CHAPTER I
In the history of nations sometimes a paragraph serves for a certain decade, while a volume is not enough for a certain day. It is so with the history of persons.
In the thirty-six hours after he received Charity Coe's invitation to call Jim Dyckman passed from being Charity's champion against her own husband to being Kedzie's champion against hers. Charity rewarded his chivalrous pommeling of Cheever by asking him never to come near her again. Kedzie rewarded his punishment of Gilfoyle by arranging that he should never leave her again.
It was Charity that he longed for, and Kedzie that he engaged to marry.
In that period Peter Cheever had traveled a very short distance in a journey he had postponed too long. Cheever had been hardly conscious when they smuggled him at midnight from his club to his own home. He had slept ill and achily. He was ashamed to face the servants, and he wanted to murder his valet for being aware of the master's defeat.
He did not know how ashamed the household retainers were of him and of themselves. The valet and butler had earned good sums on occasions by taking tips from Cheever on prize-fighters and jockeys. But they felt betrayed now, and as disconsolate as the bottle-holders and towel-flappers of a defeated pugilist.
They did not know who had whipped their master till the word came from the Dyckman household that their master had come home glorious from whipping the stuffing out of somebody. It was easy to put one and one together and make two.
One of Cheever's worst embarrassments was the matter of Zada. His battered head suffered tortures before it contrived a proper lie for her. Then he called Zada up from his house and explained that as he was leaving his club to fly to her, his car had skidded into another, with the result that he had been knocked senseless and cut up with flying glass; otherwise he was in perfect shape. Unfortunately, he had been recognized and taken to his official home instead of to the residence of his heart.
Zada was all for dashing to him at once; but he persuaded her that that would be quite impossible. He was in no real danger in his own house, and he would come back to his heart's one real first, last, only, and onliest darling love just as soon as he could.