuous dismissal.

"What was the trouble?" Fowey pursued. "Not that I'm sorry—"

"Oh, nothing much," Joan interrupted. "We just had a difference of opinion, and she had to fly off the handle like this. It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me," Fowey announced significantly.

Now Joan looked up, for the first time appreciating her position.

"Oh ..." she said blankly.

Fowey was advancing, with extended arms. She raised a hand to fend him off.

"Don't!" she begged. "Please don't. I can't.... You must go, now—of course. I'm sorry. Good night."

He paused, and she saw his face pale and working with passion; his small eyes blazing behind their thick lenses; his hands clenched by his sides, but not tightly, the fingers twitching nervously; his whole body trembling and shaken beyond control.

She was conscious of an incongruous, unnatural, inexplicable feeling of pity for him.

"Please be a good boy," she pleaded, "and go away."

"No, I'm damned if I do. You asked me up here—I know now—just to tease me. But that's no good. I won't go!" He advanced another pace, his tone and manner changing. "O Joan, Joan!" he begged—"don't treat me so cruelly! You know I'm mad about you. Doesn't that mean anything to you, more than a chance to torment me? My God! what kind of a woman are you? I can't stand this. Flesh and blood couldn't. I'm only human. All this week I've kept away from you simply because I realized what you were—"

"What am I?" Joan cut in quickly.

Fowey choked again, with a gesture of impotent exasperation.

"You," he almost shouted—"you're the woman I love and who's driving me mad—mad I tell you!"

"Hubert! You mean that? You really love me?"

"You know I do. You know I'm crazy about you. Haven't you seen it from the first?"

Hesitating, Joan experienced a sense of one in deep waters. There was a sound as that of distant surf in her ears. All through her body pulses were throbbing madly.

She struggled still a little, instinctively; but Fowey advantaged himself of that instant of indecision. He held her in his arms, now; her face was stinging beneath his kisses.

Almost unconsciously, she lifted her arms and clasped them round his neck, drawing his face to hers.

"You poor kid!" she murmured fondly, her eyes closed.... "You poor kid...."

---

XXXVI

Without knowing how she had come there, Joan found herself standing beside the outer doorway, in the narrow hall; one hand hugging about her the kimono she must have snatched up by instinct, while yet not fully wakened, the other hand fumbling with the lock; sleep clouding her brain like a fog, fatigue weighting her eyelids and chaining her limbs, panic hammering in her bosom.

Overhead the doorbell was ringing imperatively, without interruption, even as it must have been ringing for many minutes before she was consciously awake.

Dimly she felt that this alarm by night must portend something strange and terrible.

And still she held her hand, wondering. Who could it be? Not Quard: for she had seen him leave New York. Never Marbridge: that were unthinkable! Hattie Morrison, perhaps.... And that meant....

The bell ground on implacably.

At length she found courage to adjust the chain-bolt and open the door to the limit permitted by that guard.

In the outer hallway a gas-jet burned, turned low, diffusing just enough illumination to show her the figure, somehow indefinitely familiar in spite of its style, of a man in a chauffeur's uniform: a young and wiry man clothed in khaki coat and breeches and leather leggins, and wearing a cap with visor shadowing heavily his narrow, sharp-featured countenance.

As the door opened he removed his finger from the bell-push, and drove home recognition with his voice.

"Miss Thursby live here? I got a message for her."

Joan gasped: "Butch!"

"It's me, all right," her brother admitted crisply in his well-remembered tone of irony. "You certainly are one sincere little sleeper. I been ringing here—"

"How did you get in?"

"Rang up the janitor—if that matters. Lis'n: you betta hustle into your clothes quick 's you can if you wanta get home in time to say good-bye to the old woman."

"Mother!" Joan shrilled. "What—what's the matter—?"

"Dyin'," Butch told her briefly and without emotion. "She said she wanted to see you. So get a move on. My car's waitin', and I dassent leave it alone. Hustle—y' understand?"

"Yes, yes!" Joan promised with a sob. "I'll hurry, Butch—"

"See you do, then!"

The boy swung about smartly and disappeared down the well of the stairway.

Joan closed the door, and leaned against it, panting. Suppose he had wanted to come in!...

For the moment, this was her sole coherent thought.

Then, rousing, she crept stealthily back to the darkened bedroom, gathered up her clothing with infinite precautions against noise, and returned to the sitting-room to dress in feverish haste....

There was an open taxicab waiting in front of the door. As she came out, Butch bent over and cranked the motor. Straightening up, he waved her curtly into the body of the car.

"Jump in and shut the door," he ordered briefly, climbing into the driver's seat.

"But—Butch—"

"Doncha hear me? Get in and shut that door. We got no time to waste chinnin' here."

Abashed and frightened, the girl obeyed.

Immediately Butch had the cab in motion, tearing eastward at lawless speed through streets whose long ranks of yawning windows, seen fugitively in the formless dusk of early morning, seemed to look down leering, as if informed with terrible intelligence.

She shut out the sight of them with hands that covered her face until the swift rush of cool air steadied and sobered her, so that she grew calmer in the knowledge that, in veritable fact (and this was all that really mattered) "nobody knew"....

Then, sitting up, she composed herself, and with deft fingers completed the adjustment of her garments. By the time she had finished her toilet, aided by a small mirror inset between the forward windows, Butch was stopping the cab before the East Seventy-sixth Street tenement.

Bending back, he unlatched the door and swung it open.

"You go on up," he ordered. "I'll be around before long—gotta run this machine back to the garage."

Joan stepped quickly to the sidewalk, and shut the door.

"All right," she responded, and added, almost timidly, avoiding her brother's eyes: "Thank you, Butch."

He grunted unintelligibly and, as Joan moved up the stoop, threw in the power again and drew swiftly away down the street.

For an instant Joan held back in the vestibule, sickened to recognize anew the home of dirt and squalor she had fled, a long lifetime since, it seemed, and struggling with almost invincible repugnance for the ordeal awaiting her at the head of those five weary flights.

Then, more through instinct than of her will, her finger pressed the call-button beneath the Thursby letter box.

The latch clicked. She pushed the door open, moved reluctantly into the shadows and addressed herself wearily to the stairs, inhaling with a keen physical disgust the heavy and malodorous atmosphere in which her youth had been shaped toward womanhood.

As the dining-room door admitted her, she checked again, almost tempted to question the soundness of those faculties which insisted that more than a year had passed, rather than an hour or two, since she had left that mean and sordid place.

Above the dining-table blazed and wheezed a single gas-jet, whose ragged bluish flame was yet sufficiently strong to turn to the colour of night the dull dawnlight outside the air-shaft windows. It revealed to her not a single article of furniture other than as memory placed it, and showed her, seated on the far side of the table, her father lifting a heavy and sullen face from the note-book between his soiled fat fingers, that inevitable sheaf of dope lying at his elbow.

There was no sort of greeting, in proper sense, between these two. For a little neither spoke. Joan hesitated, with shoulders against the panels of the door, in an attitude instinctively defiant and defensive. Thursby looked her up and down, a louring sneer marking his recognition of his daughter's finery.

Suddenly, explosively, she found her tongue: "How's ma?"

Thursby jerked a thumb in the direction of the bedrooms.

"She died an hour ago," he said slowly, "just after Ed went to find you. Edna's in there."

Joan made a gesture of horror.

"My God!" she said throatily, and turned away.

A moment later, loud cries of lamentation ringing through the flat testified that she had found her sister.

---

XXXVII

With peculiar irony, the passing of that pallid, vague, and ineffectual character, Mrs. Thursby, proved the signal for the dissolution of the family which, denying her both respect and affection during her life, had none the less lost, in losing her, its sole motive or excuse for unity.

The return from the cemetery was accomplished toward noon of a July day whose heavily overcast sky seemed only to act as a blanket over the city, compressing its heated and humid atmosphere until the least exertion was to be indulged in only at the cost of saturated clothing.

The four were crowded in common misery within a shabby, stuffy, undertaker's growler.

Thursby occupied the back seat with his eldest daughter, notwithstanding the fact that, since apprising her of her mother's death, the morning of her return, he had addressed no word to her directly. He sat now with fat and mottled hands resting on his knees, his waistcoat unbuttoned, exposing soiled linen, his dull and heavy gaze steadfastly directed through the window.

Opposite him, on the forward seat, Edna wept silently and incessantly into a black-bordered handkerchief.

Butch, beside her, looked serious and depressed in a suit of black clothing borrowed for the occasion.

Nobody spoke from the time they re-entered the carriage, after the burial, until they left it. Joan huddled herself into her corner, putting all possible space between herself and her father. A sense of lassitude was heavy upon her. She meditated vaguely on the strangeness of life, its inscrutable riddle, the enigma of its brief and feverish transit from black oblivion through light to black oblivion. But the problem only wearied her. She dropped it from time to time and tried to think of other things; as a rule this resulted in her speculations centering about Butch.

The boy mystified her, awed her a little with a suggestion of spirit and strength, character and intelligence, conveyed by a forceful yet unassuming manner. It was a new manner, strangely developed in the year that spaced her knowledge of him, only to be explained by his sudden determination to go seriously to work and make something of himself; and the motive for that remained inexplicable, and would ever as far as concerned Joan. For the personal reticence that had always sealed his cynical mouth was more than ever characteristic of the boy today; and the sympathy which once had existed between himself and Joan was become a thing of yesterday and as if it had never been. His attitude toward her was touched with just a colour of contempt, almost too faint to be resented; she shrank from it, feeling that he saw through her shallowness, that he knew her, not as Marbridge knew her, perhaps, or as Billy Salute, but thoroughly and intimately, and far better than she would ever know herself.

She knew now—through Edna—that within the last twelve-month Butch had learned his trade of chauffeur and pursued it with such diligence that, aside from being the main support of the family which she had deserted, he was half-owner of his taxicab and in a way to acquire an interest in a small garage....

When the carriage stopped, the father was the first to alight. With no word or look for either of his daughters, and only a semi-articulate growl for Butch, to the effect that they'd see one another again at dinner, he pulled his rusty derby well forward over his haggard, haunted eyes, thrust his hands deep into trouser-pockets, and slouched ponderously away in the direction of his news-stand. Before he turned the avenue corner, Joan, looking after him while she waited for Butch to settle with the driver, saw Thursby produce his packet of dope and, moistening a thumb, begin to con it as he plodded on.

So, pursuing his passion to the end, he passed forever from her life, yet never altogether from her memory; in which, as time matured the girl, his inscrutable personality assumed the character of a symbol of aborted destiny. What he had been, whence he had sprung, what he might have become, she never learned....

Then, preceded by Edna, followed by Butch, she climbed for the last time those weary stairs.

Arrived in the flat, Butch shut himself into his room to change to working clothes. He could not afford to waste an afternoon, he said. Joan and Edna sat down in the dark and dismal dining-room, conferring in hushed voices until he rejoined them. He came forth presently, the inevitable cigarette drooping from his thin, hard lips, and sat down, his spare, wiry body looking uncommonly well set-up and capable in the chauffeur's livery.

After a little hesitation, Joan mustered up courage to say her say, if with something nearly approaching appeal in the way that she addressed this taciturn and self-sufficient man who had replaced her loaferish brother.

"I've been telling Edna," she said, "that I'm going to take care of her from now on."

"That so?" Butch exhaled twin jets of smoke from his nostrils. "How?" he enquired without prejudice.

"Well ... she's coming to live with me—"

"Where?"

"I don't know. I'm leaving where you found me. By the way, how did you know where to look for me, Butch?"

"Seen you one day when you was livin' in the Astoria Inn. There's a dairy lunch on the ground floor where I gen'ly eat. After that I kept an eye on you."

"Oh!" said Joan thoughtfully, wondering how much that eye had seen of the brief but lurid existence she had led before coming partially to her senses and moving to share Hattie Morrison's lodgings. "Well, I'll find a good place, and Edna can stay with me and act as my maid until she's old enough to find something to do for herself."

"On the stage, eh?"

"I guess so. I'm getting on, you know. Chances are I could give her a boost."

Butch shook his head: "Nothin' doin'."

"Why?"

He was unmoved by the flash of hostility in Joan's manner.

"I guess," he said after a deliberate pause, "we don't have to go into that. Anyway, I got other plans for Edna. She's goin' to the country, up-State, to spend the summer on a farm—family of a fellow I know. After that, if she's strong enough, she can come back and keep house for me, if she wants to, or go to work any way she chooses—that's not my business. Only—understand me—she isn't going to go into the chorus until she's old enough to know what she's doin', and strong enough to stand the racket. That's settled."

Rising, he jerked the stub of his cigarette through the air-shaft window, and slowly drew on his gauntlets.

"You do what packin' you wanta, kid," he advised Edna, "before three o'clock thisaft'noon. I'll be back for you then. Your train leaves at four. You'll travel along with the mother of this friend of mine—Mrs. Simmons, her name is."

As he had said, the matter was settled. Joan conceded the point without bickering, with indeed a feeling of mean relief. Moreover, she was afraid of Butch....

The flat in Fiftieth Street had gained associations insufferably hateful. She returned to it only long enough to pack up and move out. Incidentally she found, read, and destroyed without answering, a note from Fowey suggesting an assignation. Her paradoxical dislike for the man had deepened into detestation. She both hoped and intended never to see him again.

She moved before nightfall, leaving no address, and established herself in an inexpensive but reputable boarding establishment, little frequented by the class of theatrical people with which she was acquainted, and where a repetition of her escapade was impossible. On the third day following she began rehearsing privately with Gloucester, and threw into the work all she could muster of strength, patience, and intelligence, leaving herself, at the end of each day's work, too exhausted in mind and body to indulge in any of the pleasures to which her tastes inclined.

Fowey, unable to trace her and seeing nothing of the girl in those restaurants and places of amusement she had been wont to frequent, in time gave up the chase; and before the first presentation of "Mrs. Mixer" the newspapers supplied Joan with the news of his clandestine marriage and subsequent flight to Europe with a widow whose fortune doubtless promised compensation for the fact that she had a son nearly as old as her latest husband.

---

XXXVIII

The rehearsals of "Tomorrow's People" were arranged to begin on the twenty-third day of September; and since all the important rôles had been filled before he left Town, and Wilbrow, whom he could trust, had charge of all other details, Matthias delayed his home-coming until the twenty-second.

Not until the twentieth did he emerge from the wilderness up back of the Allagash country into the comparative civilization of Moosehead Lake. In eight weeks he had not written a line, received a letter, or read a newspaper. But, as he telegraphed Helena from the Mt. Kineo House, he was so healthy that he was ashamed of it.

The day-letter telegram she sent in reply was delivered on the train. Its news, though condensed, was reassuring: Venetia was well and her boy developing into a famous ruffian; the two were making a visit at Tanglewood, and on the return of Marbridge from his summer in Europe would move back to New York, where Venetia was to reassume charge of his town-house.

Thus satisfied as to the welfare of the woman he loved, Matthias gave himself up completely to the production of his play; and through the following four weeks lived in the theatre by day, dreamed of it by night, thought, talked, and wrote only in its singular terminology.

Few facts unconnected with his own play penetrated his understanding, in all that period. But, dining with Wilbrow one night at the general table in the Players, he overheard Gloucester railing bitterly at the ill-fortune which had induced him to pledge himself to stage a modern satirical comedy for Arlington and to train for the leading part a raw and almost inexperienced stage-struck girl.

He detailed his trials in vivid phrases:

"As far as I know, she's never played in anything except a bum vaudeville sketch, and I had hell's own time making her fit to play that. And yet she's got the ineffable nerve to keep picking at my way of doing things on the general ground that it ain't Tom Wilbrow's. Seems he had the privilege of rehearsing her for a five-side part in that punk show of Jack Matthias', that went to pieces out on the Coast last Summer. If Wilbrow wasn't listening with all his ears, over there, I'd tell you what I said to the young woman the last time she threw him in my face.... What?... Oh, nobody you ever heard of. Calls herself Thursday—Joan Thursday.... Of course I rowed with Arlington about her, but he only shrugged and grinned and said she had to play it and I'd got to make her play it—offered to bet me a thousand over and above my fees I couldn't do it.... Sure, I took him up. Why not? I'll make her act it yet. I could make a Casino chorus boy act human if I wasn't so squeamish.... Oh, Marbridge—one of his discoveries. I saw him handing her gently into that big, brazen touring-car of his, in front of Rector's, night before last. Fragile's the word—'handle with care!'"

Wilbrow, interrogated, supplied the context. Arlington had bought up, through a third party, Mrs. Cardrow's interest in "Mrs. Mixer," advising her to sell out because the play had already scored one failure and promising her another play in which she would stand better chance to win New York audiences. This was an old comedy from the French, revamped, and was even then being rehearsed with a scrub company and a scratch outfit of scenery, the production to be made on the same night that "Mrs. Mixer" was to tempt fate with Joan Thursday; the designated date being the twenty-fifth of October, a Wednesday.

Matthias promptly dismissed the matter from his mind: he speculated a little, hazily about Marbridge, in his constitutional inability to understand that gentleman, felt more than ever sorry for Venetia and wondered how much longer she would stand it all—and plunged again into his preoccupation.

"Tomorrow's People" was announced for production on Monday, October the twenty-third. But after the dress-rehearsal on Sunday certain changes recommended themselves as advisable to the judgment of the author, who persuaded the management to postpone the opening night until Wednesday. At ten minutes to twelve on that night the final curtain fell upon a successful representation; an audience in its wraps blocked the aisles until after midnight, applauding and demanding the author; who, however, was not in the theatre.

He had, in fact, not been near it since the curtain, falling on the first act, had persuaded him of the general friendliness of an audience and the competency of the company. This culmination of a nerve-racking strain which had endured without respite for over a month found him without courage to await the verdict. He took to the streets and walked himself weary in vain effort to refrain from circling back toward the building whose walls housed his fate.

At length, in desperation hoping to distract his thoughts from the supreme issue, he purchased a ticket of admission to another theatre, above whose entrance blazed the announcement "Mrs. Mixer," and stationed himself at the back of the orchestra to witness the last part of the performance.

He saw the self-confidence of Gloucester supremely justified: the satiric farce marched steadily, scene by scene, to a success that was to keep it on Broadway through the winter and make the name of Joan Thursday a house-hold word throughout the Union. Her personal success was as unquestionable as her beauty; she played with grace, vivacity, charm, and distinction; and only to the initiate of the theatre was it apparent that Gloucester had found in her the perfect medium for the transmission of his art. Matthias could see, in company with a few of the more discriminating and stage-wise, that she employed not a gesture, intonation or bit of business which had not originated with Gloucester; she brought to her rôle on her part nothing but beauty and an unshakable self-confidence so thoroughly ingrained that it escaped suggesting self-consciousness. The triumph was, rightly, first Gloucester's, then the play's; but the public acclaimed the actress, and the one acidulated critic who hailed her, the following morning, as "at last!—the perfect human kinetophone record!" was listened to by none, least of all by the subject of his sarcasm. Marbridge, in a stage box, led the applause at the conclusion of each act; and at the end of the play Arlington came in person before the curtain, leading by the hand the gracefully reluctant Joan, and in a few suave sentences thanked the audience for its appreciation and a beneficent Providence for granting him this opportunity of fixing a new star in the theatrical firmament: the name of "this little girl," he promised (bowing to Joan) would appear in letters of fire over the theatre, the next night....

Pausing in the lobby to light a cigarette before leaving, Matthias overheard one of Arlington's lieutenants confiding to another the news of the ruinous failure of the third initial production of that night.

Half an hour later he met Wilbrow by appointment in a quiet, non-theatrical club, and received from him confirmation of rumours which had already reached him of his own triumph with "Tomorrow's People."

"You're a made man now," Wilbrow told him with sincere good will and some little honest envy; "by tomorrow morning the pack will be at your heels, yapping for a chance to put on every old 'script in your trunk."

"I suppose so," Matthias nodded soberly.

"But there's one comfort about that," Wilbrow pursued cheerfully: "whatever the temptation, you won't give 'em anything but sound, sane, workmanlike stuff. You've proved yourself one of the two or three, at most, playwrights in this country who are able to think and to make an audience think without losing sight of the fact that, in the last analysis, 'the play's the thing.' We've got plenty of authors nowadays who can turn out first-chop melodrama, and we've got a respectable percentage of 'em who write plays so full of honest and intelligent thought that it gives the average manager a headache to look at the 'script; but the men who can give us the sort of drama that not only makes you think but holds you on the front edge of your seat waiting to see what's coming next.... Well, they're few and far between, and you're one of 'em, and I'm proud to have had a hand in putting you before the public!"

"You've got nothing on me, there," Matthias grinned: "I'm proud you had. And if I can get my own way after this—"

"You don't need to join the I-Should-Worries on account of that!"

"You'll be the only man who will ever produce one of my plays."

Between one o'clock and two they parted. Matthias trudged home, completely fagged in body, but with a buoyant heart to sustain him.

Venetia would be glad for him....

He was ascending the steps of Number 289 when a heavy touring-car, coming from the direction of Longacre Square, swung in to the curb and stopped. Latch-key in hand, Matthias paused and looked back in some little surprise: the lodgers of Madame Duprat were a motley lot, but as far as he knew none of them were of the class that maintains expensive automobiles. But this car, upon inspection, proved to be tenanted by the chauffeur alone; who, leaving the motor purring, jumped smartly from his seat and ran up the steps.

"I beg your pardon, sir," he said, touching his cap, "but I'm looking for a gentleman named Matthias—"

"I am Mr. Matthias."

"Thank you, sir. I've been sent to fetch you. It's—er—important, I fancy," the man added, eyeing Matthias curiously.

"You've been sent to fetch me? But who sent you?"

"My employer, sir—Mr. Marbridge."

"Marbridge!" Matthias echoed, startled. Without definite decision, he turned and ran down the steps in company with the chauffeur: Venetia in need of him, perhaps.... "What's happened?" he demanded. "Is Mrs. Marbridge—?"

"If you'll just get in, sir," the man replied, "I'll tell you—as much as I know—on the way. It'll save time."

He opened the door of the tonneau, but Matthias turned from it, walked round the car, and climbed into the seat beside the driver's. With a nod of satisfaction, the chauffeur joined him, threw in the power, and deftly swung the ponderous vehicle about.

"Well?" Matthias asked as the machine shot across-town.

"Beg pardon, sir," the man replied after a moment—"but I'd rather not say anything, if it's all the same to you."

"It isn't," Matthias insisted curtly. "I'm not on sufficiently friendly terms with Mr. Marbridge for him to send for me without explanation."

"Yes, sir; but you see, part of my job is to keep my mouth shut."

"I'm afraid I shall have to ask you to forget that duty to some extent, or else stop the car and let me out."

"Very good, sir. I don't suppose I can do any harm telling what little I know. After supper tonight, Mr. Marbridge told me to take the car to the garage and not to expect a call for it until sometime tomorrow morning; but when I got there, he was already wanting me on the telephone. He said there'd been an accident, and told me to find Mr. Arlington first and then you, and ask you to come immediately."

"But why me?" Matthias asked, more of himself than of the driver.

"He didn't say, sir."

"Did he state what sort of an accident?"

"No, sir."

"You found Mr. Arlington?"

"No, sir; he wasn't in when I asked at his hotel. But I left a message before coming on for you."

Matthias sat up with a start. Instead of turning up Broadway the man was steering his car straight across Longacre Square. Before he had time to comment on this fact they were speeding on toward Sixth Avenue.

"Look here," he cried, "you're not taking me to Mr. Marbridge's home!"

"No, sir."

"But—"

"Mr. Marbridge hadn't gone home when he telephoned me, sir."

"Where is he, then?"

"We'll be there in a minute, sir—an apartment house on Madison Avenue."

"Oh!" said Matthias thoughtfully. "Was Mr. Marbridge—ah—alone when you left him tonight?"

"I'd rather not say, sir, if you don't mind."

Troubled by an inkling of the disaster, Matthias composed himself to patience.

Turning south on Fifth Avenue, the car passed Thirty-fourth Street before swinging eastward again. It stopped, eventually, in the side street, just short of the corner of Madison Avenue, before a private entrance to a ground-floor apartment, such as physicians prefer. But Matthias could discern no physician's name-plate upon the door at which his guide knocked, or in either of the flanking windows.

Opening, the door disclosed a panelled entry tenanted by a white-lipped woman in the black and white uniform of a lady's-maid. Her frightened eyes examined Matthias apprehensively as he entered, followed by the chauffeur.

This last demanded briefly: "Doctor been?"

The maid assented with a nervous nod: "Ten minutes ago, about. He's with the lady now—"

"Lady!" the chauffeur echoed. "But I thought it was Mr. Marbridge—"

"I mean the other lady," the maid explained—"the one what done the shooting. When Mr. Marbridge got the gun away from her, he locked her up in the bathroom, and then she had hysterics. The doctor's trying to make her hush, so's she won't disturb the other tenants, but.... You can hear yourself how she's carrying on."

In a pause that followed, Matthias was conscious of the sound of high-pitched and incessant laughter, slightly muffled, emanating from some distant part of the flat.

He asked abruptly: "Where is Mr. Marbridge?"

The maid started and hesitated, looking to the chauffeur.

"This is Mr. Matthias," that one explained. "Mr. Marbridge sent for him."

"Oh, yes—excuse me, sir. This way, if you please."

Opening a door on the right, the woman permitted Matthias to pass through, then closed it.

He found himself in a dining-room of moderate proportions and handsomely furnished. Little of it was visible, however, outside the radius of illumination cast by an electric dome which, depending from the middle of the ceiling, focussed its rays upon a small round dining-table of mahogany. This table was quite bare save for a massive decanter of cut-glass standing at the edge of a puddle of spilt liquor: as if an uncertain hand had attempted to pour a drink. Near it lay a broken goblet.

On the farther side of the table a woman with young and slender figure stood in a pose of arrested action, holding a goblet half-full of brandy and water. Her features were but indistinctly suggested in the penumbra of the dome, but beneath this her bare arms and shoulders, rising out of an elaborate evening gown, shone with a soft warm lustre. Matthias remembered that gown: Joan Thursday had worn it in the last act of "Mrs. Mixer." But she neither moved nor spoke, and for the time being he paid her no further heed, giving his attention entirely to Marbridge.

Sitting low in a deeply upholstered wing-chair—out of place in the dining-room and evidently dragged in for the emergency—Marbridge breathed heavily, chin on his chest, his coarse mouth ajar, his face ghastly with a stricken pallor. His feet sprawled uncouthly. The dress coat and waistcoat he had worn lay in a heap on the floor, near the chair, and both shirt and undershirt had been ripped and cut away from his right shoulder, exposing his swarthy and hairy bosom and a sort of temporary bandage which, like his linen, was darkly stained. Closed when Matthias entered, his eyes opened almost instantly and fixed upon the man a heavy and lacklustre stare which at first failed to indicate recognition.

Matthias heard himself crying out in a voice of horror: "Good God, Marbridge! How did this happen?"

The man stirred, granted with pain, and made a deprecatory gesture with his left hand.

"Needn't yell," he said thickly: "I've been shot ... done for...."

His gaze shifted heavily to the woman. With effort he enunciated one word more: "Drink...."

As though by that monosyllable freed from an enchaining spell, Joan started, moved quickly to his side and held the goblet to his lips.

He drank noisily, gulping and slobbering; overflowing at either corner of his mouth, the liquor dripped twin streams upon his naked bosom.

Mechanically Matthias put his hat down on the table.

He experienced an incredulous sensation, as though he were struggling to cast off the terror and oppression of some particularly vivid and coherent nightmare.

From the farther room that noise persisted of monotonous and awful laughter.

Marbridge ceased to swallow and grunted. Joan removed the glass and drew away without looking at Matthias. At a cost of considerable will-power, apparently, the wounded man collected himself and levelled at Matthias his louring, but now less dull, regard.

"Oh, it's you, is it?" he said ungraciously. "Well, you'll do at a pinch.... I wanted Arlington ... but you if he couldn't be found."

"Well," said Matthias stupidly, "I'm here.... The doctor's seen you, I suppose?"

"Yes—did what he could for me—no use wasting effort—it's my cue to exit."

"Oh, come! It's not as bad as that!"

"The hell it ain't. The doctor knows—I know. Not that it matters. It was coming to me and I got it."

"Where's the doctor?" Matthias insisted. "Why isn't he attending you now?"

"He's in the other room ... trying to silence that crazy woman.... She plugged me and ... went into hysterics...."

"Who?"

"Nella Cardrow.... Had the devil of a time with her before doctor came ... trying to keep her from rushing out and giving herself up ... all this in the papers.... But all right now: we'll hush it up."

"Then that's what you want of me?"

"Wait," Marbridge grunted. "Where's that girl?"

Joan moved back to his side. "What can I do?" she said; and these were all the words Matthias heard her utter from first to last of that business.

Marbridge nodded at her with a curling lip: "You can get out!"

She turned sharply and left the room, banging the door.

"That's the kind she is," Marbridge commented. "You were lucky to get rid of her as easy as you did.... Give me more brandy, will you, like a good fellow—and be stingy with the water. I've got to ... hold out a couple of hours more."

Matthias served him.

"I presume Venetia knows nothing about this, yet?"

Having drunk, Marbridge shook his head. "Not yet. Now, listen.... You guessed it: I want you to help hush this up, for Venetia's sake.... Rotten mess—do no good if it gets in the papers—only humiliation for her. Will you—?"

"What is it you want me to do?"

"Help me home and keep your mouth shut.... You see, this is my place; I've had it years; very handy—private entrance—all that.... Nella used to meet me here. That's how she came to have a key. I'd forgotten.... Well, I got tired of her, and she couldn't act, and Arlington was sore about that. So we planned to get rid of her. I guess you must've heard. It was a dirty business, all round.... And tonight, when her play went to pieces, just as we'd planned it should, she saw how she'd been bilked and lost her head.... Came here, let herself in quietly, without the maid's hearing her, and shot me when I came in with Joan. I managed to get the gun away before she could turn it on herself, and locked her up. Then—hysterics.... Well, I'm finished. I asked for it, and got it.... No: no remorse bunk, no deathbed repentance, nothing like that! But I realize I've been a pretty rotten proposition, first and last. Never mind.... What I'm getting at's this: nobody need suffer but me. That's where you come in. For Venetia's sake. You and Arlington and the doctor can cover it all up between you. Arlie can quiet that girl—Joan—and the doctor's all right; he'll want a pretty stiff cheque to fix the undertaker—and that's all right, too. Then you've got to scare Nella Cardrow so's she won't give herself away, and buy my chauffeur and that maid out there, Sara.... But first off, you'll have to help doctor get me home and in bed. I'm the sort that's got to die in the house."

His chin dropped again.

"Well ... I guess it's a good job ... at that...."

He shivered.

The hall-door opened and Arlington entered, followed by a lean man with worried eyes who proved to be the doctor.

---

XXXIX

Shortly before seven o'clock, that same morning, a limousine car pulled up quietly just short of the corner of Madison Avenue, and its occupant, with a word on alighting to his driver, addressed himself briskly to the door of the ground-floor flat.

He was a handsome, well dressed, well-set-up and well-nourished animal of something more than middle-age: a fact which the pitilessly clear light of early morning betrayed, discovering lines and hollows in his clean-shaven countenance which would ordinarily have escaped notice.

But he had passed that time of life when he could suffer a sleepless night of anxiety without visibly paying for it.

His intention to announce himself by ringing the bell was promptly anticipated, the door opening before his finger could touch the button. He checked momentarily in obvious surprise, then jauntily lifted his hat as he stepped hurriedly inside.

"Why, my dear!" he addressed the woman who held the door—"up so early!"

"I haven't been to bed, of course, Mr. Arlington," Joan informed him.

"Well," he observed, not without envy, "you don't look it."

"I've been packing all night," she returned. "Of course—I can't stay here, after what's happened."

"Of course not," he agreed sympathetically.

Having closed the outside door, she moved before him into a small drawing-room which adjoined the entry-hall on the left, and when he had followed shut its door with particular care.

"Sara's still packing," she explained, turning to Arlington. "Well?"

He hesitated, looking her over with a doubtful eye. But she was, at least outwardly, quite cool and collected, her manner exhibiting no undue amount of anxiety.

Still, a certain amount of make-believe would seem no more than decent....

"Look here," he said almost sharply—"you're feeling all right, eh?"

"Quite—only tired as a dog; and naturally—"

"I understand," he interrupted. "But you'll be fit to go on tonight, you think?"

"Don't worry about that," Joan advised him decidedly. "I'm hoping to get a nap before evening, but even if I don't, I know the first duty of an actress is always to her public."

"Yes," Arlington agreed briefly, avoiding her eyes.... "Still, I must ask you to be prepared."

Joan's figure stiffened slightly, and her dark eyes widened.

"Dead?" she questioned in a low voice.

Arlington nodded. "I'm sorry.... About half an hour after we got him home."

The girl sat down suddenly and buried her face in her hands.

"Oh!" she cried in a stifled voice—"how awful!"

"There!" Arlington moved over and rested a hand familiarly on her shoulder. "Brace up. You'll forget all about this before long."

"O no—never!" she moaned through her fingers.

"But you will," he insisted, looking down at her with an odd expression. "To begin with, I'm going to make it my business to see that you forget. You must. You can't do justice to your—genius, if you keep harping on this accident. It wasn't your fault, you know. Just as soon as I've arranged a few details.... By the way, how's the Cardrow woman?"

"Asleep," Joan answered. "She hasn't made a bit of trouble since the doctor gave her that dope—whatever it was."

"Good. He'll be along presently with a nurse he can trust. And by that time I'll have you out of the way. I know just the place for you, a little flat uptown, on Fifty-ninth Street, overlooking the Park. You'll be very quiet and comfortable there, and near the theatre besides."

"I'm glad of that. I was thinking, of course, I'd have to go to some hotel ... and I didn't want to."

"And quite natural. You want to be alone until you feel yourself again.... I'll find you a good maid, and make everything smooth for you. You're not to fret about anything, and if you're troubled you must come right to me."

"You're awf'ly kind."

"Don't look at it that way, please."

"How can I ever thank you?"

"Oh, we'll talk that over some other time." Arlington removed his hand from her shoulder and went back to the table, upon which he had deposited a bundle of newspapers. "There's no doubt of your success," he pursued soothingly. "Your notices are the finest I've seen in years. I brought you the lot of them in case you care—"

Joan uncovered her face and looked up quickly. "Oh, do let me see them!"

Arlington placed the papers in her eager hands.

"They're all folded with your reviews uppermost."

"Oh, thank you ever so much!"

But in the act of opening the bundle, Joan hesitated and let it fall into her lap.

"There's nothing about—?" she questioned fearfully.

"No, and won't be," he promised. "Besides, these were already on the presses by the time it happened.... You needn't worry," he resumed, moving to a window and looking abstractedly out, hands clasped behind him; "the affair will be kept perfectly quiet. Everybody's been seen and fixed, except the Cardrow, and the doctor has already given us a certificate of death under the knife—operation for appendicitis, imperatively required at an hour's notice.... By the way, I don't suppose you know, but—Marbridge didn't leave any papers or anything of that sort lying round here, did he?"

There was no answer. He heard a paper rustle, and looking round saw the girl with her attention all absorbed by one of her notices.

"Well," he said after a moment, "I'll go and have a talk with that maid, Sara."

"All right," she returned abstractedly.

"You're all ready to leave when I've fixed things up with her?"

"Yes," she returned, without looking up.

He hesitated a moment by the door, remarking the flush of colour that was deepening in her cheeks; then with a mystified shake of his head, he left the room very quietly.

She remained alone for upwards of half an hour, in the course of which time she read all the reviews once and some of the more enthusiastic twice.

Then carefully folding the papers, she put them aside and sat thinking.

She thought for a long time without moving, her eyes shining as they looked ahead, out of the stupid and sordid turmoil of yesterday into the golden promise of tomorrow.

She thought by no means clearly, with a brain confused by praise and sodden with fatigue; but above the welter of her thoughts, a single tremendous fact stood out, solid and unshakable, like a mountain towering about cloud-wrack:

She was a Success.

---