Strathdene told her that if she ever looked at another man after she married him he would take her up ten thousand feet in the clouds, set his airship on fire, and drop with her as one cinder into the ocean. What handsomer tribute could any woman ask of a man? He was a lover worth fighting for.
But she had felt uncertain of winning him till that wonderful morning when Jim did not come back home. She woke up early all by herself and heard the valet answer Jim's call from Viewcrest.
She had made a friend of Dallam by her flirtation with the nobility. The poor fellow had suffered tortures from the degradation of his master's alliance with a commoner like Kedzie until Kedzie developed her alliance with the Marquess. Then his valetic soul expanded again.
He looked upon her as his salvation.
Over the telephone she heard him now promising Jim that he would not tell Kedzie. If Jim's old valet, Jules, had not gone to France and his death he would have saved Jim from infernal distresses, but this substitute had a malignant interest in his master's confusion. Dallam proceeded forthwith to rap at Mrs. Dyckman's door and spoke through it, deferentially:
“Beg pardon, ma'am, but could I have a word?”
Kedzie wrapped herself in a bath-robe and opened the door a chink to hear the rest of what she had heard in part. The valet had no collar on and his overnight beard not off, and he, too, was in a bath-robe. Man and mistress stood there like genius and madness, “and thin partitions did their bounds divide.”
“Very sorry to trouble you, ma'am,” he said, “but I'm compelled to. The master has just telephoned me that his car broke down at the Viewcrest Inn out Tiverton way, and he wants his morning clothes, and also—if you'll pardon me, ma'am—he instructed me to send him a long motor-coat of yours and a large hat and your limousine. I was directed not to—ahem—to trouble you about it, ma'am, but I 'ardly dared.”
He helped her out so perfectly that she had no need to say anything more than, “Quite right.”
She was glad that the door screened her from observation, for she went through a crisis of emotions, wrath and disgust at Jim's perfidy versus ecstasy and gratitude to him for it.