The house windows had darkened one by one by the time his tramp ended again at Haverly Lodge. The moon was near the western timber fringe of the mountains, but Mary Burton, still wide-eyed and wakeful, had slipped out of her room to the balcony by her window.
The stone coping where she sat was partly black with shadow and partly platinum gray with the last of the moonlight. Her hair, falling in two heavy braids, caught the glistening light and her lips were parted in a smile. "It is strange," she told herself, "that once before he came along—and waked me into a new self. His second coming is stranger still. It would almost seem that there is no chance about it. It would almost seem that it has been definitely planned." Then she laughed low to herself. "And if that's true I have no responsibility in the matter at all. Nothing I do about it is my fault—and I needn't be very angry about his kissing me before he was introduced to me."
Then she saw a figure leave the shadow of the hedges and cross the moonlit lawn with a confident stride. Mary Burton leaned a little forward, resting on her hands, and her lips remained parted.
"He seems just about as shameless about the whole affair as I am," she reflected, and when he was directly below she accosted him in a careful voice: "Halt, Restless Stranger. Does a disturbed conscience send you out to wander in the night mists?"
Jefferson Edwardes obeyed the command and raised his eyes to the commanding voice. "Perhaps," he announced in a guarded tone, "it is, in a fashion, dread of the wrath to come—though my conscience is clear. But you"—in his half-whisper she caught an eager note of hope—"why aren't you asleep?" She shook her head and in the moon-bath her face flashed into a luminous smile. "I am working up that wrath," she assured him. "I am preparing to be terribly angry with you tomorrow."
"And until tomorrow?"
"Until tomorrow I am very happy. Good-night."
"Tomorrow is always—tomorrow, dearest—" he said, "Good-night."
A many-sided man was J. J. Malone, with a nature as brilliant and as capable of flashing varying lights from its facets as a diamond—and when need be as hard as a diamond. Had he lived in feudal times other barons would have said, "Where Malone sits there is the head of the table," and the monarch himself would have taken thought before provoking his wrath. In these days of alleged intolerance for tyrants he dispensed with the fanfare of trumpets and the tossing of flambeaux. The door of his office in a gray shaft-like building down-town bore the simple inscription, "American Transportation Co., President's Office."