“As far as she was concerned I was right. She was careless enough to receive the man again—at lunch today. With the servant out. I found out and went home to see you and finish with you. But I crept in and found it wasn’t you. It was another fellow. They were laughing and having a gay time over the way they were doing us both. The good joke was my interpretation of your letter. You and not he had been the victim, and Rose said you had been with her enough to make me jealous—that you would never deny anything that she didn’t want you to.
“How she’s played us!
“I’m through. I can’t see you because you might dissuade me and I don’t want to be dissuaded. The world’s rotten and I want to get out of it. Every ounce of rotten passion in me for that woman drags me down farther. It’s killing her or myself and it’s easier this way. Only please do this for me. Give the statement enclosed to the newspapers. Sounds rather spectacular but it must be done. It must be done. And for God’s sake be careful whom you marry and steer clear of Rose. Good-bye, old Jim.”
That was all except for a signed statement saying that John Hubbell wished to publicly acknowledge that in naming James Langley as co-respondent in the case of Hubbell vs. Hubbell he had been under a complete misapprehension and wished so to state—that Mr. Langley was entirely innocent of any such entanglement. It said nothing whatever about his wife.
“Thank God he knew,” groaned Jim under his breath. “Thank God he knew.” He sat staring bleakly out of his window as if he looked on waste and desolation.
Many thoughts must have been comforting and torturing him. Of course it was too late for the statement to be used but it healed a wound in Jim which even Horatia could not have cured. It must have seemed ironic to him that he had let such a woman come between him and Horatia. That for a promise to such a woman he had waived his right to yield to Horatia’s request—worst of all that in the society of such a woman he had let Horatia linger. If reason told him that the cause of his separation from Horatia might have been anything else, still there might not have been any immediate cause of alienation.
He looked at the time-tables taken from his pocket. They showed him what he knew, that within six hours he could be with Horatia. But the flame in his face died out and he looked again bitter—discouraged. There was Anthony!
That night the most dreadful forest fires of years broke out around the city. There were always forest fires—often very bad ones, but never had they been so terrible and so devastating. It was a relief to Jim to bury himself in the work of help as well as of publicity. The Hill district was safe. He kept half a dozen wires busy until he was sure of that. This fire was coming from the other way, sweeping through the farming country, destroying homes, farms, cattle and human life.
That night too, in one of the large city hospitals on the other side of the city, several babies were born. The nurse made the mother of one of them as comfortable as she could and then tiptoed out.
“Rotten to be as alone as that,” she confided to another blue and white figure, whom she met in the nursery. “Usually you have somebody around. But she didn’t have a soul.”