Now it was Peter who put his hand on her arm and patted it and said, “I didn't mean anything.”
Mean what? Kedzie wondered. But she had no chance to find out, for Peter rose from the table and, dodging around the dancing couples, made his escape. He reappeared in the very nook where Kedzie watched, and called up to Zada:
“Did they see me?”
Zada shook her head. Peter threw her a kiss. She threw him a shrug of contempt. Peter went away laughing. Kedzie waited a few minutes and saw that Mr. Devoe had come to sit with Zada.
After a moment the music was resumed, and Zada rose to dance again with Mr. Devoe—a curious sort of dance, in which she lifted her feet high and placed them carefully, as if she were walking on a floor covered with eggs and didn't want to break any.
But Kedzie's eyes were filling with sand. They had gazed too long at brilliance. She dashed back to the elevator and to her room. She was exhausted, and she pulled off her clothes and let them lie where they fell. She slid her weary frame between the sheets and instantly slept.
Charity Coe danced till all hours with Jim, with Tom Duane and other men, and no one could have fancied that she had ever known or cared what horrors filled the war hospitals across the sea.
She was frantic enough to accept a luncheon engagement with Jim and his mother for the next day. She telephoned him in the morning: “Your angel of a mother will forgive me when you tell her I'm lunching down-town with my husband. The poor boy was detained at his office last night and didn't get my telegram till he got home. When he learned that I had come in and gone out again he was furious with himself and me. I hadn't left word where I was, so he couldn't come running after me. He waited at home and gave me a love of a call-down for my dissipation. It was a treat. I really think he was jealous.”
Jim Dyckman did not laugh with her. He was thinking hard. He had seen Cheever at the Biltmore, and a little later Cheever vanished. Cheever must have seen Charity Coe then. And if he saw her, he saw him. Then why had he kept silent? Dyckman had a chilling intuition that Cheever was lying in ambush for him.