Even in the dim light he could see the soft color steal to her hair. He turned away with a sharp:
"Get your wrap while I go for the car, and give Benson his orders. He'll have to keep a date for me."
The star-spangled night was clear and still as Courtlandt slowed down in front of the Bear Creek ranch-house. The girl beside him shivered as she looked at the lighted windows. He laid one hand on hers.
"Steady, little girl, steady. You won't be able to help if you lose your nerve."
"I know, Steve, I'll be all right as soon as I get busy. I have never seen——" She sprang from the car and ran up the path, her golden gown gleaming in the dim light. As she opened the door Courtlandt heard a sound which sent him from the car. He couldn't sit still. Lips set he paced back and forth, back and forth while a voice inside his head, which didn't seem his voice at all, kept repeating, "Suppose—just suppose it were I, Steve?"
Other thoughts crowded in upon him as he paced like a sentinel, a sentinel in dinner clothes, before the little house. The dawn crept slowly up in the east spraying the dark sky overhead with gorgeousness. It transformed the world into the fairyland of the pantomimes of his boyhood, a world full of magic passwords and talismans. He almost expected to see a shimmering, masked Harlequin tap on the cabin door with his supple wand and a dainty Columbine pirouette out in response.
Whatever it might be outside, there was no illusion behind that closed door. It was raw reality. What wonders women were, some of them, Steve amended. He thought of the girls with whom he had dined and danced in the last two years. Many of them sensation-seeking privateers. Was it after-war reaction which made them so recklessly, flagrantly determined in their attempts to lure? They had succeeded only in repelling him but they had plenty of victims. How they crackled the glaze of their reputations. How they married and unmarried, those people whom he knew, and with what tragic consequences to their children. Felice was a product of the atmosphere in which she lived. He realized now that she would have no scruples in coming between him and the girl he had married if she could. A fragment from Kant which had been the text for a college theme teased at the tip Of his tongue. He had it! "No one of us can do that, which if done by all, will destroy society." If this divorce business kept up it would destroy society. Did luxurious social life breed inconstancy of purpose, contempt of covenants?
As though in answer to his question came a vision of Jerry as she had knelt beside Old Nick's bed. He could see her face, the hint of tears under the steadiness of her gaze, hear her voice as she repeated reverently the marriage service.
She would keep her marriage vow at any cost to herself, Courtlandt thought, no matter how she might care for someone else. She was the sort of woman who would stand the wear and tear of daily companionship, making allowance for a man's moods but never knuckling to them. She'd bring him up with a round turn, but she'd laugh while she did it. He couldn't imagine her irritable or fretty or snappy. She had the saving grace of humor. If women could only learn the persuasive value of a laugh as against tears or sulks how many marriages would be saved from the scrap-heap. After all, any poor dumb-bell could get married; it was staying married which proved one's metal.
The color overhead spread with increasing beauty. The last friendly star high up above a mountain twinkled out. Somewhere toward the barns a shrill-voiced, enterprising cock "hailed the smiling morn." A curl of smoke rose lazily from the cabin chimney. The sun shot up through a fleece of clouds; it painted the fields and sloping hillside with radiance. A horse whinnied in the corral, a light breeze sprang up and brought with it the odor of barns, the strong scent of wool. From the road came the labored breathing of a flivver.