Over across the city, far away to the northeast, on a quiet side street near Bradfield's was Annie Holton's tiny flat. To find its occupant at home at nine o'clock in the evening was a rare occurrence, but on this particular night, for perhaps the first time in a fortnight, she had not gone to Bradfield's, but sat alone in front of the fire, whose leaping flames furnished the only light in the little room.
She, too, was busy with her thoughts. It was not often that a thing as big as this came her way. Sheer luck it had been from the first. A suspicion that her mother had been a little over eager in urging her to go on the motor trip with the warm hearted western millionaire, a suspicion confirmed on her return by a chance word incautiously let fall; then her unlooked-for good fortune in getting the old woman gloriously drunk, and finally the startling discovery of the whole story, and her instant visit to Harry Palmer. With him, too, it had been touch and go. What if she had not been able to persuade him to listen; what if she had failed to convince him of the truth of her story? Gordon's game had been a good one. In spite of her desire for revenge, she felt a fierce admiration for his cleverness; just that one flaw, the picking of Mrs. Holton for one of his helpers, risking the taking on of a woman once notorious as a drunkard, and still given to occasional lapses. That one fact had meant Gordon's defeat and her own salvation.
The struggle between her old infatuation for Gordon, and her hatred of Rose Ashton had been bitter, but brief. Hatred had triumphed, and yet to-night her exultation meant regret as well. The thought of holding Rose in her power made her clench her shapely hands, and brought a tigerish gleam to her bold black eyes, and still the afterthought would come that it was Gordon, after all, who would suffer most. Gordon was the one man she had ever cared the snap of her fingers for, and to harm him—and yet, since she had had the bitterness of seeing him desert her for Rose, there was a fierce pleasure in knowing that she would be sending him where she would never again know the agony of seeing him under the spell of the girl she loathed with all her heart.
And her own future? Five thousand dollars. What could she not do with that? First, clothes, of course. She would be the best dressed woman at Bradfield's. Jewels, too. And a little laid up for a rainy day, for Annie Holton was level-headed, and saw with grim philosophy the fate of the poor, tawdry, painted things of the street, who served to point the moral, when youth and good looks have fled.
"I'm lucky," she cried aloud challengingly, "I'm one of the lucky ones. I'm—"
She broke off sharply with a little cry of disgust. "You fool," she said, in a very different tone, a tone of the bitterest self-contempt, "you poor, weak fool! You know you're miserable. You know everything's a sham. You know your life isn't worth sixpence to you. And all because you're such a fool, with a dozen men crazy after you, you can't be satisfied because you can't have the one you want."
The clock chimed the hour of ten. For a moment she sat silent, and then slowly nodded her head. "It oughtn't to be so," she said with conviction, "but it's the truth, just the same. A woman can get along if the man she's stuck on is stuck on her—and if he isn't, she's better dead."
In the parlor of her pretty little home on Dalton Street Rose Ashton was pacing restlessly to and fro. Finally, with a sigh of weariness, she flung herself down on the sofa, and lay quiet, gazing into the dying embers with wide-open, unseeing eyes.
Wave after wave, a flood of bitter, remorseful thoughts swept over her. What a weak thing, she mused, a woman is, after all. "To know the right and still the wrong pursue," she quoted to herself. "That's what I'm doing now, and that's what I've done for a year. Perhaps, before that, I wasn't to blame, but since I met Dick it's all been so different. Now I know, and yet three times in a year I've lowered myself to depths of which no decent woman would even dream. And perhaps I've got more shame before me still. And yet I do it—hating it, protesting, drawing back, almost refusing,—and then doing it, because he tells me to. I might as well be honest. I've damned myself for a man who's using me to help himself, and I've done it just on the hope that he's going to be honest with me and do what he's promised. I've done it because I'm weak, I've done it because I couldn't help myself, I've done it—because I'm a woman."