The dress he was in and the dress she was in were the very habiliments of guilt. Getting back to Newport in evening clothes would be the advertisement of their escapade. His expansive shirt-bosom might as well have been a sandwich-board. His broadcloth trousers and his patent-leather pumps would be worse than rags.
And Charity had no hat. There was an unmistakable dressed-up eveningness about them both.
This struck him as the first evil to remedy. As with an escaped convict, his prime necessity was a change of clothes. There was only one way to manage that. He went back to the hotel and found a startled early-morning waiter sweeping out the office. Jim asked where the nearest telephone was, and learned that it was half a mile away at a farm-house.
Jim turned up his collar, pulled down his motor-cap, and struck out along the muddy road. He startled the farmer's family and their large hands were not wide enough to hide their wider smiles.
On the long hike thither Jim had worked out his stratagem. He called up his house, or, rather, Kedzie's house, in Newport, and after much delay got his yawning valet to the telephone. He never had liked that valet less than now.
“That you, Dallam? My car broke down out in the country,” he explained, every syllable a sugarless quinine pill in his throat. “That is to say, the gasolene gave out. I am in my evening clothes, so is—er—Mrs.—er—the lady I was with. I want you to bring me at once an outfit of day clothes, and a—one of my wife's long motor-coats—a very long one—and one of her small hats. Then get out my wife's limousine and send the suit-case and the coat and hat to me here at the Viewcrest Inn, and tell the chauffeur to bring an extra can of gasolene.”
A voice with an intolerable smile in it came back: “Very good, sir. I presume I'd better not waken Mrs. Dyckman?”
“Naturally not. I don't want to—er—alarm her.”
“She was quite alarmed when you didn't come home, sir, last night.”
“Well, I'll explain when I see her. Do you understand the situation?”