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Nobody

by Louis Joseph Vance · English · Gutenberg #29671 · 431,542 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Nobody

Author: Louis Joseph Vance

Illustrator: W. L. Jacobs


        
Release date: August 12, 2009 [eBook #29671]
                Most recently updated: January 5, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29671

Credits: Produced by Don Kostuch. (This text was produced from files
        obtained from The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOBODY ***




Produced by Don Kostuch. (This text was produced from files
obtained from The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)





[Transcriber's note: The original unedited text file came
from http://www.archive.org/details/nobody00jacogoog]


NOBODY

LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE




[Illustration: "Miss Manwaring! For the Love of Mike--"]





NOBODY

By LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE

AUTHOR OF "The Lone Wolf,"

"The Brass Bowl," "Cynthia of the Minute,"

"The Destroying Angel," Etc.





With Frontispiece

By W. L. JACOBS





A. L. BURT COMPANY

Publishers

New York

Published by Arrangement with GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY



Copyright, 1914,

By LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE

Copyright, 1915,

By GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

_This novel was originally published serially,
under the title of "An Outsider."_





CONTENTS

CHAPTER

    I  ANARCHY

   II  BURGLARY

  III  ACCESSARY AFTER THE FACT

   IV  BLACKMAIL

    V  CONSPIRACY

   VI  ALIAS MANWARING

  VII  FRAUD

 VIII  A THIEF IN THE NIGHT

   IX  PICAROON

    X  LEGERDEMAIN

   XI  THE THIRD DEGREE

  XII  MACHIAVELLIAN

 XIII  MARPLOT

  XIV  MAGIC

   XV  FALSE WITNESS

  XVI  THE PLANT

 XVII  EXPOSE

XVIII  BREAKING JAIL







NOBODY




CHAPTER I

ANARCHY



"What you gonna have?"

To this inquiry the patron made no response; head bent, nose between
the pages of the magazine, she pored sedulously over a legend attached
to one of the illustrations.

After a decent pause in waiting the waitress renewed her demand with a
sharper accent:

"Say, lis'en; what you want?"

"White satin, veiled with _point d' Angleterre_,'" Miss Manvers
replied distinctly, if without looking up, aware simply of something
imperative in the starched but humid presence at her elbow.

Pardonably startled, the waitress demanded with the rising inflection:
"_Wha-a-at?_"

"'The court train,'" Miss Manvers pursued in abstraction, "'is lined
with lace and dotted with bouquets of orange-blossoms--'"

She checked herself suddenly, looked up shyly, and essayed a pale,
apologetic smile.

"I'm sorry; I didn't realise--"

But now the waitress had caught a glimpse of the illustration and was
bending over the patron's shoulder for a better look.

"Gee!" she commented sincerely. "Ain't that a dream?"

"Yes," Miss Manvers admitted wistfully, "it's a dream, right enough!"

"That's so, too." Deftly, with a large, moist, red hand, the waitress
arranged knife, fork, spoon, and paper serviette on the unclothed
brown board before Miss Manvers. "That's the worst of them fashion
mag'zines," she complained; "they get your goat. Sometimes after
readin' some of that dope I can't hardly remember orders right, just
for wishin' somebody'd come along and hang some of them joyful rags
onto me!"

Then, catching the eye of the manager, she straightway resumed her
professional habit of slightly wilted hauteur--compounded in equal
parts of discontent, tired feet, heat-fag and that profound disdain
for food-consuming animals which inevitably informs the mind of every
quick-lunch waitress.

"What you gonna have?" she demanded dispassionately.

"Ham-and, please."

"Plate of ham-and. Cawfy?"

"Yes, iced coffee and"--Miss Manvers hesitated briefly--"and a
napoleon."

Reciting the amended order, the waitress withdrew.

For the next few moments the customer neglected the fashion magazine
which she had found--apparently a souvenir of some other
absent-minded patron--on the seat of the chair next that one of her
own casual choice.

She stared blankly at the smudged and spotted bill of fare propped up,
in its wooden frame, against an armour-plate-china sugar-bowl. She was
deeply intrigued by the mystery of human frailty as exemplified by her
reckless extravagance in ordering that superfluous bit of pastry. Miss
Manvers's purse contained a single coin of silver, the quarter of a
dollar; being precisely the sum of her entire fortune. Her ham and
beans would cost fifteen cents, the coffee and the napoleon five cents
each. In other words, she would be penniless when she had paid her
score--and Heaven only knew for how long afterward.

Her lips moved without sound in her worn and pallid face. "What's the
difference?" she bully-ragged her conscience. "I might as well be
broke as the way I am!"

The argument was painfully reasonable; that inmate of New York
who has but five cents has nothing.

On the other hand, there was nothing whatever to be advanced in
extenuation of her folly in thus inviting indigestion--a passion for
pastry is its own punishment no less than any other infatuation to
which mortal flesh is prone. Sally was morally certain she would
suffer, and that severely, before nightfall.

"Well, what of it?" she grumbled sullenly. "If I die for it, it's
cheap at the price! And, no matter what happens, it can't be any
hotter afterward than it is now."

Somehow soothed by this cynical reflection, she sat up, mopped her
flushed forehead with a handkerchief of which she was not proud, and
drank thirstily of her tumbler of ice-water.

The grateful draft reminded her that she had actually been athirst
ever since noon. It was now almost three o'clock--thanks to which fact
she might eat in the comparative comfort of a lunchroom which boasted
no patron other than herself. But she was little appreciative of this
boon; she comprehended her surroundings with just a little languid
resentment of their smug cleanliness and their atmosphere impregnated
with effluvia of cheap edibles. But if these seemed offensive she
would have been willing to overlook them on certain
conditions--as she proved when the waitress reappeared with her order.

"I don't suppose--" Miss Manvers began, but hesitated.

"What say?"

"I don't suppose you need any more girls here?"

"Lookin' for a job?" the waitress inquired brilliantly. "I dunno--I'll
ask the manager, if you want."

Miss Manvers nodded a barely audible "Please!" She munched drearily
for a few minutes, staring out through the front windows wherein, from
dawn till dark, a white-clad chef industriously browned the wheats and
cast sinkers; beyond their wide expanse of plate-glass, stenciled with
the name of the establishment in reverse, a vista of sun-smitten
street danced drunkenly through the reek from the sheet-iron griddles.
Miss Manvers wondered dully if the sidewalks were really less hot than
those same griddles.

"The manager says nothin' doin'," the waitress reported. "But you can
leave your name and add-ress if you wanta."

"Thanks," said Miss Manvers; "but what's the use?"

"That's right, all right," the other sympathised. "Besides, take it
from me, this ain't the kind of a job you could make good at. You
gotta be a horse like me to stand it, 'specially days like this."

"Yes, I was thinking of that--"

"Believe me or not, nobody ain't got no idear what hot is without
they've juggled hash in one of these joints on a summer day. The
kitchen back there is honest' somethin' fierce. Three of our girls
fainted dead away in the noon rush."

"Oh, I know," Miss Manvers sighed; "I've tried it before--and failed."

The entrance of another customer prevented further confidences, and
Miss Manvers was left to resume her scanning of the fashion magazine.

If its distracting quality was unquestionable, it hardly contributed
comfort to her mood.

"In selecting her personal apparel," she read, "the bride-to-be must,
of necessity, be guided by individual requirements and the social
position which she is to assume. Although much has been said about the
advisability of purchasing only what is really needed and can be worn
before the styles change, it is a common fault of brides to buy too
much. . . . It is assumed that the June bride will have already on
hand a suit or two, a one-piece frock of serge or similar material, a
top-coat, an afternoon coat or one of the new capes, evening gowns,
and an evening wrap, one or two afternoon and luncheon frocks,
and hats, shoes, and similar accessories. . . ."

Here Miss Manvers withdrew from the printed page long enough mentally
to inventory her own wardrobe.

"That lets me out," she said, and turned a page.

The caption, "A Feudal Aristocracy," caught her attention. "Long
Island," she learned, "is a poem itself to-day, even if it is
suffering from cheap developments, the encroachment of tenantry, and
the swarming of the commuters. It is too bad that this garden spot
must be overrun, and indeed there has been a movement to stay the tide
of immigration from the city. In one section our best people are
buying up vast stretches of property to add to their private estates.
. . ."

Fascinated, Miss Manvers thrust aside a garnished plate, took a gulp
of the decoction called coffee, and attacked her napoleon.

"I am so glad," she continued to read, "to see that we are adding to
our estates and fast forming an aristocracy of the countryside; we
really live at our country places now for over half the year. Even the
large weddings are no longer town affairs. If one has an estate it is
so much smarter now to marry off one's daughters from the country
place. Yet there is always one difficulty about this method of
procedure: can such weddings be afforded the prominence
necessary? Weddings, of course, must be given a certain amount of
advertisement, through the proper channels, because each of us stands
for a representative house, which must not drop into oblivion. . . ."

At this point Miss Manvers wrinkled her nose indignantly. "Just for
that," she informed the unknown author of this artless screed, "just
for that now, I've a great mind not to go to Long Island at all this
summer--not even once to Coney!"

She turned impatiently back to the advertising pages and reviewed the
"classified wants" listlessly, forewarned by experience that they
would offer no invitation to one of her singularly modest
accomplishments; none of these advertisers desired the services of a
saleswoman, a typist, or even a lady's-maid. Not that Miss Manvers
imagined she would score a success in the role of lady's-maid, though
it was almost the only means open to her of earning a livelihood
which, thus far, she had not essayed.

Such work was hardly calculated to suit a girl with a mind of
independent cast and what is known as a temper of her own: prohibitive
barriers between her and such bread as may be earned in the sweat of
domestic servitude.

Little disappointed, then, she turned attention to "Chat of the Social
World," gossip which exercised potent fascination upon the girl's
intelligence. She devoured with more avidity than she had her
food those pretentiously phrased chronicles of the snobocracy--trite
announcements of post-season luncheons, dinners, dances, and bridge
parties; of departures for Europe and for American country homes, of
engagements and of weddings--distilling therefrom an acid envy that
robbed her napoleon of all its savour.

Such was the life for which she yearned with every famished aspiration
of her being. And why not? Who were these whose half-tone portraits
smirked complacence or scowled disdain to her inspection--who were
these that they should enjoy every good thing in life while she must
go hungering all her days for a little pleasure? Scarce one betrayed
by feature or expression either breeding or intelligence superior to
that of Sally Manvers, late of the hardware notions in Huckster's
Bargain Basement!

Regarding the full-page reproduction of a photograph showing a
jibber-jawed June bride in full regalia, Miss Manvers was moved
enviously to paraphrase an epigram of moot origin: "There, but for the
grace of God, stands Sally Manvers!"

There was enough truth in that to excuse a little gulp of emotion;
which, however, was craftily dissembled.

In due course, rising, Miss Manvers stood and delivered at the
desk of the blond cashier, then, penniless, wandered forth into the
brutal sunshine.

Her homeward way took her up Sixth Avenue, through Thirty-Fourth
Street, and northward on Park Avenue.

She went slowly, wearily, as suited a drudge to whom respite from
drudgery brought no earnest of ease or pleasure. The burning air beat
up into her downcast face from sun-baked stones that scorched through
the soles of her shoddy shoes, and she gulped down acrid mouthfuls of
it rather than breathed.

June was still young, but already summer, like some burly ruffian
shouldering spring aside with her work half done, held the city in the
hollow of a hot and humid hand.

In the mid-afternoon glow, lower Park Avenue owned its personal
atmosphere of somnolent isolation, in strong contrast with the bustle
of proletarian Fourth Avenue at its one extreme and the roar at the
other of traffic-galled Forty-Second Street. Of the residences a few,
whose awninged windows resembled heavy-lidded eyes, overlooked
wayfaring folk with drowsy arrogance; the greater number, with boarded
doors and blinded windows, like mouths and eyes tight shut in
seasonable slumber, ignored the world entirely.

Though she had passed that way twice a day for years on
end--always in consciousness of that aloof spirit informing the
inanimate, and in such resentment thereof as properly rewarded a
studied insolence--never before to-day had Sarah Manvers found the
genius of the neighbourhood so unmitigatedly intolerable. It was with
downright relief that presently she turned from the avenue eastward
and accomplished in the span of one short cross-town block a transit
of the most violent contrasts, from the dull dignity of the socially
eligible, if somewhat _passé_, through a stratum of shabby gentility,
to a region of late years dedicated to the uses of adversity
undisguised.

A few doors short of Lexington Avenue she paused, sighed, turned,
climbed weather-bitten steps to a brownstone entrance, and addressed
herself to three long flights of naked stairs.

She left behind, at the entrance, the dingy parlours of "Mme. Levin,
Modes et Toilettes," on the first landing the wailing-rooms of a
hag-ridden teacher of vocal culture, on the next several dusty
chambers perennially unrented, and gained at the top an open door
whose panels sported a simple rectangle of cardboard advertising the
tenancy of (in engraved script) _Miss Lucy Spode_, (in ink) _M. A.
Warden_, and (in pencil, a scrawl) _Manvers_.

Through this the girl walked into a back room of generous size, which
boasted a top-light together with the generic name of studio, and
was furnished with an ill-assorted company of lame and dismal pieces.
The several vocations of its tenants were indicated by a
typewriting-machine beneath a rubber hood thick with dust, a folding
metal music-stand and a violin-case, and a large studio easel
supplemented by a number of scrubby canvases. A door in the partition
wall communicated with a small bedchamber of the kind commonly termed
"hall room." And in one corner a stationary wash-stand and a gas-stove
for morbid cookery lurked behind a Japanese screen of dilapidated
panels.

Near the windows, on the end of a box-couch, a young woman was
perched, thin shoulders rounded over the ink-stained drawing-board
resting on her knees. She had a large, self-willed mouth and dark
Bohemian hair, and wore a dreary cotton kimono over a silk petticoat
whose past had been lurid. One hand clutched gingerly a bottle of
India ink, the other wielded a scratchy steel drafting-pen.

Interrupted, she looked up with a start that all but spilled the ink
and cried in a voice heavily coloured with the enervating brogue of
the Southern born:

"My land, Sally! _What_ time is it?"

In the act of unpinning her hat (a straw that even a drowning woman
would have hesitated to grasp at) Miss Manvers paused to consult an
invalid alarm-clock which was suffering palpitations on an
adjacent shelf.

"Twenty past three," she reported, sententious.

The artist cocked her head, squinted malevolently at her drawing,
dipped, and busily scratched once more.

"Scared me," she explained: "coming home so early!"

Sally removed her collar with a wrench and a grunt: "Got a date?"

"Sure; with Sammy--four o'clock."

"Salamander stuff, eh?"

"What do you want--a day like this? I'm half-cooked already, and I
guess I can go through a little fire for the sake of a sixty-cent
_table d' hôte_ and a trip to Coney. But you needn't worry; it'll be
hotter than this before Sammy warms up enough to singe anything. His
intentions are so praiseworthy they pain him; he blushes every time he
has to recognise the sex question long enough to discuss the delights
of monogamy in a two-family house within commuting distance of
Prospect Park South."

"You don't mean to say you've got that far along--already!"

"That's the reward of a year's steady angling, honey."

"Heavens, but how you must carry on with Sammy!"

"Believe me, it's something scandalous," sighed Lucy Spode.

"But why--" Sally began in a tone of expostulation.

The other quickened with a flash of temper. "Don't ask me! I came
No'th to study art and mingle with the world of intellect and fashion,
and after three years I'm drawing heads for fashion magazines at a
dollar per, and I know a minor poet who's acquainted with the
assistant editor of _The Scrap-Book_, and the one man I know who owns
a dress-suit gets fifty cents an hour for posing in it. If that isn't
enough to make me welcome even the prospect of married life with Sammy
Myerick and a woman to do the washing, I don't know--"

"Well, if you aren't crazy about Sammy, why not chuck him? Marriage
isn't the last resource for a girl like you. You've got just as many
wits to live on as the next one. This town's full of young women no
better-looking than either of us, and with even less intelligence, who
manage pretty comfortably, thank you, on the living the world owes
them."

"Sally Manvers!" cried the Southern girl, scandalised, "what a way to
talk!"

"Oh, _all_ right," said the other indifferently. "Where's Mary
Warden?"

"Lyric Hall-rehearsing."

"Lucky Mary!"

Lucy Spode looked up in astonishment. "Lucky!" she protested; "dancing
till she's ready to drop, in this awful heat, and no pay for
rehearsals!"

"All the same," Sally contended, "she's got some chance, some right to
hope for better things. She's an understudy, and her principal might
fall ill--or something. That's better than marrying a man you don't
care for--or clerking at Huckster's for seven dollars a week."

"Cat," said Miss Spode dispassionately. "Who's been mussing your fur?"

"Life."

The steel pen was poised again while Lucy Spode surveyed Sally Manvers
suspiciously.

"What do you mean--life?" she demanded.

"This sort of thing." Sally waved a comprehensive hand. "Living here,
in this hole, and most of the time not even able to pay my share of
the rent; slaving for a dollar a day, and losing part of that in
unjust fines; walking to and from the store to save car fare; eating
the sort of food we do eat; never having pretty clothes or pleasures
of any sort. I don't call this a life!"

"You've got indigestion," Miss Spade diagnosed shrewdly. "I'll bet two
bits you've been eating napoleons again."

"I have got indigestion, but it's thanks only to being fed up
with existence--the kind we lead, at least. I want something better."

"The vote, perhaps?"

"For two cents I'd throw something at you."

The artist uncoiled her legs, stuck the pen in her hair, set the
ink-bottle down on the floor, sighed, and, lifting the drawing-board,
held it at arm's length, studying her work through narrowed eyelids.

"Then it must be a man," she concluded absently. "When a woman of
twenty-seven wants something and doesn't know what it is, it's either
the vote or a man."

"Oh, shut up."

"With man an odds-on favourite in the betting." Miss Spode laid the
board aside with a "Thank goodness, that's finished!" and, rising,
stretched her cramped limbs. "What I'd like to know," she persisted,
"is whether it's man abstract or a man concrete."

Sally laughed bitterly. "Take a good look at me, dear--as an exhibit,
not as a friend--and tell me honestly whether any man worth having
would glance twice at me."

"You can be pretty enough," Miss Spade returned seriously, "when you
want to take the trouble--"

"But I don't--ever."

"The more fool you."

"What's the use--on seven a week? What's the good of being pretty in
rags like these? It only gets a girl in wrong. I don't care how
fetching I might make myself seem--"

"But you ought to."

"Look here; do you know how a reporter would describe me?"

"Of course; 'respectable working girl.'"

"Well, then, men worth while don't run after 'respectable working
girls'; they leave that to things who wear 'Modish Men's
Clothing'--with braided cuffs and pockets slashed on the bias!--and
stand smirking on corners we have to pass going home. Do you think I'd
do my hair becomingly, and--and all that--to attract such creatures?"

"So it's abstract man. Thought so!"

"It's starvation, that's what it is. I'm sick for want of what other
girls get without asking--pretty clothes and--and all that sort of
thing."

"Meaning," the artist interpreted gravely, "love."

"Well," Sally demanded, defiant, "why not?"

"Why not indeed?" Lucy returned obliquely, wandering round the studio
and collecting various articles of wearing-apparel toward her
appearance in public.

"I'm twenty-seven," Miss Manvers declared mutinously. "I'll never be
younger--I want to be loved before I'm old!"

She paused, viewed with reassuring amusement Lucy's countenance of
perplexity, and laughed again.

"I've had ten years of independence; and what has it brought me? The
reward of virtue: that swaybacked couch for my bed, Uneeda biscuit for
my bread, and for salt--tears of envy!"

"Virtue is its own reward," Lucy enunciated severely.

"Virtue is its only reward, you mean!"

"You don't talk fit to eat."

"You know what I mean. Only mental bankrupts go to the devil because
they're hungry. I'm less bothered about keeping body and soul together
--Huckster's seven a week does that after a fashion--than about
keeping soul and mind together."

"It sounds reasonable."

"I'm desperate, I tell you! And there's more than one resort of
desperation for a girl of intelligence."

"As, for instance-"

"Well--you've named one."

"Man?"

"That's the animal's first name."

"But you've just pointed out, a successful campaign demands a
wardrobe."

"Even that can be had if one's unscrupulous enough."

"Whatever do you mean?"

"To seek happiness where I can find it. I'm game for anything. I'm
'north of fifty-three'!"

"You're _what_?"

"Have you forgotten the 'Rhyme of the Three Sealers'? 'There's never a
law of God or man runs north of fifty-three'! Well, the age of
twenty-seven is a woman's fifty-three, north latitude--at least, it is
if she's unmarried--time to jettison scruples, morals, regard for the
conventions, and hoist the black flag of social piracy!"

"In plain language, you think the hour has struck to doll yourself up
like a man-trap. What?"

"Yes--and hang the expense!"

"By all means, hang it. But where? It's a case of cash or credit; the
first you haven't got, and I don't see your visible means of
supporting a charge-account at Altman's."

"There are ways," Sally insisted darkly.

"You can't mean you'd do anything dishonest--"

"I'd do _anything_. Look at all the people in high places who began as
nothing more nor less than adventurers. Nobody's fussing about how
they got their money. It's a sin to be poor nowadays, but the sin of
sins is to stay poor!"

A moment of silence followed this pronouncement; then Miss Spode
observed pensively:

"Something's happened to you to-day, Sally. What is it? You haven't
been--"

"Fired again'? Not exactly. Just laid off indefinitely--that's all.
With good luck I may get my job back next September."

"Oh, but honey!" Lucy exclaimed, crossing to drop a hand on Sally's
shoulder: "I am sorry!"

"Of course you are," Sally returned stonily. "But you needn't be. I'm
not going to let this make things any harder for you and Mary Warden."

"How perfectly mean! You know I wasn't thinking anything like that!"

"Yes, dear, I do know it." In sudden contrition, Sally caught the
other girl's hand and laid her cheek transiently against it. "What I
meant to make clear was"--she faltered momentarily--"I've made up my
mind I'm a Jonah, and the only decent thing for me to do is to quit
you both, Lucy, my dear!"

She ended on a round note of determination rather than of defiance,
and endured calmly, if with a slightly self-conscious smile, the
distressed look of her companion.

"Don't be silly!" this last retorted, pulling herself together. "You
know you're welcome--"

"Of course I do. All the same, I'm not taking any more, thanks."

"But it's only a question of time. If you can't wait for Huckster's to
take you on again, Mary and I can easily keep things going until you
find another job."

"But that wouldn't be fair!"

"What wouldn't be fair?"

"To sponge on you two under false pretences." "False pretences!" Lucy
iterated blankly.

"I was laid off last Saturday. I didn't say anything, but I've been
looking for something else ever since--and this is Wednesday, and I'm
through. I'm sick and tired. I've got just as much right as anybody to
live on society, and that's what I'm going to do from now on!"

Miss Spode lowered a cloth skirt over her head and blouse before
pursuing. "But what I can't understand is how--assuming you're in
earnest--"

"Deadly earnest!" Sally declared.

"--and mean to go through with this--how you think you'll get a start
without doing something downright wrong."

"It wouldn't be fair to tempt me the way I feel to-day."

"There's only one thing," Miss Spode announced, adjusting her hat,
"that prevents me from speaking to a cop about you: I know you're a
fraud. You couldn't do anything dishonourable to save you."

"Oh, couldn't I!" Sally returned ominously. "You wait and see!"

"Well, well," said the other indulgently, "have it your own way.
Hooray for crime! But if I stop here listening to you preach
anarchy I'll be late for Sammy. So I'm off." Pausing in the doorway,
she looked back with just a trace of doubt colouring her regard. "Do
try to brace up and be sensible, honey. I'm worried about leaving you
alone with all these blue devils."

"You needn't be. I can take care of myself--"

"Well, promise to do nothing rash before I come home."

"Promises made for keeps are specifically prohibited by article nine
of the Social Pirate's Letters of Marque. But I don't mind telling you
the chances are you'll find me on the roof when you get back, unless
this heat lets up. I'm going up now; this place is simply
suffocating!"

But her smile grew dim as she resigned herself to an evening whose
loneliness promised to be unbroken; that faint flush faded which had
crept into her cheeks in the course of her half-whimsical,
half-serious harangue; she looked once more what life had made her--a
work-worn shop-girl, of lack-lustre charm, on the verge of prematurely
middle-aged, hopeless spinsterhood.

Another six months of this life would break her, body and spirit,
beyond repair.

Her eyes, that ranged the confines of those mean quarters, darkened
quickly with their expression of jaded discontent.

Another six months? She felt as if she could not suffer another six
hours. . . .

After a time she rose and moved languidly out into the hall, from
which an iron ladder led up through a scuttle to the roof, the refuge
and retreat of the studio's tenants on those breathless, interminable
summer nights when their quarters were unendurably stuffy. Here they
were free to lounge at ease, _en déshabillé_; neither the dressmaker
nor the teacher of voice-production ever troubled their privacy, and
seldom did other figures appear on any of the roofs which ran to the
Park Avenue corner on an exact plane broken only by low dividing walls
and chimney-stacks.

Three chairs of the steamer type, all maimed, comprised the furniture
of this roof-garden, with (by way of local colour) on one of the
copings a row of four red clay flower-pots filled with sun-baked dust
from which gnarled and rusty stalks thrust themselves up like withered
elfin limbs.

Selecting the soundest chair, Sally dragged it into the shadow cast by
the hood of the studio top-light, and settling down with her feet on
the adjacent coping, closed her eyes and sought to relax from her
temper of high, almost hysterical nervous tension.

Thoughts bred of her talk with Lucy for a time distracted her,
blending into incoherent essays at imaginative adventures staged in
the homes and parks of the wealthy, as pictured by the sycophantic
fashion magazine and cast with the people of its gallery of
photographs--sublimely smart women in frocks of marvellous
inspiration, and polo-playing, motor-driving, clothes-mad men of an
insouciance appalling.

On the edge of unconsciousness she said aloud, but without knowing
that she spoke, three words.

These were: "Charmeuse . . . Paquin . . . Bride . . ."

And then she slept; her pallid face upturned to that high-arched sky
of brass, from which light and heat beat down in brutal waves, she
slept the sleep of exhaustion, deep and heavy; dark and stupefying
sleep possessed her utterly, as overpowering and obliterating as
though induced by drugs.



CHAPTER II

BURGLARY



She wakened in sharp panic, bewildered by the grotesquerie of some
half-remembered dream in contrast with the harshness of inclement
fact, drowsily realising that since she had fallen asleep it had come
on to rain smartly out of a shrouded sky.

Without the least warning a blinding violet glare cut the gloom, the
atmosphere quaked with a terrific shock of thunder, and the downpour
became heavier.

Appalled, the girl sprang from her chair and groped her way to the
scuttle through a crepuscle resembling late twilight.

It was closed.

Somebody, presumably the janitor, had shut it against the impending
storm without troubling to make sure there was no one on the roof, for
her chair had been invisible behind the shoulder of the top-light.

With a cry of dismay the girl knelt and, digging fingers beneath the
cover, tugged with all her might. But it was securely hooked
beneath and held fast.

Then, driven half frantic less by the lashing rain than by a dread of
lightning which she had never outgrown, she stumbled back to the glass
face of the top-light and pounded it with her fists, screaming to Mary
Warden to come and let her in. But no lights showed in the studio, and
no one answered; reluctantly she was persuaded that Mary was not yet
home from rehearsals.

The long rolling, grinding broadsides of thunder made almost
continuous accompaniment--broken only by the briefest
intermissions--to the fiery sword-play that slashed incessantly
through and through that grim tilt of swollen black cloud.

Half-stunned and wholly terrified, dazzled and deafened as well, the
girl dashed the rain from her eyes and strove to recollect her wits
and grapple sanely with her plight.

Already she was wet to her skin--water could no more harm her--but the
mad elemental tumult confounded all her senses; her sole conscious
impulse was to gain shelter of some sort from the sound and fury of
the tempest.

It was a bare chance that a scuttle on some one of the adjacent roofs
might be, at least, not fastened down.

Fighting the buffeting wind, the scourging rain, and her panic
fright, she gained the scuttle of the roof to the west, but found it
immovable.

She tried the next roof, with no better fortune.

Panting, even sobbing a little in her terror, she scrambled on through
a sort of nightmarish progress to the next roof, and on and on to the
next and the next.

She kept on reckoning, and couldn't have said how many roofs she had
crossed, when at length she discovered a scuttle that was actually
ajar, propped wide to the pounding flood; and without pause to wonder
at this circumstance, or what might be her reception and how to
account for herself, she swung down into that hospitable black hole,
found footing on the ladder, let herself farther down--and by
mischance dislodged the iron arm supporting the cover.

It fell with a bang and a click, and Sally barely escaped crushed
fingers by releasing the rim and tumbling incontinently to the floor.

Happily she hadn't far to fall, wasn't hurt, and hastily picking
herself up, stood half-dazed, listening for sounds of alarm within the
house.

Coincidently the storm sounded a crisis in a series of tremendous,
shattering crashes, so heavy and so prolonged that all the world
seemed to rock and vibrate, echoing the uproar like a gigantic
sounding-board.

This passed; but from the body of the house Sally heard nothing--only
the crepitation of rain on the roof and the sibilant splatter of drops
trickling from her saturated skirts into the puddle that had formed
beneath the scuttle.

She stood in what at first seemed unrelieved darkness--but for
glimpses revealed by the incessant slash and flare of lightning--at
one end of a short hallway, by the rail of a staircase well. Three or
four doors opened upon this hall; but she detected no sign of any
movement in the shadows, and still heard no sound.

Wondering--and now, as she began to appreciate her position, almost as
unhappy in her refuge as she had been in the storm--Sally crept to the
rail and peered down. But her straining senses detected nothing below
more than shadows, solitude, and silence; which, however, failed to
convey reassurance; the fact of the open scuttle would seem to
indicate that she hadn't stumbled into an uninhabited house.

Stealthily she proceeded to investigate the several rooms of that
topmost story--servants' quarters, comfortably furnished, but
tenantless.

Then step by timid step she descended to the next floor, which she
found devoted to three handsomely appointed bedchambers, also empty.
And slowly, as her courage served, another flight took her down to a
story given over wholly to two bedchambers with baths, dressing-rooms
and boudoirs adjoining, all very luxurious to a hasty survey.

Below this again was an entrance hall, giving access to a
drawing-room, a library, and, at the back of the house, a dining-room,
each apartment in its way deepening the impression of a home toward
whose making wealth and good taste had worked in rarely harmonious
collaboration.

And finally the basement proved to be as deserted as any room above;
this though the kitchen clock still ticked on stertorously, though the
fire in the range had been banked rather than drawn, though one had
but to touch the boiler to learn it still held water piping-hot.

It required, however, only a moment's sober thought, once satisfied
she was alone, to suggest as one reasonable solution to the puzzle
that the owners had fled town for the week-end, leaving the
establishment in care of untrustworthy servants, who had promptly
elected to seek their own pleasure elsewhere.

Content with this theory, Sally chose one of the windows of the
servants' dining-room from which to spy out stealthily, between the
shade and the sill, over a flooded area and street; first remarking a
sensible modification of the gloom in spite of an unabated downpour,
then that the house was near the Park Avenue corner, finally a
policeman sheltered in the tradesman's entrance of the dwelling
across the way.

At this last disquieting discovery Sally retreated expeditiously from
the window, for the first time realising that her presence in that
house, however adventitious and innocent, wouldn't be easy to explain
to one of a policeman's incredulous idiosyncrasy; the legal definition
of burglar, strictly applied, fitted Sarah Manvers with disconcerting
neatness.

But nobody knew; it was only half past six by the clock in the
kitchen; it was reasonably improbable that the faithless servants
would come back much before midnight; and she need only wait for the
storm to pass to return across the roofs, or, for that matter, to
leave circumspectly by the front door. For it would certainly be dark
by the time the storm uttered its last surly growl and trailed its
bedraggled skirts off across Long Island.

For an instant finely thrilled with a delicious sense of the wild
adventure of being alone in a strange house, free to range and pry at
will, she found the full piquancy a bit difficult to relish with
sodden clothing clinging clammily to her body and limbs.

None the less it was quite without definite design that Sally retraced
her way to that suite of rooms in the second story which seemed to be
the quarters of the mistress of the establishment; and it was no
more than common-sense precaution (prompted, it's true, by sheer, idle
curiosity) which moved her to darken windows already shuttered by
drawing their draperies of heavy, rose-coloured silk before switching
on the lights.

It may have been merely the reflection of rose-tinted walls that lent
the face of the girl unwonted colour, but the glow that informed her
eyes as she looked about was unquestionably kindled by envy as much as
by excitement.

Nothing, indeed, lacked to excite envy in that hungry heart of hers.
The bedchamber and its boudoir and bath were not only exquisitely
appointed, but stood prepared for use at a moment's notice; the bed
itself was beautifully dressed; the dressing-table was decked with all
manner of scent-bottles, mirrors, and trays, together with every
conceivable toilet implement in tortoise-shell with a silver-inlay
monogram--apparently A-M-S; the rugs were silken, princely, priceless;
elusive wraiths of seductive perfumes haunted the air like memories of
lost caresses.

And when the girl pursued her investigations to the point of opening
closed doors she found clothes-presses containing a wardrobe to cope
with every imaginable emergency--frocks of silk, of lace, of satin, of
linen; gowns for dinner, the theatre, the street, the opera;
boudoir-robes and negligees without end; wraps innumerable, hats,
shoes, slippers, mules--and a treasure of lingerie to ravish any
woman's heart.

And against all this sybaritic store the intruder had to set the
figure mirrored by a great cheval-glass--the counterfeit of a jaded
shop-girl in shabby, shapeless, sodden garments, her damp, dark hair
framing stringily a pinched and haggard face with wistful, care-worn
eyes.

Her heart ached with a reawakened sense of the cruel unfairness of
life. Her flesh crept with the touch of her rain-soaked clothing. And
in her thoughts temptation stirred like a whispering serpent.

Beyond dispute it was wrong, what she contemplated, utterly wrong, and
wild to madness; but the girl was ripe for such temptation and frail
with a weakness due to long years of deprivation. Full half of her
heart's desire was here, free to her covetous fingers, a queen's
trousseau of beautiful belongings.

"It's only for an hour. No one need ever know. I'll leave everything
just as I found it. And I'm so uncomfortable!"

She hesitated a moment longer, but only a moment; of a sudden
smouldering embers of jealousy and desire broke into devastating
flame, consuming doubts and scruples in a trice. Swift action ensued;
this was no more an affair of conscience, but of persuasion and
resistless impulse. She flew about like one possessed--as, indeed, she
was, no less.

Her first move was to turn on hot water in the shining porcelain tub.
Then, instinctively closing and locking the hall door, she slipped
from her despised garments and, hanging them up to dry in a tiled
corner where their dampness could harm, nothing, slipped into the
bath. . . .

Half an hour later, deliciously caressed by garments of soft white
silk beneath a feather-weight _robe-de-chambre_, she sat before the
dressing-table, drying her hair in the warm draft of an electric fan
and anointing face, hands, and arms with creams and delicately scented
lotions.

A faint smile touched lips now guiltless of any hint of sullenness;
she hummed softly to herself, whose heart had almost forgotten its
birthright of song and laughter; never the least pang of conscience
flawed the serene surface of her content.

Properly dressed, her hair was beautiful, soft, fine and plentiful,
with a natural wave that lent an accent to its brownish lustre. When
she finished arranging it to her complete satisfaction she hardly knew
the face that smiled back at her from the mirror's depths.
Miraculously it seemed to have gained new lines of charm; its very
thinness was now attractive, its colour unquestionably intrinsic; and
her eyes were as the eyes of a happy child, exulting in the
attainment of long-coveted possessions.

It wasn't in human nature to contemplate this transformation and feel
contrition for whatever steps had been necessary to bring it about.

And when she could do no more to beautify her person Sally turned
again to the clothes-press, by now so far gone in self-indulgence, her
moral sense so insidiously sapped by the sheer sensual delight she had
of all this pilfered luxury, that she could contemplate without a
qualm less venial experiments with the law of _meum et tuum_.

She entertained, in short, a project whose lawless daring enchanted
her imagination, if one as yet of vague detail. But with command of
the resources of this wonderful wardrobe, what was to prevent her from
appropriating a suitable costume and stealing forth, when the storm
had passed, to seek adventure, perhaps to taste for a night those joys
she had read about and dreamed about, longed for and coveted, all her
life long? Nothing could be more mad; there was no telling what might
not happen; there was every warrant for believing that the outcome
might be most unpleasant. But adventures are to the adventurous; and
surely this one had started off propitiously enough!

"And what I need she'll never miss. Besides, I can send back
everything in the morning, anonymously, by parcel-post. It's only
borrowing."

Already she had passed from contemplation to purpose and stood
committed to the enterprise, reckless of its consequence.

But she found it far from easy to make her selection; it wouldn't do
to fare forth _en décolletée_ without an escort--a consideration that
sadly complicated the search for just the right thing, at once simple
and extravagant, modish and becoming. Moreover, any number of
captivating garments positively demanded to be tried on, then clung
tenaciously to her pretty shoulders, refusing to be rejected.

She wasted many a sigh over her choice, which was ultimately something
darkish, a frock (I think) of dark-blue _crépe-de-chine_, designed
primarily for afternoon wear, but, supplemented by a light silk wrap,
quite presentable for evening; and it fitted to admiration.

This question once settled, she experienced little trouble finding
slippers and a hat to her taste.

The testimony of a small gilt clock startled her when at length she
stood ready for the next step in her nefarious career: the hour-hand
was passing ten. That seemed almost incredible.

Running into the unlighted boudoir, she caught back the
window-draperies, raised the sash, and peered cautiously out through
the slanted slats of the wooden blinds.

The sky that now shone down upon the city was a fair shield of stars
unblurred by cloud; the storm had passed without her knowledge.

Closing the window, Sally delayed for one last, rapturous survey of
herself in the cheval-glass, then put out the lights and went to the
door.

She hardly knew why it was that she opened it so gently and waited so
long upon the threshold, every nerve tensed to detect alien sound in
the stillness of the empty house. But it was as if with darkness those
vacant rooms and passages had become populous with strange, hostile
spirits. She heard nothing whatever, yet it was with an effect of
peril strong upon her senses that she stole forth through the hallway
and up the stairs to the topmost floor, where, perched precariously
upon the iron ladder, she tried her patience sorely with a stubborn
scuttle-cover before recalling the click that had accompanied its
closing--the click of a spring-latch.

And this last, when gropingly located, proved equally obdurate; she
fumbled doggedly until back and limbs ached with the strain of her
position; but her fingers lacked cunning to solve the secret; and in
the end, when on the point of climbing down to fetch matches, she
heard a sound that chilled her heart and checked her breath in a
twinkling--an odd, scuffling noise on the roof.

At first remote and confused, it drew nearer and grew more
clear--a sound of light footfalls on the sheet-tin.

Her self-confidence and satisfaction measurably dashed, she climbed
down, so fearful of betraying herself to the person on the roof that
she went to the absurd extreme of gathering her skirts up tightly to
still their silken murmur.

Now she must leave by the street. And now she remembered the policeman
who kept nightly vigil at the avenue crossing!

She was beginning to be definitely frightened, vividly picturing to
herself the punishment that must follow detection.

And as she crept down-stairs, guided only by the banister-rail, the
sense of her loneliness and helplessness there in that strange, dark
place worked upon the temper of the girl until her plight, however
real, was exaggerated hideously and endued with terrors so frightful
that she was ready to scream at the least alarm.



CHAPTER III

ACCESSARY AFTER THE FACT

At the foot of the stairs Sally paused in the entry-hall, thoughtfully
considering the front door, the pale rectangle of whose plate-glass
was stenciled black with the pattern of a lace panel. But she decided
against risking that avenue of escape; it would be far less foolhardy
to steal away _via_ the basement, unostentatiously, that the
always-possible passer-by might more readily take her for a servant.

Turning back, then, toward the basement staircase, she began to grope
her way through blinding darkness, but had taken only a few uncertain
steps when, of a sudden, she stopped short and for a little stood like
a stricken thing, quite motionless save that she quaked to her very
marrow in the grasp of a great and enervating fear.

If she could not have said what precisely it was that she feared, her
fright was no less desperately real. She could see nothing; she had
heard no sound; her hands had touched nothing more startling than
the banister-rail, and yet . . .

It was as if sensitive filaments of perceptions even finer than sight,
touch, and hearing had found and recoiled from something strange and
terrible skulking there, masked by the encompassing murk.

Probably less than twenty seconds elapsed, but it seemed a long minute
before her heart stirred anew, leaping into action with a quickened
beat, and she was able to reassert command of her reason and--
reassured, persuaded her fright lacked any real foundation--move on.

Five paces more brought her to the elbow of the rail; here, in the
very act of turning to follow it down to the basement, she halted
involuntarily, again transfixed with terror.

But this time her alarm had visible excuse; that there was something
wrong in that strange house, so strangely deserted, was evident beyond
dispute.

She stood facing the dining-room door, the door to the library on her
left; if not in any way evident to her senses, she could fix its
position only approximately by an effort of memory. But through the
former opening her vision, ranging at random, instinctively seeking
relief from the oppression of blank darkness, detected a slender beam
of artificial light no thicker than a lead-pencil--a golden blade that
lanced the obscurity, gleaming dull upon a rug, more bright on
naked parquetry, vivid athwart the dust-cloth shrouding the
dining-table.

For a moment or two the girl lingered, unstirring, fascinated by that
slender, swerveless ray; then, slowly, holding her breath, urged
against her will by importunate curiosity, she crossed the threshold
of the dining-room, following the light back to its source--a narrow
crack in the folding doors communicating with the library.

Now Sally remembered clearly that the folding doors had been wide open
at the time of her first tour of investigation; as, indeed, had the
door between the library and hall--now tight shut, else this light
would have been perceptible in the hall as well.

It was undeniable, then, that since she had closeted herself up-stairs
another person had entered the house--some one who had shut himself up
there in the library for a purpose apparently as clandestine as her
own. Or why such pains to mask the light, and why such care not to
disturb the silence of the house?

To have gone on and made good an escape without trying to read this
riddle would have been hardly human of the girl, for all her
misgivings; she stole on to the folding doors with less noise than a
mouse had made and put an eye to the crack, which, proving somewhat
wider than she had imagined, afforded a fair view of the best
part of the other room.

An electric chandelier was on full-blaze above the broad and heavy
centre-table of mahogany, beyond which, against the farther wall,
stood on the one hand a bookcase, on the other a desk of the roll-top
type--closed. Above each of these the wall was decorated with trophies
of ancient armour; between them hung a huge canvas in a massive gilt
frame--the portrait of a beautiful woman beautifully painted. And
immediately beneath the portrait stood a young man, posed in profound
abstraction, staring at the desk.

He rested lightly against the table, his back square to Sally's view,
revealing a well-turned head thatched with dark hair, clipped snugly
by well-formed ears, and the salient line of one lean, brown cheek.
But even so, with his countenance hidden, something conveyed a strong
impression to the girl of a perplexed and disconcerted humour.

She was frankly disappointed. For some reason she had thought to
discover a burglar of one or another accepted type--either a dashing
cracksman in full-blown evening dress, lithe, polished, pantherish, or
a common yegg, a red-eyed, unshaven burly brute in the rags and
tatters of a tramp. But this man wore unromantic blue serge upon a
person neither fascinating nor repellent. She could hardly
imagine him either stealing a diamond tiara or hopping a freight.

But that he was of a truly criminal disposition she was not permitted
long to doubt; for in another moment he started from his pensive pose
with the animation of one inspired, strode alertly to the wall,
stepped up on the seat of a chair beside the desk, and straining on
tiptoes (though tolerably tall) contrived to grasp the handle of a
short-bladed Roman sword which formed part of one of the trophies.

With some difficulty and, in the end, a grunt of satisfaction, he
worked the weapon loose and, jumping down, turned to the desk, thrust
the point of the sword between the writing-pad and the edge of the
roll-top, forced the blade well in, and bore all his weight upon the
haft of this improvised jimmy. Promptly, with a sound of rending wood,
the top flew half-way up.

At this the man released the sword, which fell with a thump to the rug
at his feet, pushed the top as far back as it would go, and, bending
over the desk, explored its rack of pigeonholes and drawers. One of
the latter eventually yielded the object of his search; he took from
it first a small automatic pistol, which he placed carelessly to one
side, then a small leather-bound book whose pages he thumbed in
nervous haste, evidently seeking some memorandum essential to his
ends. This found, he paused, conned it attentively for an
instant, then turned and took the book with him across the room beyond
the bookcase, thus vanishing from the field of Sally's vision.

Now was her chance to slip down-stairs and, undetected, away. But,
surprisingly enough, she proved of two minds about advantaging herself
of the opportunity. To begin with, she was no more afraid--at least,
not to any great extent. What, she argued scornfully, was one man,
after all?--especially one who had no more lawful business than she
upon those premises! She wasn't afraid of men; and even were this one
to catch her watching him (something Sally meant to take good care he
shouldn't) he could hardly denounce her to the police. Besides, what
_was_ he up to, anyhow, over there in that corner, out of sight? She
simply had to know the meaning of those noises he was making.

They were difficult to diagnose--an odd whirring sound broken by
repeated muffled clanks and by several others as baffling, notably a
muted metallic knocking and rattling.

She experienced an exasperating effect of trying to see round a
corner.

But in the end she identified those sounds beyond mistake: the man was
fretting the combination of a safe, pausing now and again to try the
handle. For what, indeed, had he forced that desk if not to find
the combination?

In due course the noises ceased and the malefactor re-appeared,
bringing with him a morocco-bound box of good size. She made no doubt
whatever that this was a jewel-case, and took his smile for
confirmation of her surmise, though it was really less a smile than
satisfaction twitching the full lips beneath his dark little moustache
(one of those modishly flat affairs so widely advertised by
collarmakers).

For now the miscreant was facing Sally as he bent over the table and
fumbled with the lock of the jewel-case, and she made good use of this
chance to memorise a countenance of mildly sardonic cast, not
unhandsome--the face of a conventional modern voluptuary,
self-conscious, self-satisfied, selfish--rather attractive withal in
the eyes of an excited young woman.

But a moment later, finding the case to be fast-locked, the burglar
gave utterance to an exclamation that very nearly cost him his appeal
to her admiration. She couldn't hear distinctly, for the impatient
monosyllable was breathed rather than spoken, but at that distance it
sounded damnably like "_Pshaw!_"

And immediately the man turned back to the desk to renew his
rummaging--in search of a key to fit the case, she guessed. But his
business there was surprisingly abbreviated--interrupted in a
fashion certainly as startling to him as to her who skulked and spied
on the dark side of the folding doors.

Neither received the least intimation that the door from the library
to the hall had been opened. Sally, for one, remained firmly persuaded
that they two were alone in the silent house until the instant when
she saw a second man hurl himself upon the back of the first--a
swift-moving shape of darkness, something almost feline in his grim,
violent fury that afforded the victim no time either to turn or to
lift a hand in self-defence. In a twinkling the two went headlong to
the floor and disappeared, screened by the broad top of the table.

There, presumably, Blue Serge recovered sufficiently from the shock of
surprise to make some show of fighting back. Confused sounds of
scuffling and hard breathing became audible, with a thump or two
deadened by the rug; but more than that, nothing--never a word from
either combatant. There was something uncanny in the silence of it
all.

For an instant Sally remained where she was, rooted in fright and
wonder; but the next, and without in the least understanding how she
had come there, she found herself by the open door in the entry-hall,
just beyond the threshold of the library, commanding an unobstructed
view of the conflict.

Apparently this neared its culmination. Though he had gone down
face forward, Blue Serge had contrived to turn over on his back, in
which position he now lay, still struggling, but helpless, beneath the
bulk of his assailant--a burly, blackavised scoundrel who straddled
the chest of his prey, a knee pinning down either arm, both hands busy
with efforts to make an unappetising bandana serve as a gag.

Pardonably rewarded for this inconsiderate treatment, the fat one
suddenly snatched one hand away, conveyed a bitten finger to his
mouth, instantly spat it out together with a gust of masterful
profanity and, the other taking advantage of the opportunity to renew
his struggles, shifted his grip to Blue Serge's throat and, bending
forward, strove with purpose undoubtedly murderous to get possession
of the short Roman sword.

It lay just an inch beyond his reach. He strained his utmost toward
it, almost touched its haft with eager finger-tips.

At this a strange thing happened--strangest of all to Sally. For she,
who never in her life had touched firearm or viewed scene of violence
more desperate than a schoolboy squabble, discovered herself inside
the library, standing beside the desk and levelling at the head of the
heavy villain the automatic pistol that had rested there.

Simultaneously she was aware of the sound of her own voice, its
accents perhaps a bit shaky, but none the less sharp, crying: "Stop!
Don't you dare! Drop that sword and put up your hands! I say, put up
your hands!"

The stout assassin started back and turned up to the amazing
apparition of her a ludicrous mask of astonishment, eyes agoggle,
mouth agape, pendulous beard-rusty chin aquiver like some unsavoury
sort of jelly. Then slowly--thanks to something convincing in the
manner of this young woman, aflame as she was with indignant
championship of the under dog--he elevated two grimy hands to a point
of conspicuous futility; and a husky whisper; like a stifled roar,
rustled past his lips:

"Well, can yuh beat it?"

A thrill of self-confidence galvanised the person of Miss Manvers,
steadying at once her hand and her voice.

"Get up!" she snapped. "No--keep your hands in sight. Get up somehow,
and be quick about it!"

Without visible reluctance, if with some difficulty, like a clumsy
automaton animated by unwilling springs, the fat scoundrel lurched
awkwardly to his feet and paused.

"Very good." She was surprised at the cold, level menace of her tone.
"Now stand back--to the wall! Quick!"

She was abruptly interrupted by a vast, discordant bellow: "Look out,
lady! Look out! That gun might go off!"

And as if hoping by that sudden and deafening roar to startle her off
guard, the man started toward her, but pulled up as quickly, dashed
and sullen. For she did not flinch an inch.

"That's your lookout!" she retorted incisively. "If you're afraid of
it--stand back and keep your hands up!"

With a flicker of a sheepish grin the rogue obeyed, falling back until
his shoulders touched the wall and keeping his hands level with his
ears.

Still holding the pistol ready, the girl shifted her glance to Blue
Serge.

He had already picked himself up, and now stood surveying his ally
with a regard which wavered between amaze and admiration, suspicion
and surprise. Meanwhile he felt gingerly of his throat, as if it were
still sore, and nervously endeavoured to readjust a collar which had
broken from its moorings. Catching her inquiring eye, he bowed
jerkily.

"Thanks!" he panted. "I--ah--good of you, I'm sure--"

She checked him coolly. "Take your time--plenty of it, you know--get
your breath and pull yourself together."

He laughed uncertainly. "Ah--thanks again. Just a minute.
I'm--ah--as dumfounded as grateful, you know."

She nodded with a curtness due to disillusionment; the man was
palpably frightened; and, whatever his excuse, a timid Raffles was a
sorry object in her esteem at that instant. She had anticipated of
him--she hardly knew what--something brilliant, bold, and dashing,
something as romantic as one has every right to expect of a hero of
romantic fiction. But this one stood panting, trembling, "sparring for
wind," for all the world like any commonplace person fresh from rough
handling!

It was most disappointing, so much so that she conceded grudgingly the
testimony of her senses to the rapidity with which he regained his
normal poise and command of resource; for one evidence of which last
she noted that he backed up to the centre-table with a casual air, as
if needing its support, and with a deft, certain, swift gesture
slipped the jewel-case into his coatpocket. And she noted, too, a
flash of anxiety in his eyes, as if he were wondering whether she had
noticed.

At this she lost patience. "Well?" she said briskly. "If you've had
time to think--"

"To be sure," Blue Serge returned easily. "You mean, about this
gentleman? If you ask me, I think he'd be far less potentially
mischievous facing the wall."

"All right," Sally agreed, and added with a fine flourish of the
pistol: "Face about, you!"

With flattering docility the fat rascal faced about. "And now," Blue
Serge suggested, "by your leave--"

Drawing near the girl, he held out his hand for the pistol, and to her
own surprise she surrendered it without demur, suddenly conscious that
he was no more afraid, that he was rapidly assuming comprehensive
command of the situation beyond her to gainsay, and that he knew, and
knew that she knew he knew, that she had never entertained any real
intention of pulling the trigger, however desperate the emergency.

And incontinently, as though he had taken away all her courage,
together with that nickel-plated symbol, she started back, almost
cringing in a panic of sadly jangled nerves.

Happily for her conceit, once he had disarmed her, Blue Serge
transferred his interest exclusively to his late assailant.

Calmly showing the girl his back, he stepped over, poked the pistol's
nose significantly into the folds of the ruffian's neck, and with a
sharp word of warning slapped smartly his two hips; in consequence of
which singular performance he thrust a hand beneath the tail of the
fellow's coat and brought away a bull-dog revolver of heavy calibre.

And then he stepped back, smiling, with a sidelong glance of triumph
for Sally's benefit--a glance that spent itself on emptiness.

For Sally was no more there; her uninstructed fingers were already
fumbling with the fastenings of the front door when Blue Serge
discovered her defection.



CHAPTER IV

BLACKMAIL

There was a breathless instant while the combination of knobs, bolts,
and locks defied her importunity so obstinately that Sally was tempted
to despair.

She dared not look behind her; but momentarily, as she groped,
fumbled, and trembled at the front door, she was aware that a man had
backed out of the library into the hall and paused there in the gush
of light, staring after her.

And when the door suddenly yielded she heard--or fancied that she
heard--his voice, its accent peremptory: "Stop!" Or perhaps it was:
"Wait!"

She did neither; the door slammed behind her with a crash that
threatened its glass; she was at the foot of the front steps before
that sound had fairly registered on her consciousness; and her
panic-winged heels had carried the young woman well round the corner
and into Park Avenue before she appreciated how interesting her
tempestuous flight from that rather thoroughly burglarised mansion
would be apt to seem to a peg-post policeman. And then she pulled
up short, as if reckoning to divert suspicion with a semblance of
nonchalance--now that she had escaped.

But a covert glance aside brought prompt reassurance; after all, the
gods were not unkind; the policeman was just then busy on the far side
of the avenue, hectoring humility into the heart of an unhappy taxicab
operator who had, presumably, violated some minor municipal ordinance.


Inconsistently enough--so strong is the habit of a law-abiding
mind--the sight of that broad, belted, self-sufficient back, symbolic
of the power and sanity of the law, affected Sally with a mad impulse
to turn, hail the officer, and inform him of the conditions she had
just quitted. And she actually swerved aside, as if to cross the
avenue, before she realised how difficult it would be to invoke the
law without implicating herself most damningly.

Recognition of that truth was like receiving a dash of ice-water in
her face; she gasped, cringed, and scurried on up Park Avenue as if
hoping to outdistance thought. A forlorn hope, that: refreshed from
its long rest (for since the storm she had been little better than the
puppet of emotions, appetites, and inarticulate impulses) her mind had
resumed its normal functioning.

Inexorably it analysed her plight and proved that what she had
conceived in an hour of discontent and executed on the spur of an
envious instant could nevermore be undone. What had been planned to be
mere temporary appropriation of an outfit of clothing--"to be returned
in good order, reasonable wear and tear excepted"--was one thing;
safe-breaking, with the theft of Heaven only knew what treasure, was
quite another. As to that, had she not been guilty of active
complicity in the greater crime? How could she be sure (come to think
of it) that the stout man had not been the lawful caretaker rather
than a rival housebreaker?

She had indeed commenced adventures with a vengeance!

The police were bound to learn of the affair all too soon; her part in
it was as certain to become known; too late she was reminded that the
name "Manvers" indelibly identified every garment abandoned in the
bath-room. Before morning certainly, before midnight probably, Sarah
Manvers would be the quarry of a clamorous hue-and-cry.

Appalled, she hurried on aimlessly, now and again breaking into
desperate little jog-trots, with many a furtive glance over shoulder,
with as many questing roundabout for refuge or resource.

But the city of that night wore a visage new and strange to her, and
terrifying. The very quietness of those few residential blocks,
marooned amid ever-rising tides of trade, had an ominous accent.
All the houses seemed to have drawn together, cheek by jowl, in secret
conference on her case, sloughing their disdainful daytime pose and
following her fugitive, guilty figure with open amusement and
contempt. Some (she thought) leered horribly at her, others scowled,
others again assumed a scornful cast; one and all pretended to a
hideous intelligence, as though they knew and, if they would, could
say what and why she fled.

It was as if the storm had been a supernatural visitation upon the
city, robbing it of every intimate, homely aspect, leaving it
inhumanly distorted in an obsession of abominable enchantment.

With the start of one suddenly delivered from dream-haunted sleep, she
found herself arrived at Forty-Second Street, and safe; none pursued
her, nothing in her manner proclaimed the new-fledged malefactor; she
need only observe ordinary circumspection to escape notice altogether.
And for several moments she remained at a complete standstill there on
the corner, blocking the fairway of foot traffic and blindly surveying
the splendid facade of Grand Central Station, spellbound in wonder at
the amazing discovery that Providence did not always visit incontinent
retribution upon the heads of sinners--since it appeared that she who
had sinned was to escape scot-free.

With this she was conscious of a flooding spirit of exultant
impenitence; the deadly monotony of her days was done with once and
for all. It mattered little that--since it were suicidal to return to
the studio, the first place the police would search for her--she was
homeless, friendless, penniless; it mattered little that she was
hungry (now that she remembered it) and had not even a change of
clothing for the morrow; these things would somehow be
arranged--whether by luck or by virtue of her wit--they _must!_

All that really mattered was that the commonplace was banished from
her ways, that she was alive, foot-loose and fancy-free, finally and
definitely committed to the career of an adventuress.

Paradoxically, she was appalled by contemplation of her amazing
callousness; outlawed, _declassée_, she was indifferent to her
degradation, and alive only to the joy of freedom from the bondage of
any certain social status.

Now as she lingered on the corner, people were passing her continually
on their way over to the terminal; and one of these presently caught
her attention--a man who, carrying a small oxford hand-bag, came up
hastily from behind, started to cross the street, drew back barely in
time to escape annihilation at the wheels of a flying squadron of
taxicabs, and so for a moment waited, in impatient preoccupation
with his own concerns, only a foot or two in advance but wholly
heedless of the girl.

Sally caught her breath sharply, and her wits seemed to knit together
with a sort of mental click; the man was Blue Serge, identified
unmistakably to her eyes by the poise of his blue-clad person--the
same Blue Serge who owed his life to Sally Manvers!

In another instant the way cleared and the man moved smartly on again,
with every indication of one spurred on by an urgent errand--but went
no more alone. Now a pertinacious shadow dogged him to the farther
sidewalk, into the yawning vestibule of the railway station, on (at a
trot) through its stupendous lobbies, even to the platform gates that
were rudely slammed in his face by implacable destiny in the guise and
livery of a gateman.

At this, pausing a little to one side, Sally watched Blue Serge accost
the guardian, argue, protest, exhibit tickets, and finally endeavour
to bribe a way past the barrier. But the train was already pulling
out; with a shake of his stubborn head the uniformed official moved
on; and ruminating on a power of pent profanity, Blue Serge turned and
strode back into the waiting-room, passing so near to Sally that their
elbows almost touched without his rousing to the least recognition of
her existence.

But that in itself was nothing to dismay or check the girl in her
purpose, and when Blue Serge a minute later addressed himself to
the Pullman bureau she was still his shadow--an all but open
eavesdropper upon his communications with the authority of the
brass-barred wicket.

"I've just missed the eleven ten for Boston," she heard him explain as
he displayed tickets on the marble ledge, "and, of course, I'm out my
berth reservation. Can you give me a lower on the midnight express?"

"No," Authority averred with becoming sententiousness.

"An upper, then?"

"Nothing left an the midnight."

"Not even a stateroom?"

"I told you nothing doing."

"Well, then, perhaps you can fix me up for the Owl train?"

"Wait a minute."

A pause ensued while Authority consulted his records; not a long
pause, but one long enough to permit a wild, mad inspiration to flash
like lightning athwart the clouded horizon of Sally's doubt and
perplexity. Surely it were strangely inconsistent with her role of
adventuress to permit this man to escape, now that destiny had
delivered him into her unscrupulous hands!

"Owl train? De luxe room or ordinary stateroom--all I got left."

"Good enough. I'll take--"

If Blue Serge failed promptly to nominate his choice, it was only
because Miss Manvers chose that juncture to furnish him--and
incidentally herself, when she had time to think things over--with
what was unquestionably for both of them the most staggering surprise
of that most surprising night.

Peremptorily plucking a blue-serge sleeve with the brazenest impudence
imaginable, she advised her victim:

"Take both, if you please!"

Had she schemed deliberately to strike him dumb in consternation, her
success must have afforded Sally intense satisfaction. Since she
hadn't, her personal consternation was momentarily so overpowering as
to numb her sense of appreciation. So that for the period of a long
minute neither of them moved nor spoke; but remained each with a blank
countenance reflecting a witless mind, hypnotised by the stupefaction
of the other.

Then, perhaps a shade the quicker to recover, Sally fancied that her
victim's jaw had slackened a bit and his colour faded perceptibly; and
with this encouragement she became herself again, collected,
aggressive, confronting him undismayed before recognition dawned upon
Blue Serge, and, with it, some amused appreciation of her effrontery.
Even so, his first essay at response was nothing more formidable
than a stammered "I beg your pardon?"

She explained with absolute composure: "I said, take both rooms,
please. I'm going to Boston, too."

"Oh!" he replied stupidly.

She nodded with determination and glanced significantly aside, with a
little toss of her head, toward the middle of the lobby.

"There's a Central Office man over there," she observed obliquely,
dissembling considerable uncertainty as to what a Central Office man
really was, and why.

"There is!"

"If you go to Boston, I go," she persisted stolidly. His countenance
darkened transiently with distrust or temper. Then of a sudden the man
was shaken by a spasm of some strange sort--the corners of his mouth
twitched, his eyes twinkled, he lifted a quizzical eyebrow, his lips
parted.

But whatever retort he may have contemplated was checked by the
accents of Authority and the tapping of an imperative pencil on the
window-ledge.

"Say, I'm busy. Which are you going to take now, de luxe room or--"

"Both!" With the dexterity of a stage conjurer Blue Serge whipped a
bill from his pocket and thrust it beneath the wicket, not for an
instant detaching his gaze from Sally. "And quick," said he; "I'm
in a hurry!"

Grunting resentfully, Authority proceeded to issue the reservations,
thus affording Sally, constrained to return without a tremor the
steadfast regard of her burglar, time to appreciate the lengths to
which bravado had committed her. And though she stood her ground
without flinching, her cheeks had taken on a hue of bright crimson
before Blue Serge, without troubling to verify them, seized tickets
and change and turned squarely to her.

"Now that's settled," he inquired amiably, "what next?"

The better to cover her lack of a ready answer, she made believe to
consult the mellow orb of the four-faced clock that crowns the bureau
of information.

"The Owl train leaves when?" she asked with a finely speculative air.

"One o'clock."

"Then we've got over an hour and a half to wait!"

"How about a bite of supper? The station restaurant is just
down-stairs--"

"Thank you," she agreed with a severe little nod.

Lugging his bag, he led the way with the air of one receiving rather
than conferring a favour.

"Curious how things fall out," he observed cheerfully; "isn't it?"

"Yes--"

"I mean, your popping up like this just when I was thinking of you.
Coincidence, you know."

"Coincidences," Sally informed him consciously, "are caviar only to
book critics. There's nothing more common in real life."

He suffered this instruction with a mildly anguished smile.

"That's true, I presume, if one knows anything about real life. I
don't go in for realistic novels you see, so can't say. But you're
right one way: it isn't anything extraordinary, come to consider it,
that you and I, both headed for Boston, should run into each other
here. By the way," he added with a casual air, "speaking of
coincidences, it sort of triple-plated this one to have your friend
from Central Office hanging round so handy, didn't it? If he's in
sight, why not be a sport and tip me off?"

"I don't see the necessity," Sally returned, biting her lip--"yet."

"Not from your point of view, perhaps--from mine, yes. Forewarned is
fortunate, you know."

"I dare say."

"You won't put me wise?"

"Certainly not."

"Well, of course, one can guess why."

"Can one?"

"Why, forgive me for calling your bluff, it wouldn't be safe,
would it? Of course, I'm a sure-enough bad man--and all that. But you
must be a bird of my feather, or you wouldn't flock together so
spontaneously."

Sally opened her eyes wide and adopted a wondering drawl known to have
been of great service to Miss Lucy Spode: "Why, whatever do you mean?"

"Good!" Blue Serge applauded. "Now I _know_ where I stand. That baby
stare is the high sign of our fraternity--of blackbirds. Only the
guilty ever succeed in looking as transparently innocent. Too bad you
didn't think of that in time."

"I don't follow you," she said truthfully, beginning to feel that she
wasn't figuring to great advantage in this passage of repartee.

"I mean, your give-away is calculated to cramp your style; now you
can't very well cramp mine, threatening to squeal."

"Oh, can't I?"

"No. I know you won't go through with it; not, that is, unless you're
willing to face Sing Sing yourself. For that matter, I don't see how
you're going to make Boston at all to-night, after that break, unless
you go on your own; I don't believe I'm scared enough to stand for
being shaken down for your transportation."

He was gaining the whip-hand much too easily. She averted her face to
mask a growing trepidation and muttered sullenly: "What makes you
think I'm afraid--?"

"Oh, come!" he chuckled. "I know you hadn't any lawful business in
that house, don't I?"

"How do you know it?"

"Because if you had, I would now be going peaceful, with the kind
policeman instead of being a willing victim of a very pleasant form of
blackmail."

Burning with indignation and shivering a bit with fear of the man, she
stopped short, midway down the ramp to the "lower level," and
momentarily contemplated throwing herself upon his mercy and crawling
out of it all with whatever grace she might; but his ironic and
skeptical smile provoked her beyond discretion.

"Oh, very well!" she said ominously, turning, "if that's the way you
feel about it, we may as well have this thing out here and now."

And she made as if to go back the way she had come; but his hand fell
upon her arm with a touch at once light and imperative.

"Steady!" he counselled quietly. "This is no place for either
bickering or barefaced confidences. Besides, you mustn't take things
so much to heart. I was only making fun, and you deserved as much for
your cheek, you know. Otherwise, there's no harm done. If you hanker
to go to Boston, go you shall, and no thanks to me. Even if I do
pay the bill, I owe you a heap more than I'll ever be able to repay,
chances are. So take it easy; and I say, do brace up and make a bluff,
at least, of being on speaking terms. I'm not a bad sort, but I'm
going to stick to you like grim death to a sick nigger's bedside until
we know each other better. That's flat, and you may as well resign
yourself to it. And here we are."

Unwillingly, almost unaware, she had permitted herself to be drawn
through the labyrinth of ramps to the very threshold of the
restaurant, where, before she could devise any effectual means of
reasserting herself, a bland head waiter took them in tow and, at Blue
Serge's direction, allotted them a table well over to one side of the
room, out of earshot of their nearest neighbours.

Temporarily too fagged and flustered to react either to the danger or
to the novelty of this experience, or even to think to any good
purpose, Sally dropped mechanically into the chair held for her,
wondering as much at herself for accepting the situation as at the
masterful creature opposite, earnestly but amiably conferring with the
head waiter over the bill of fare.

Surely a strange sort of criminal, she thought, with his humour and
ready address, his sudden shifts from slang of the street to phrases
chosen with a discriminating taste in English, his cool
indifference to her threatening attitude, and his paradoxical pose of
warm--it seemed--personal interest in and consideration for a complete
and, to say the least, very questionable stranger.

She even went so far as to admit that she might find him very likable,
if only it were not for that affected little moustache and that
semi-occasional trick he practised of looking down his nose when he
talked.

On the other hand, one assumed, all criminals must seem strange types
to the amateur observer. Come to think of it, she had no standard to
measure this man by, and knew no law that prescribed for his kind
either dress clothing with an inverness and a mask of polished
imperturbability, or else a pea-jacket, a pug-nose, a cauliflower ear,
with bow legs and a rolling gait. . . .

"There, I fancy that will do. But hurry it along, please."

"Very good, sir--immediately."

The head waiter ambled off, and Blue Serge faced Sally with an odd,
illegible smile.

"At last!" he hissed in the approved manner of melodrama, "we are
alone!"

She wasn't able to rise to his irresponsible humour. Thus far her
audacity seemed to have earned her nothing but his derision. He was
not in the least afraid of her--and _he_ was a desperate
criminal. Then what was she in his esteem?

Such thoughts drove home a fresh painful realisation of her ambiguous
personal status. It began to seem that she had been perhaps a little
hasty in assuming she was to be spared punishment for her sin, however
venial that might in charity be reckoned. Chance had, indeed, offered
what was apparently a broad and easy avenue of escape; but her own
voluntary folly has chosen the wrong turning.

Her hands were twisted tight together in her lap as she demanded with
tense directness:

"What have you done with them?"

He lifted the ironic eyebrow. "_Them?_"

"The jewels. I saw you steal them--watched you from the dining-room,
through the folding doors--"

"The deuce you did!"

"I saw you break open the desk--and everything."

"Well," he admitted fairly, "I'm jiggered!"

"What have you done with them?"

"Oh, the jewels?" he said with curious intonation. "Ah--yes, to be
sure; the jewels, of course. You're anxious to know what I've done
with them?"

"Oh, no," she countered irritably; "I only ask out of politeness."

"Thoughtful of you!" he laughed. "Why, they're outside, of course--in
my bag."

"Outside?"

"Didn't you notice? I checked it with my hat, rather than have a row.
I ought to be ashamed of myself, I know, but I'm a moral coward before
a coat-room attendant. I remember keeping tabs one summer, and--will
you believe me?--a common, ordinary, every-day three-dollar straw lid
set me back twenty-two dollars and thirty cents in tips. But I hope
I'm not boring you."

"Oh, how can you?" she protested, lips tremulous with indignation.

"Don't flatter; I bore even myself at times."

"I don't mean that, and you know I don't. How can you sit there joking
when you--when you've just--"

"Come off the job?" he caught her up as she faltered. "But why not? I
feel anything but sad about it. It was a good job--wasn't it?--a clean
haul, a clear getaway. Thanks, of course, to you."

She responded, not without some difficulty: "Please! I wouldn't have
dared if he hadn't tried to get at that sword."

"Just like him, too!" Blue Serge observed with a flash of indignation:
"his kind, I mean--less burglars than bunglers, with no professional
pride, no decent instincts, no human consideration. _They_ never
stop to think it's tough enough for a householder to come home to a
cracked crib without finding a total stranger to boot--a man he's
never even _seen_ before, like as not--ah--weltering on the
premises--"

"Oh, do be serious!"

"Must I? If you wish."

The man composed his features to a mask of whimsical attention.

"What--what did you do with him?" the girl stammered after a pause
during which consciousness of her disadvantage became only more acute.

"Our active little friend, the yegg? Why, I didn't do anything with
him."

"You didn't leave him there'?"

"Oh, no; he went away, considerately enough--up-stairs and out
through the scuttle--the way he broke in, you know. Surprisingly spry
on his feet for a man of his weight and age--had all I could do to
keep up. He did stop once, true, as if he'd forgotten something, but
the sword ran into him--I happened thoughtlessly to be carrying
it--only a quarter of an inch or so--and he changed his mind, and by
the time I got my head through the scuttle he was gone--vanished
utterly from human ken!"

"He had broken the scuttle open, you say?"

"Pried it up with a jimmy."

"And you left it so? He'll go back."

"No, he won't. I found hammer and nails and made all fast before I
left."

"But," she demanded, wide-eyed with wonder, "why did you take that
trouble?"

"My silly conceit, I presume. I couldn't bear the thought of having
that roughneck return and muss up one of my neatest jobs."

"I don't understand you at all," she murmured, utterly confounded.

"Nor I you, if it matters. Still, I'm sure you won't keep me much
longer in suspense, considering how open-faced I've been. But here's
that animal of a waiter again."

She was willingly silent, though she exerted herself to seem at ease
with indifferent success. The voice of her companion was like a
distant, hollow echo in her hearing; her wits were all awhirl, her
nerves as taut and vibrant as banjo-strings; before her vision the
face of Blue Serge swam, a flesh-tinted moon now and again traversed
by a flash of white when he smiled.

"Come!" the man rallied her sharply, if in an undertone, "this will
never do. You're as white as a sheet, trembling and staring as if I
were a leper--or a relation by marriage or--something repulsive!"

She sat forward mechanically and mustered an uncertain smile.
"Forgive me. I'm a little overwrought--the heat and--everything."

"Not another word, then, till you've finished. I'll do the talking, if
it's all the same to you. But you needn't answer--needn't listen, for
that matter. I've no pride in my conversational powers, and you
mustn't risk losing your appetite."

He seemed to find it easy enough to make talk; but Sally spared him
little attention, being at first exclusively preoccupied with the
demands of her hunger, and later--as the meal progressed, renewing her
physical strength and turning the ebbing tide of her
spirits--thoroughly engaged with the problem of how to extricate
herself from this embarrassing association or, if extrication proved
impossible, how to turn it to her own advantage. For if the affair
went on this way--his way--she were a sorry adventuress indeed.

Small cups of black coffee stood before them, steaming, when a
question roused her, and she shook herself together and faced her
burglar across the cloth, once more full mistress of her faculties.

"You're feeling better'?"

"Very much," she smiled, "and thank you!"

"Don't make me uncomfortable; remember, this is all your fault.

"That I'm here, alive and whole, able to enjoy a most unique
situation. _Who are you?_"

But she wasn't to be caught by any such simple stratagem as a question
plumped suddenly at her with all the weight of a rightful demand; she
smiled again and shook her head.

"Shan't tell."

"But if I insist?"

"Why don't you, then?"

"Meaning insistence won't get me anything?"

Sensitive to the hint of a hidden trump, she stiffened slightly.

"I haven't asked you to commit yourself. I've got a right to my own
privacy."

There fell a small pause. Lounging, an elbow on the table, a cigarette
fuming idly between his fingers, the man favoured her with a steady
look of speculation whose challenge was modified only by the
inextinguishable humour smouldering in his eyes--a look that Sally met
squarely, dissembling her excitement. For with all her fears and
perplexity she could never quite forget that, whatever its sequel,
this was verily an adventure after her own heart, that she was looking
her best in a wonderful frock and pitting her wits against those of an
engaging rogue, that she who had twelve hours ago thought herself
better dead was now living intensely an hour of vital emergency.

"But," the man said suddenly, and yet deliberately, "surely you
won't dispute my right to know who makes free with my own home?"

Her bravado was extinguished as suddenly as a candle-flame in a gust
of wind.

"_Your_ home?" she parroted witlessly.

"Mine, yes. If you can forgive me." He fumbled for his card-case. "It
has been amusing to play the part you assigned me of amateur
cracksman, but really, I'm afraid, it can't be done without a better
make-up."

He produced and placed before her on the cloth a small white card; and
as soon as its neat black script ceased to writhe and run together
beneath her gaze she comprehended the name of _Mr. Walter Arden
Savage_, with a residence address identical with that of the house
wherein her great adventure had begun.

"You!" she breathed aghast, "you're not _really_ Mr. Savage?"

He smiled indulgently. "I rather think I am."

"But--"

Sally's voice failed her entirely, and he laughed a tolerant little
laugh as he bent forward to explain.

"I don't wonder you are surprised--or at your mistake. The fact is,
the circumstances are peculiar. It's my sister's fault, really; she's
such a flighty little thing--unpardonably careless. I must have warned
her a hundred times, if once, never to leave valuables in that
silly old tin safe. But she won't listen to reason--never would. And
it's her house--her safe. I've got no right to install a better one.
And that is why we're here."

He smiled thoughtfully down his nose. "It's really a chapter of
accidents to which I'm indebted for this charming adventure," he
pursued with a suavely personal nod, "beginning with the blow-out of
the taxicab tire that made us five minutes late for this evening's
boat. We were bound up the Sound, you understand, to spend a fortnight
with a maternal aunt. And our luggage is well on its way there now. So
when we missed the boat there was nothing for it but go by train. We
taxied back here through that abominable storm, booked for Boston by
the eleven ten, and ducked across the way to dine at the Biltmore. No
good going home, of course, with the servants out--and everything. And
just as we were finishing dinner this amiable sister of mine gave a
whoop and let it out that she'd forgotten her jewels. Well, there was
plenty of time. I put her aboard the train as soon as the sleepers
were open--ten o'clock, you know--and trotted back home to fetch the
loot."

A reminiscent chuckle punctuated his account, but struck no echo from
Sally's humour. Moveless and mute, the girl sat unconsciously
clutching the edge of the table as if it were the one stable fact in
her whirling world; all her bravado dissipating as her daze of
wonder yielded successively to doubt, suspicion, consternation.

"I said there was plenty of time, and so there was, barring accidents.
But the same wouldn't be barred. I manufactured the first delay for
myself, forgetting to ask Adele for the combination. I knew where to
find it, in a little book locked up in the desk; but I hadn't a key to
the desk, so felt obliged to break it open, and managed that so
famously I was beginning to fancy myself a bit as a Raffles when, all
of a sudden--_Pow!_" he laughed--"that fat devil landed on my devoted
neck with all the force and fury of two hundredweight of professional
jealousy!

"And then," he added, "in you walked from God knows where--"

His eyes affixed a point of interrogation to the simple declarative.

She started nervously in response, divided between impulses which she
had no longer sufficient wit to weigh. Should she confess, or try to
lie out of it?

Must she believe this glibly simple and adequate account or reject it
on grounds of pardonable skepticism?

If this man were what he professed to be, surely he must recognise her
borrowed plumage as his sister's property. True, that did not of
necessity follow; men have so little understanding of women's
clothing; it pleases them or it displeases, if thrust upon their
attention, but once withdrawn it is forgotten utterly. Such might well
be the case in this present instance; the man gave Sally, indeed,
every reason to believe him as much bewildered and mystified by her as
she was by him.

On the other hand, and even so . . .

The infatuate impulse prevailed, to confess and take the consequences.

"I'm afraid--" she began in a quaver.

"No need to be--none I know of, at least," he volunteered promptly, if
without moderating his exacting stare.

"You don't understand--"

She hesitated, sighed, plunged in desperation. "It's no use; there's
nothing for me to do but own up. What you were not to-night, Mr.
Savage, I was."

"Sounds like a riddle to me. What is the answer?"

"You were just make-believe. I was the real thing--a real thief. No,
let me go on; it's easier if you don't interrupt. Yes, I'll tell you
my name, but it won't mean anything. I'm nobody. I'm Sarah Manvers.
I'm a shop-girl out of work."

"Still I don't see . . ."

"I'm coming to that. I live on your block--the Lexington Avenue
end, of course--with two other girls. And this afternoon--the studio
was so hot and stuffy and lonesome, with both my friends away--I went
up on the roof for better air, and fell asleep there and got caught by
the storm. Somebody had closed the scuttle, and I ran across roofs
looking for another that wasn't fastened down, and when I found
one--it was your house--I was so frightened by the lightning I hardly
knew what I was doing. I just tumbled in--"

"And welcome, I'm sure," Blue Serge interpolated.

She blundered on, unheeding: "I went all through the house, but there
wasn't anybody, and--I was so wet and miserable that I--made myself
at home--decided to take a bath and--and borrow some things to wear
until my own were dry. And then I thought . . ."

She halted, confused, realising how impossible it would be to convince
anybody with the tale of her intention merely to borrow the clothing
for a single night of arabesque adventure, finding it difficult now to
believe in on her own part, and hurried breathlessly on to cover the
hiatus.

"And then I heard a noise on the roof. I had closed the scuttle, but I
was frightened. And I crept down-stairs and--saw the light in the
library and . . . That's all." And when he didn't reply promptly,
she added with a trace of challenge: "So now you know!"

He started as from deep reverie.

"But why call yourself a thief--for that?"

"Because . . . because . . ." Overstrung nerves betrayed her in gusty
confession. "Because it's no good blinking facts: that's what I was in
my heart of hearts. Oh, it's all very well for you to be generous, and
for me to pretend I meant only to borrow, and--and all that! But the
truth is, I did steal--and I never honestly meant to send the things
back. At first--yes; then I meant to return them, but never once they
were on my back. I told myself I did, I believed I did; but deep down,
all along, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't! I'm a liar as well as a
thief."

"Oh, come now!" Blue Serge interjected in a tone of mild remonstrance,
lounging back and eying the girl intently. "Don't be so down on
yourself."

"Well, everything I've said was true except that one word 'borrow';
but that in itself was a lie big enough to eclipse every word of
truth. . . . But you'll never understand--never! Men can't. They
simply can't know what it is to be clothes-hungry--starving for
something fit to wear--as I have been for years and years and years,
as most of us in the shops are all our lives long."

"Perhaps _I_ understand, though," he argued with an odd look. "I
know what you mean, at any rate, even if I'm not ready to admit that
shop-girls are the only people who ever know what it is to desire the
unattainable. Other people want things, at times, just as hard as you
do clothes."

"Well, but . . ." She stammered, unable to refute this reasonable
contention, but, womanlike, persistent to try: "It's different--when
you've never had anything. Try to think what it must be to work from
eight till six--sometimes later--six days a week, for just enough to
keep alive on, if you call such an existence being alive! Why, in ten
years I haven't seen the country or the sea--unless you count trips to
Coney on crowded trolley-cars, and mighty few of them. I never could
afford a vacation, though I've been idle often enough--never earned
more than ten dollars a week, and that not for many weeks together.
I've lived on as little as five--on as little as charity, on nothing
but the goodness of my friends at times. That's why, when I saw myself
prettily dressed for once, and thought nothing could stop my getting
away, I couldn't resist the temptation. I didn't know where I was
going, dressed like this, and not a cent; but I was going some place,
and I wasn't ever coming back!"

"Good Lord!" the man said gently. "Who'd blame you?"

"Don't sympathise with me," she protested, humanly quite unconscious
of her inconsistency. "I don't deserve it. I'm caught with the goods
on, literally, figuratively, and I've got to pay the penalty. Oh, I
don't mean what you mean. I'm no such idiot as to think you'll have me
sent to jail; you've been too kind already and--and, after all, I did
do you a considerable service, I did help you out of a pretty
dangerous fix. But the penalty I'll pay is worse than jail: it's
giving up these pretty things and all my silly, sinful dreams, and
going back to that scrubby studio--and no job--"

She pulled up short, mystified by a sudden change in the man's
expression, perceiving that she was no longer holding his attention as
completely as she had. She remarked his look of embarrassment, that
his eyes winced from something descried beyond and unknown to her. But
he was as ready as ever to recover and demonstrate that, if his
attention had wandered, he hadn't missed the substance of her
harangue; for when she paused he replied:

"Oh, perhaps not. Don't let's jump at conclusions. I've a premonition
you won't have to go back. Here comes some one who'll have a word to
say about that--or I don't know!"

And he was up before Sally had grasped his meaning--on his feet and
bowing civilly, if with a twinkling countenance, to a woman who
swooped down upon him in a sudden, wild flutter of words and
gestures:

"Walter! Thank God I've found you! I've been so upset--hardly knew
what to do--when you didn't show up. . . ."

What more she might have said dried instantly on the newcomer's lips
as her gaze embraced Sally. She stiffened slightly and drew back,
elevating her eyebrows to the frost-line.

"Who is this woman? What does this mean?" Without awaiting an answer
to either question, she observed in accents that had all the chilling
force and cutting edge of a winter wind:

"_My_ dress! _My_ hat!"



CHAPTER V

CONSPIRACY

"My dear sister!" interposed Mr. Savage with an imitation so exact of
the woman's tone that he nearly wrung a smile even from Sally. "Do
calm yourself--don't make a scene. The matter is quite easy to
explain--"

"But what--"

"Oh, give us a chance. But permit me!" He bowed with his easy laugh.
"Adele, this is Miss Manvers--Miss Manvers, my sister Mrs. Standish.
And now"--as Sally half started from her chair and Mrs. Standish
acknowledged her existence by an embittered nod--"do sit down, Adele!"

With the manner of one whose amazement has paralysed her parts of
speech, the woman sank mechanically into the chair which Savage
(having thoughtfully waved away the hovering waiter) placed beside the
table, between himself and his guest. But once seated, precisely as if
that position were a charm to break the spell that sealed them,
promptly her lips reformed the opening syllables of "_What does this
mean?_"

Mr. Savage, however, diplomatically gave her no chance to utter more
than the first word.

"Do hold your tongue," he pleaded with a rudeness convincingly
fraternal, "and listen to me. I am deeply indebted to Miss
Manvers--for my very life, in fact. Oh, don't look so blamed
incredulous; I'm perfectly sober. Now _will_ you please give me a
show?"

And, the lady executing a gesture that matched well her look of blank
resignation, her brother addressed himself to a terse summing up of
the affair which, while it stressed the gravity of the adventure with
the fat burglar, did not seem to extenuate Sally's offence in the
least and so had the agreeable upshot of leaving the sister in a
much-placated humour and regarding the girl with a far more indulgent
countenance than Sally had found any reason at first to hope for.

As for that young woman, the circumstance that she was inwardly all
a-shudder didn't in the least hinder her exercise of that feminine
trick of mentally photographing, classifying, and cataloguing the
other woman's outward aspects in detail and, at the same time,
distilling her more subtle phases of personality in the retort of
instinct and minutely analysing the precipitate.

The result laid the last lingering ghost of suspicion that all was not
as it should be between these two, that Blue Serge had not been
altogether frank with her.

She had from the first appreciated the positive likeness between Mrs.
Standish and the portrait in the library, even though her observation
of the latter had been limited to the most casual inspection through
the crack of the folding doors; there wasn't any excuse for
questioning the identification. The woman before her, like the woman
of the picture, was of the slender, blonde class--intelligent,
neurotic, quick-tempered, inclined to suffer spasmodically from
exaltation of the ego. And if she had not always been pampered with
every luxury that money has induced modern civilisation to invent, the
fact was not apparent; she dressed with such exquisite taste as only
money can purchase, if it be not innate; she carried herself with the
ease of affluence founded upon a rock, while her nervousness was
manifestly due rather to impatience than to the vice of worrying.

"And now," Mr. Savage wound up with a graceless grin, "if you'll be
good enough to explain what the dickens you're doing here instead of
being on the way to Boston by the eleven-ten, I'll be grateful; Miss
Manvers will quit doubting my veracity--secretly, if not openly; and
we can proceed to consider something I have to suggest with
respect to the obligations of a woman who has been saved the loss of a
world of gewgaws as well as those of a man who is alive and whole
exclusively, thanks to . . . Well, I think you know what I mean."

"Oh, as for that," said Mrs. Standish absently, "when you turned up
missing on the train I stopped it at the Hundred and Twenty-Fifth
Street station and came back to find out what was the matter. I've
been all through this blessed place looking for you--"

"Pardon!" Mr. Savage interrupted. "Did I understand you to say you had
stopped the train?"

"Certainly. Why not? You don't imagine I was going to let myself be
carried all the way to Boston in ignorance--"

"Then, one infers, the eleven-ten doesn't normally stop at One Hundred
and Twenty-Fifth Street?"

"No. I had to speak to the conductor. Do be quiet. It doesn't matter.
What were you going to say?"

"Nothing much, except that the clothes Miss Manvers stands in are
hardly to be considered an adequate reward."

"True. But you mentioned some suggestion or other--"

"Without being downright about it, thereby sparing Miss Manvers
any embarrassment, she might feel should you disapprove, as I'm
confident you won't--"

This was the woman's turn; she silenced him with a gesture of infinite
ennui. "Why is it," she complained, "that you _never_ get anywhere
without talking all around Robin Hood's barn?"

"Objection," Mr. Savage offered promptly, "on the ground of mixed
metaphor."

"Objection sustained," his sister conceded. "But do come to the
point."

"I wish only to remind you of the news imparted by our respected aunt
in her letter of recent date."

The woman frowned slightly, as with mental effort; then a flash of
comprehension lightened her blue eyes. Immediately her brows mutely
circumflexed a question. A look of profound but illegible significance
passed between the two. Mr. Savage nodded. Mrs. Standish pursed
speculatively her thin, well-made-up lips and visibly took thought,
according to the habit of her sex, by means of a series of intuitive
explosions. Then she nodded vigorously and turned upon Miss Manvers a
bewildering smile, for the first time addressing her directly.

"My dear," she said pleasantly enough--though, of course, the term had
no accent whatever of affection--"this half-witted brother of
mine once in a while stumbles upon the most brilliant inspiration
imaginable. I'm sure he has seen enough of you in this last hour to be
making no mistake in offering you as one answer to a very delicate
question which has been distressing us both for a long time. If you're
not overscrupulous . . ."

She paused with a receptive air.

"I'm sure I don't know what you're driving at," Sally said bluntly;
"but I'm hardly in a position to be nice-minded about trifles."

"It's this way," Savage interposed; "we're offering you a chance to
get away, to enjoy a summer by the seashore, to mix with a lot of
mighty interesting people, and all that sort of thing--everything you
tell me you've been pining for--if you'll consent to sail under false
colours."

"Please!" Sally begged with a confused and excited little laugh.

"He simply can't help it; indirection is Walter's long suit," Mrs.
Standish took up the tale. "First of all, you must know this aunt of
ours is rather an eccentric--frightfully well off, spoiled,
self-willed, and quite blind to her best interests. She's been a widow
so long she doesn't know the meaning of wholesome restraint. She's got
all the high knee-action of a thoroughbred never properly broken to
harness. She sets her own pace--and Heaven help the hindermost!
All in all, I think Aunt Abby's the most devil-may-care person I've
ever met."

"You're too modest," Mr. Savage commented abstractedly.

"Be quiet, Walter. Aunt Abby's passionately fond of two things--cards
and what she calls 'interesting people.' Neither would matter much but
for the other. She gambles for sheer love of it, and doesn't care a
rap whether she wins or loses. And her notion of an interesting person
is anybody fortunate or misfortunate enough to be noticed by the
newspapers. A bit of a scandal is sure bait for her regard . . ."

Pausing, Mrs. Standish smiled coolly. "Take me, for example. Until I
found it necessary to get unmarried, my aunt never could find time to
waste on me. But now, in spite of the fact that the decree was in my
favour, I'm the object of her mad attachment. And if Walter hadn't
come into the limelight through a Senatorial inquiry into high
finance, and made such a sick witness, and got so deservedly roasted
by the newspapers--well, nothing is now too good for him. So, you see,
the people Aunt Abby insists on entertaining are apt to be a rather
dubious lot. I don't mean she'd pick up with anybody openly immoral,
you know; but she certainly manages to fill her houses--she's got
several--with a wild crew of adventurers and--esses--to call 'em
by their first names.

"They're smart enough, God knows, and they do make things hum, but
they charge her--some of them--fat fees for the privilege of
entertaining them. Funny things have happened at her card tables. So
Walter and I have been scheming to find some way to protect her
without rousing her resentment by seeming to interfere. If we could
only get evidence enough to talk privately to some of her
friends--about time-tables, for instance--it would be all right. And
only recently she herself showed us the way--wrote me that she had
quarrelled with her corresponding secretary, a spinster of acid
maturity, and discharged her; and would we please look round for
somebody to replace Miss. Matring. Do you see?"

"You mean," Sally faltered, dumfounded--"you can't mean you'll
recommend _me_ for the position?"

"I'll do more. I'll see that you get it; I'll take you with me
to-night, and by to-morrow noon you'll be engaged. But you must
understand we're giving you the chance solely that you may serve us as
well as Aunt Abby, by keeping your eyes and ears wide open and
reporting to us in strictest confidence and secrecy anything that
doesn't look right to you."

"But--but I--but how--why do you think you can trust me?" the
girl stammered. "Knowing what you do--"

"That's just the point. Don't you see'? We can trust you because you
won't dare betray us."

"But--but after I've stolen--"

"Don't say it!" Savage cut in. "You stole nothing, if you please; you
merely anticipated a reward for a service not yet rendered."

"But . . . Oh, it's kind of you, but don't you see it's impossible?"

"Nothing is impossible except your refusal," said Mrs. Standish. "Do
be sensible, my dear, and realise that we--that I intend you shall
have this chance. What can you possibly find to object to? The deceit?
Surely an innocent deception, practised upon a dear old lady for her
own good!"

"Deceit," Mr. Savage propounded very sagely, "is like any other sin,
it's only sinful when it is. That's elementary sophistry, but I
invented it, and I'm strong for it. Besides, we've got just twenty
minutes now to get aboard the Owl--and I've got to beg, borrow, or buy
transportation on it, because there wasn't a room left but the two I
bought for you and me--and now Adele will have to have one of the
rooms--"

"But I've nothing to wear but these things!" "Don't worry about that,"
Mrs. Standish reassured her. "I've got nine trunks on the way--and
you unquestionably fill my things out like another perfect
figure."

"But how will you explain? Who am I to be?
You can't introduce me as a shop-girl out of work whom you caught
stealing your clothes."

"_La nuit porte conseil_," Mr. Savage announced sagely, and with what
was no doubt an excellent accent. "Let Adele sleep on it, and if she
doesn't come through in the morning with a good, old-fashioned, all
wool, yard-wide lie that will blanket every possible contingency, I
don't know my little sister."

"An elder brother, let me tell you, Miss Manvers, is the best possible
preceptor in prevarication."

"Elder!" exclaimed the outraged young man. "Well, of all--" He turned
appealingly to Sally. "_What_ did I tell you?"



CHAPTER VI

ALIAS MANWARING

Fickle-minded fortune favoured Mr. Savage's belated application for
additional sleeping-car accommodation: somebody turned back a
reservation only ten minutes or so before train-time, in consequence
of which Mrs. Standish and Miss Manvers enjoyed adjoining compartments
of luxury, while Mr. Savage contented himself with less pretentious
quarters farther aft.

Thus it was that at one minute past one o'clock, when a
preternaturally self-respecting porter dispassionately ascertained
that nothing more would be required of him till morning and shut
himself out of her presence, the girl subsided upon the edge of a bed
of such sybaritic character as amply to warrant the designation _de
luxe_, and, flushed and trembling with excitement (now that she dared
once again to be her natural self) and with all incredulity
appropriate to the circumstances, stared at the young woman who
blankly stared back from a long mirror framed in the door.

It was truly a bit difficult to identify that modishly dressed and
brilliantly animated young person with S. Manvers of the Hardware
Notions in Huckster's Bargain Basement, while reason tottered and
common sense tittered when invited to credit the chain of accidents
responsible for the transformation.

Strange world of magic romance, this, into which she had stumbled over
the threshold of a venial misdemeanour! Who now would dare contend
that life was ever sordid, grim, and cruel, indigestible from soup to
savoury? Who would have the hardihood to uphold such contention when
made acquainted with the case of Sarah Manvers, yesterday's drudge,
unlovely and unloved, to-day's child of fortune, chosen of a golden
destiny?

Sally's jubilation was shadowed by a pensive moment; dare she assume
that the winters of her discontent had been forever banished by one
wave of Chance's wand?

She shook a confounded head, smiled an uncertain smile, sighed a
little, broken sigh, and with determination bade adieu to misgivings,
turning a deaf ear to the dull growls of mother-wit arguing that the
Board of Health ought to be advised about the State of Denmark.
Sufficient unto the night its room de luxe; she found her couch no
less comfortable for the sword that conceivably swayed above it,
suspended by a thread of casual favour.

For a time she rested serenely in the dark--only half undressed in
view of the ever-possible accident--cheek to pillow, face turned to
the window that endlessly screened the sweeping mysteries of that dark
glimmering countryside, quite resigned so to while away the night,
persuaded it was inevitable that one with so much to ponder should be
unable to sleep a wink.

Deliberately, to prove this point, she closed her eyes. . . .

And immediately opened them to broad daylight, revealing, through that
magic casement, the outskirts of a considerable city, street after
suburban street wheeling away like spokes from a restless hub.

A simultaneous pounding on the door warned her she had but ten minutes
in which to dress; no time to grasp the substance of a dream come
true, no time even to prepare a confident attitude with which to
salute the fairy godparents of her social debut--time only to
struggle into her outer garments and muster a half-timid, deprecatory
smile for those whom she was to find awaiting her in the corridor,
impatient to be off, none too amiably conscious of foregone beauty
sleep, accepting their protegee with a matter-of-course manner almost
disillusioning.

"Got to hurry, you know," Savage informed her brusquely; "only
twenty minutes to snatch a bite before our train leaves for the
Island."

They hurried down a platform thronged with fellow passengers similarly
haunted by the seven devils of haste, beneath a high glazed but opaque
vault penning an unappetizing atmosphere composed in equal parts of a
stagnant warm air and stale steam, into a restaurant that had patently
been up all night, through the motions of swallowing alternate
mouthfuls of denatured coffee and dejected rolls, up again and out and
down another platform--at last into the hot and dusty haven of a
parlour-car.

Then impressions found time for readjustment. The journey promised,
and turned out, to be by no means one of unalloyed delights. The early
morning temper discovered by Mrs. Standish offered chill comfort to
one like Sally, saturate with all the emotions of a stray puppy
hankering for a friendly pat. Ensconced in the chair beside her
charge, the patroness swung it coolly aside until little of her was
visible but the salient curve of a pastel-tinted cheek and buried her
nose in a best-selling novel, ignoring overtures analogous to the
wagging of a propitiatory tail. While Savage, in the chair beyond his
sister, betrayed every evidence of being heartily grateful for a
distance that precluded conversation and to a Providence that
tolerated _Town Topics_. Sally was left to improve her mind with
a copy of _Vanity Fair_, from contemplation of whose text and pictures
she emerged an amateur adventuress sadly wanting in the indispensable
quality of assurance. It wasn't that she feared to measure wits,
intelligence, or even lineage with the elect. But in how many
mysterious ways might she not fall short of the ideal of Good Form?

What--she pondered gloomily, chin in hand, eyes vacantly reviewing a
countryside of notable charms adrowse in the lethargic peace of a
mid-summer morning--what the dickens was Good Form, anyway?

Nothing, not even her own normally keen power of observation, offered
any real enlightenment.

She summed up an hour's studious reflection in the dubious conclusion
that Good Form had something subtly to do with being able to sit
cross-kneed and look arrogantly into the impertinent lens of a
camp-follower's camera--to be impudently self-conscious, that is--to
pose and pose and get away with it.

The train came to a definite stop, and Sally startled up to find Mrs.
Standish, afoot, smiling down at her with all her pretty features
except her eyes, and Mr. Savage smiling in precisely the reverse
fashion.

"All out," he announced. "Change here for the boat. Another
hour, and--as somebody says Henry James says--there, in a manner of
speaking, we all are."

They straggled across a wharf to a fussy small steamer, Mrs. Standish
leading the way with an apprehensive eye for possible acquaintances
and, once established with her brother and Sally in a secluded corner
of the boat's upper deck, uttering her relief in a candid sigh.

"Nobody we know aboard," she added, smiling less tensely at Sally.

"Eh--what say'?" Mr. Savage inquired from a phase of hypnosis induced
by a glimpse of Good Form in a tailored skirt of white corduroy.

"Nobody of any consequence in this mob," his sister paraphrased,
yawning delicately.

"Oh," he responded with an accent of doubt. But the white corduroy
vanished round a shoulder of the deck-house, and he bestirred himself
to pay a little attention to Sally.

"There's the Island," he said, languidly waving a hand. "That
white-pillared place there among the trees--left of the
lighthouse--that's Aunt Abby's."

Sally essayed a smile of intelligent response. Not that the Island
failed to enchant her; seen across a fast diminishing breadth of
wind-darkened blue water, bathed in golden mid-morning light, its
villas of delicious grey half buried in billows of delicious
green, its lawns and terraces crowning fluted grey-stone cliffs from
whose feet a broad beach shelved gently into the sea, it seemed more
beautiful to Miss Manvers than anything she had ever dreamed of.

But what was to be her reception there, what her status, what her
fortunes?

"I've been thinking," Mrs. Standish announced when a sidelong glance
had reassured her as to their practical privacy, "about Miss Manvers."

"I hope to Heaven you've doped out a good one," Savage interrupted
fervently. "In the cold grey dawn it doesn't look so good to me. But
then I'm only a duffer. Perhaps it's just as well; if I'd been a good
liar I might have married to keep my hand in. As it is, I never forget
to give thanks, in my evening prayers, for my talented little sister."

"Are you finished?" Mrs. Standish inquired frigidly.

"I'd better be."

"Then, please pay close attention, Miss Manvers. To begin with, I'm
going to change your name. From now on it's Sara Manwaring--Sara
without the _h_."

"Manwaring with the _w_ silent, as in wrapper and wretch?" Savage
asked politely.

For Sally's benefit Mrs. Standish spelled the word patiently.

"And the record of the fair impostor?" Savage prompted.

"That's very simple. Miss Manwaring came to me yesterday with a letter
of introduction from Edna English. Edna sailed for Italy last
Saturday, and by the time she's back Aunt Abby will have forgotten to
question Miss Manwaring's credentials."

"What did I tell you?" Mr. Savage wagged a solemn head at Sally.
"There's Art for you!"

"She comes from a family prominent socially in"--Mrs. Standish paused
a fraction of a second--"Massillon, Ohio--"

"Is there any such place?"

"Of course--"

"What a lot you do know, Adele!"

"But through a series of unhappy accidents involving the family
fortunes was obliged to earn her own living."

"Is that all?"

"Isn't it enough?"

"Plenty. Simple, succinct, stupendous! It has only one flaw."

"And that, if you please?" Mrs. Standish demanded, bristling a trifle.

"It ain't possible for anyone to be prominent socially in a place
named Massillon, Ohio. It can't be done--not in a place I never heard
of before."

"Do you understand, Miss Manwaring?" the woman asked, turning an
impatient shoulder to her brother.

"Perfectly," Sally assented eagerly; "only--who is Edna English?"

"Mrs. Cornwallis English. You must have heard of her."

"Oh, yes, in the newspapers . . ."

"Social uplift's her fad. She's done a lot of work among
department-store girls."

"To their infinite annoyance," interpolated Savage.

"At all events, that's how she came to notice you."

"I see," said Sally humbly.

"You may fill in the outlines at your discretion," Mrs. Standish
pursued sweetly. "That's all I know about you. You called at the house
with the letter from Mrs. English yesterday afternoon, and I took a
fancy to you and, knowing that Aunt Abby needed a secretary, brought
you along."

"Thank you," said Sally. "I hope you understand how grate--"

"That's quite understood. Let us say no more about it."

"Considerable story," Savage approved. "But what became of the letter
of introduction?"

"I mislaid it," his sister explained complacently. "Don't I mislay
everything?"

For once the young man was dumb with admiration. But his look was
eloquent.

Deep thought held the amateur adventuress spellbound for some minutes.
"There's only one thing," she said suddenly, with a puzzled frown.

"And that?" Mrs. Standish prompted.

"What about the burglary? Your servants, when they came home last
night, must have noticed and notified the police."

"Oh, I say!" Savage exclaimed blankly.

"Don't let's worry about that," Mrs. Standish interrupted. "We can
easily let it be understood that what was stolen was later recovered
from--whatever they call the places where thieves dispose of their
stealings."

"That covers everything," Savage insisted impatiently. "Do come along.
There's the car waiting."

Coincident with this announcement a series of slight jars shook the
steamer, and with surprise Sally discovered that, without her
knowledge in the preoccupation of being fitted with a completely new
identity, the vessel had rounded a wooded headland, opening up a deep
harbour dotted with pleasure craft, and was already nuzzling the town
wharf of a sizable community.

She rose and followed her fellow conspirators aft and below to the
gangway, her mind registering fresh impressions with the
rapidity of a cinema film.

The grey cliff had given place to green-clad bluffs sown thick with
cottages of all sorts, from the quaintly hideous and the obviously
inexpensive to the bewitchingly pretty and the pretentiously ornate
--a haphazard arrangement that ran suddenly into a plot of streets
linking a clutter of utilitarian buildings, all converging upon the
focal point of the village wharf.

Upon this last a cloud of natives and summer folk swarmed and buzzed.
At its head a cluster of vehicles, horse-drawn as well as
motor-driven, waited. In the shadow beneath it, and upon the crescent
beach that glistened on its either side, a multitude of children,
young and old, paddled and splashed in shallows and the wash of the
steamer.

Obviously the less decorative and exclusive side of the island, it was
none the less enchanting in Sally's vision. A measure of confidence
reinfused her mood. She surrendered absolutely to fatalistic enjoyment
of the gifts the gods had sent. Half closing her eyes, she drank deep
of salt-sweet air vibrant with the living warmth of a perfect day.

A man whose common face was as impassive as a mask shouldered through
the mob and burdened himself with the hand-luggage of the party. Sally
gathered that he was valet to Mr. Savage. And they were pushing
through the gantlet of several hundred curious eyes and making
toward the head of the pier.

"Trying," Mrs. Standish observed in an aside to the girl. "I always
say that everything about the Island is charming but the getting
here."

Sally murmured an inarticulate response and wondered. Disdain of the
commonalty was implicit in that speech; it was contact with the herd,
subjection to its stares, that Mrs. Standish found so trying. How,
then, had she brought herself so readily to accept association on
almost equal terms with a shop-girl misdemeanant--out of gratitude, or
sheer goodness of heart, or something less superficial?

The shadow of an intimation that something was wrong again came
between Sally and the sun, but passed as swiftly as a wind-sped cloud.

The valet led to a heavy, seven-seated touring-car, put their luggage
in the rear, shut the door on the three, and swung up to the seat
beside the chauffeur. The machine threaded a cautious way out of the
rank, moved sedately up a somnolent street, turned a corner and
pricked up its heels to the tune of a long, silken snore, flinging
over its shoulder two miles of white, well-metalled roadway with no
appreciable effort whatever.

For a moment or two dwellings swept by like so many telegraph-poles
past a car-window. Then they became more widely spaced, and were
succeeded by a blurred and incoherent expanse of woods, fields,
parks, hedges, glimpses of lawns surfaced like a billiard-table,
flashes of white facades maculated with cool blue shadows.

Then, without warning if without a jar, the car slowed down to a safe
and sane pace and swung off between two cobblestone pillars into a
well-kept wilderness of trees that stood as a wall of privacy between
the highroad and an exquisitely parked estate bordering the cliffs.

Debouching into the open, the drive swept a gracious curve round a
wonderful wide lawn of living velvet and through the pillared
porte-cochere of a long, white-walled building with many gaily
awninged windows in its two wide-spread wings.

Sentinelled by sombre cypresses, relieved against a sapphire sky
bending to a sea of scarcely deeper shade, basking in soft, clear
sunlight, the house seemed to hug the earth very intimately, to belong
most indispensably, with an effect of permanence, of orderliness and
dignity that brought to mind instinctively the term estate, and caused
Sally to recall (with misspent charity) the fulsome frenzy of a
sycophantic scribbler ranting of feudal aristocracies, representative
houses, and encroaching tenantry.

The solitary symptom of a tenantry in evidence here was a perfectly
good American citizen in shirt-sleeves and overalls, pipe in
mouth, toleration in his mien, calmly steering a wheelbarrow down the
drive. Sally caught the glint of his cool eyes and experienced a flash
of intuition into a soul steeped in contemplative indulgence of the
city crowd and its silly antics. And forthwith, for some reason she
found no time to analyse, she felt more at home, less apprehensive.

As the car pulled up beneath the porte-cochere a mild-eyed footman ran
out to help the valet with the luggage; Savage skipped blithely down
and gave a hand to his sister, offering like assistance to Sally in
turn; and on the topmost of three broad, white, stone steps the
chatelaine of Gosnold House appeared to welcome her guests--a vastly
different personality, of course, from any in Sally's somewhat
incoherent anticipations.

Going upon the rather sketchy suggestions of Mrs. Standish, the girl
had prefigured Aunt Abby as a skittish female of three-score years and
odd; a gabbling creature with a wealth of empty gesticulation and a
parrot's vacant eye; semi-irresponsible, prone to bright colours and
an overyouthful style of dress.

She found, to the contrary, a lady of quiet reserve, composed of
manner, authoritative of speech, not lacking in humour, of impeccable
taste in dress, and to all appearances not a day older than
forty-five, despite hair like snow that framed a face of rich
but indisputably native complexion.

In her regard, when it was accorded exclusively to Sally, the girl
divined a mildly diverted question, quite reasonable, as to her choice
of travelling costume. Otherwise her reception was cordial, with
reservations; nothing warranted the assumption that Mrs. Gosnold (Aunt
Abby by her legitimate title) was not disposed to make up her mind
about Miss Manwaring at her complete leisure. Interim she was very
glad to see her; any friend of Adele's was always welcome to Gosnold
House; and would Miss Manwaring be pleased to feel very much at home.

At this point Mrs. Standish affectionately linked arms with her
relation and, with the nonchalant rudeness that was in those days
almost a badge of caste, dragged her off to a cool and dusky corner of
the panelled reception-hall to acquaint her with the adulterated facts
responsible for the phenomenon of Miss Manwaring.

"Be easy," Mr. Savage comforted the girl airily; "trust Adele to get
away with it. That young woman is sure of a crown and harp in the
hereafter if only because she'll make St. Peter himself believe black
is white. You've got nothing to worry about. Now I'm off for a bath
and nap; just time before luncheon. See you then. So-long."

He blew a most débonnaire kiss to his maternal aunt and trotted
lightly up the broad staircase; and as Sally cast about for some place
to wait inconspicuously on the pleasure of her betters, Mrs. Gosnold
called her.

"Oh, Miss Manwaring!"

The girl responded with an unaffected diffidence apparently pleasing
in the eyes of her prospective employer.

"My niece has been telling me about you," she said with an engaging
smile; "and I am already inclined to be grateful to her. It isn't
often--truth to tell--she makes such prompt acknowledgment of my
demands. And I'm a most disorderly person, so I miss very much the
services of my former secretary. Do come nearer."

Sally drew within arm's-length, and the elder woman put out a hand and
caught the girl's in a firm, cool, friendly grasp.

"Your first name?" she inquired with a look of keen yet not unpleasant
scrutiny.

"Sarah," said Sarah bluntly. "Man'aring" stuck in her guilty throat.

"S-a-r-a," Mrs. Standish punctiliously spelled it out.

"Thank you; I recognise it now." A shrewd, sidelong glance flickered
amusement at Mrs. Gosnold's niece. "You come from the middle West, I
understand, and you've had rather a hard time of it in New York.
What do you do best?" "Why--I've tried to write," Sally confessed
shyly.

"Oh? Novels?"

"Not quite so ambitious; short stories to begin with and then special
articles for the newspapers--anything that promised to bring in a
little money, but nothing ever did."

"Then, I presume, you're familiar with typewriters?"

"Oh, yes."

"And can punctuate after a fashion?"

"I think so."

"You don't look it; far too womanly, unless your appearance is
deceptive, to know the true difference between a semicolon and a
hyphen. No matter; you have every qualification, it seems, including a
good manner and a pleasant smile. You're engaged--on probation; I mean
to say, for this one week we'll consider you simply my guest, but
willing to help me out with my correspondence. Then, if you like the
place and I like you as much as I hope I shall, you'll become my
personal secretary at a salary of twenty-five dollars a week and all
expenses. No--don't thank me; thank your sensible eyes."

Mrs. Gosnold laughed lightly, gave Sally's hand a final but
barely perceptible pressure, and released it.

"Now Thomas will show you your room. Mrs. Standish tells me she has
promised to outfit you; her maid will bring you more suitable things
by the time you've had your tub and some rest. Plenty of time; we
lunch at one-thirty."

The girl stammered some sort of an acknowledgment; she was never able
to recall precisely what she said, in truth, but it served. And then
she was amazedly ascending the broad staircase and following the
flunky's back down a long, wide, drafty corridor to a room at one
extreme of the building--a small room, daintily furnished and bright
with summery cretonne, its individual bath adjoining.

"I'll be sending the maid to you at once, ma'am," said Thomas, and
shut the door.

Sally wandered to a window, lifted the shade, and looked out with
bewildered eyes.

From the front of the house to the edge of the cliff the grounds were
as severely composed as an Italian formal garden; but to one side,
screened by high box hedges, a tennis-court was in the active
possession of four young people, none of them, apparently over twenty
years of age. Their calls and clear laughter rang in the quietness,
vibrant with careless joy of living.

They did not in the least suggest the crew of adventurers which
Mrs. Standish had led Sally to expect.

Thus far, indeed, Sally had failed to detect anything in the
atmosphere of the establishment or in the bearing of its mistress to
bear out the innuendo that Gosnold House was infested by a parasitic
swarm and "Aunt Abby" the dupe of her own unholy passions. Doubts
hummed in Sally's head, and she was abruptly surprised to find the
view obscured by a mist of her own making--by, in short, nothing less
than tears.

The simple kindliness of Mrs. Gosnold's welcome had touched the
impostor more deeply than she had guessed. All this was offered her,
this life of semi-idleness and luxury in this spot of poetic beauty,
in return for nothing but trifling services. But she was not worthy!

A little gust of anger shook her--anger with her benefactors, that
they could not have introduced her to this mundane paradise as her
simple self, Miss Manvers--Sarah with the vulgar _h_--by her own
merits and defects to stand or fall. . . .

But, as though the fates were weaving the fabric of her destiny less
blindly than is their commonly reputed custom, the young woman's
conscience during those few first hours had little time in which to
work upon her better nature. Its first squeamish qualms, when it at
length got Sally alone, were quickly counteracted by a knock at
her door and what followed--the entrance of a quiet-mannered maid
whose fresh-coloured countenance loomed like some amiable, mature moon
above a double armful of summery apparel.

"Mrs. Standish's compliments, ma'am, and I'm bringing your things.
There's more to come--as much again I'm to fetch immediate--and the
rest, Mrs. Standish says, there'll be time enough for after luncheon,
when all her trunks is unpacked."

Carefully depositing her burden upon the bed, she beamed
acknowledgment of Sally's breathless thanks and made off briskly, to
return much too soon to suit one who would have been glad of longer
grace in which to become more intimately acquainted with this new
donation of her ravishing good fortune.

None the less, it didn't need another double armful of beautiful
things to satisfy Sally that, whatever and how many might be the
faults of her benefactress, niggardliness was not of their number.

"That's all for now, and Mrs. Standish's compliments, and will you be
so kind as to stop and see her, when you're dressed, before going down
to lunch. It's the last door on the left, just this side the stairs.
Will I turn on your bath now?"

"Please don't trouble. I--"

"No trouble at all, ma'am. Indeed, and I'm sure you'll find us all
very happy to do anything we can for you. It'll be a nice change
to be waiting on a pleasant-spoken person like yourself after that"--
with a sniff--"Miss Matring."

"Oh!" Genuine disappointment was responsible for the exclamation. But
a moment's thought persuaded Sally she had been unreasonable to hope
her secret might be kept from the servants. Even if Mrs. Standish had
not betrayed it to this maid, there had been that flunky, Thomas, in
the reception-hall close at hand during the establishment of Sally's
status, with his pose of inhuman detachment of interest--quite too
perfect to be true.

"Beg pardon, ma'am?"

"Oh, nothing!" Sally swallowed her chagrin bravely. "I mean, thank you
very much, but I'm accustomed to waiting on myself--except when it
comes to hooks up the back--and you must have enough to keep you busy
with so many people in the house."

"Not a great many just now, ma'am--not more'n a dozen, counting in
Mrs. Standish and her brother and you. This has been an off week, so
to speak, but they'll be arriving in plenty to-morrow and Saturday,
I'm told."

That gossip was the woman's failing was a fact as obvious as that her
desire was only to be friendly; brief reflection persuaded Sally that
it was to her own interest neither to snub nor to neglect this
gratuitous source of information. With some guilty conceit, befitting
one indulging in all most Machiavellian subtlety, she let fall an
extravagantly absent-minded "Yes?" and was rewarded, quite properly,
with a garrulous history of her predecessor's career, from which she
disengaged only two profitable impressions: that the staff of servants
was devoted to their mistress, and that it would little advantage a
secretary to quarrel with the one in the hope of ingratiating herself
with the other.

So she contrived, as soon as might be without giving offence, to
interrupt and dismiss the maid; then steeled her heart against the
temptation to try on everything at once, and profited by long practice
in the nice art of bathing, dressing, breakfasting, and trudging two
miles in minimum time--between, that is, the explosion of a matutinal
alarm and the last moment when one might, without incurring a fine,
register arrival on the clock at Huckster's entrance for employees.
She hadn't the slightest notion what Mrs. Standish might want of her,
but she was very sure that she didn't mean to invite displeasure by
seeming careless of the lady's whims.

Consequently it was surprisingly soon that she stood, refreshed and
comfortable in white linen, tapping at the door that Emmy, the maid,
had designated.

Another maid, less prepossessing, admitted her to the
dressing-room of the woman of fashion; and this last greeted Sally
with a fretful, preoccupied frown, visible in the mirror, which
reflected as well the excellent results obtainable from discreet
employment of a high-keyed palette.

"Oh, it's you!" said Mrs. Standish shortly. "I was hoping you wouldn't
be forever. Though you do look well in those duds. I've something
quite important to say. You may go now, Ellen; I sha'n't want you
again until evening."

With a scowl Ellen made off, an effort of masterly self-restraint
alone enabling her to refrain from slamming the door.

"A most ridiculous thing has happened," Mrs. Standish pursued,
delicately lining in her devastating eyebrows--"most annoying!" She
jerked an impatient thumb at a telegram that lay open on the
dressing-table. "Read that. It was waiting our arrival."

Sally obeyed with an opening wonder that swiftly gave place to panic
consternation.

  House entered by burglars last night discovered this morning forced
  entrance by scuttle extent of loss unknown but desk broken open safe
  cleaned out dining-room silver gone some clothing dresses missing
  one   of gang evidently woman garments left in bath-room name
  indelible ink   faded but apparently manners or manvers police
  notified detectives on   case advise return please wire
  instructions-Riggs.

"Now don't have hysterics!" Mrs. Standish snapped as Sally, with a low
cry of dismay, sank stunned into a chair. "There's nothing for you to
fret about--you're all right, here, with me, under my protection.
Nobody's going to look for you here; but think how fortunate it was I
had the wit to change your name. No, it's I who have to worry!"

"But I don't understand," the girl stammered. "Of course there must be
some mistake; you haven't really lost anything--"

"Oh, haven't I? I wish I could believe that. Don't you see what the
telegram says--'safe cleaned out, dining-room silver gone'? That
sounds suspiciously like a loss to me. Walter didn't 'clean out' the
safe, and of course he didn't touch the silver. On the contrary, he's
positive he shut the safe and fixed the combination before leaving. As
for the dining-room, he didn't once set foot in it."

"Then--that burglar must have come back."

"That's our theory, naturally. Walter was so sure he'd scared the man
off, he simply left the scuttle closed--"

"But he told me he found hammer and nails and fastened it up
securely!"

"That was just his blague; he was having a good time, pretending to be
what you took him for--an amateur cracksman; he made up that
story to fool you. The truth is, he made an uncommonly asinine
exhibition, even for Walter--so excited and upset by that fight with
the real burglar, to say nothing of the mystery of your interference,
that he didn't stop to make sure he had got hold of the right
jewel-case. As a matter of fact, he hadn't; everything I own of any
real value was left behind; what Walter brought me was an old case
containing a lot of trinkets worth little or nothing aside from
sentimental associations."

"Oh, I am so sorry!"

"I'm sure you are, but that doesn't mend matters. The only thing that
will is for you to make good here and keep away from New York until
the whole affair has blown over and, above all, never, under any
consideration, breathe a word of the truth to a living soul."

"I'm hardly likely to do that, Mrs. Standish; it wouldn't--"

"But you might. I've got to warn you. Everything depends on secrecy.
Suppose some one were to question you, and you thought you had to tell
the truth--a detective, for instance. It's not unlikely that one may
come down here to interview me. Walter is leaving for New York by the
first boat--in hopes of preventing anything of the sort--but still it
isn't impossible. And if it ever comes out that Walter was in
the house last night after dark--well, you can see for yourself what
chance we'll have of making the burglar-insurance people pay us for
what we've lost!"



CHAPTER VII

FRAUD

At Gosnold House that day, in an airy dining-room from which sunlight
was jealously excluded by Venetian blinds at every long, wide window,
creating an oasis of cool twilight in the arid heart of day, ten
persons sat at luncheon--a meal of few and simple courses, but
admirably ordered and served upon a clothless expanse of dark
mahogany, relieved at each place by little squares of lace and fine
linen, and in the center by a great, brazen bowl of vivid roses.

In this strange atmosphere the outsider maintained a covertly watchful
silence (which, if rarely interrupted, was altogether of her own
election) and was happily guiltless of any positive fault; long
proscription to the social hinterland of dingy boarding-houses, smug
quick-lunch rooms, and casual studio feeding had not affected her nice
feeling for the sensible thing at table. She possessed, furthermore,
in full measure that amazing adaptability which seems to be innate
with most American women of any walk in life; whatever she might
lack to her detriment or embarrassment she was quick to mark, learn,
assimilate, and make as much her own as if she had never been without
it.

And then--for in spite of reassurances persistently iterated by Mrs.
Standish, the news from New York troubled her
profoundly--preoccupation largely counteracted self-consciousness
through those first few dreaded moments of Sally's modest social
debut.

The men on either side of her she found severally, if quite amiably,
agreeable to indulge her reticence. Savage, for one, was secretly, she
guessed, quite as much disconcerted by the reported contretemps in
town; but he dissembled well, with a show of whimsical exasperation
because of this emergency that tore him so soon away from both Gosnold
House and his other neighbour at table, a Mrs. Artemas--a spirited,
mercurial creature, not over-handsome of face, but wonderfully smart
in dress and gesture, superbly stayed and well aware of it; a dark,
fine woman who recognised the rivalry latent in Sally's dark looks
without dismay--as Sally conceded she might well.

On her other hand sat a handsome, well-bred boy of eighteen or so, one
of the tennis four, answering to the name of Bob--evidently a cheerful
soul, but at ease in the persuasion that comparative children should
be seen and so forth. His partner of the courts sat next
him--name, Babs--a frank-eyed, wholesome girl, perhaps a year his
senior. Their surnames did not transpire, but they impressed Sally,
and correctly, as unrelated save in community of unsentimental
interests. The other players were not present.

Aside from these, the faces strange to her were those of a Miss Pride
and Messrs. Lyttleton and Trego.

The last-named impressed her as a trifle ill at ease, possibly because
of the blandishments of Mrs. Artemas, who had openly singled him out
to be her special prey, and discovered an attitude of proprietorship
to which he could not be said to respond with the ardour of a
passionate, impulsive nature. A youngish man, with a heavy body, a bit
ungainly in carriage, Mr. Trego had a square-jawed face with
heavy-lidded, tranquil eyes. When circumstances demanded, he seemed
capable of expressing himself simply and to the point, with a
sure-footed if crushing wit. In white flannels his broad-shouldered
bulk dwarfed the other men to insignificance.

Mr. Lyttleton--assigned to entertain his hostess, and (or Mrs. Gosnold
flattered him) scoring heavily in that office--was as slenderly
elegant and extreme a gallant as one may hope to encounter between
magazine covers. He had an indisputable air, a way with him, the eye
of a killer; if he perhaps fancied himself a trace too
fervently, something subtle in his bearing toward Mrs. Standish
fostered the suspicion that he was almost fearfully sensible of the
charms of that lady.

Miss Pride, on Mrs. Gosnold's other hand, was a wiry roan virgin who
talked too much but seldom stupidly, exhibited a powerful virtuosity
in strange gestures, and pointedly designated herself as a "spin"
(diminutive for spinster) apparently deriving from this conceit an
amusement esoteric to her audience. Similarly, she indulged a
mettlesome fancy for referring to her hostess as "dear Abigail." Her
own maiden name was eventually disclosed as Mercedes--pronounced, by
request, Mar-say-daze.

From her alone Sally was conscious at the very outset of their
acquaintance of a certain frigidity--as one may who approaches an
open window in the winter unawares. And it was some time before she
discovered that Miss Pride accounted her a rival, thanks to a
cherished delusion, wholly of independent inspiration, that dear
Abigail was a forlorn widow-woman in sore want of some thoroughly
unselfish friend--somebody whose devotion could not possibly be
thought mercenary--somebody very much like Mercedes Pride, Spin.

The table talk was so much concerned with the sensation of the hour,
the burglary, that Sally grew quickly indifferent to the topic, and
thus was able to appreciate Savage's mental dexterity in
discussing it with apparent candour, but without once verging upon any
statement or admission that might count against the interests of his
sister. He seemed wholly unconstrained, but the truth was not in him.
Or, if it were, it was in on a life sentence.

The consensus pronounced Mrs. Standish a very fortunate woman to be so
thoroughly protected by insurance, and this the lucky victim indorsed
with outspoken complacence, even to the extent of a semiserious
admission that she almost hoped the police would fail to recover the
plunder. For while many items of the stolen property, of course, were
priceless, things not to be duplicated, things (with a pensive sigh)
inexpressibly endeared to one through associations, she couldn't deny
(more brightly again) it would be rather a lark to get all that money
and go shopping to replenish her treasure-chests from the most famous
jewellers of the three capitals.

This aspect of the case made Mrs. Artemas frankly envious. "How
perfectly ripping!" she declared. "I'm almost tempted to hire a
burglar of my own!"

"And then," Lyttleton observed profoundly, "if one isn't in too great
a hurry--there's no telling--one may run across the lost things in
odd corners and buy them back for a song or so. Anne Warridge did,
when they looted her Southampton place, some time ago. Remember
the year 'motor-car pirates' terrorized Long Island? Well, long after
everything was settled and the insurance people had paid up, Anne
unearthed several of her best pieces in the shops of bogus Parisian
antiquaries, and bought them back at bargain rates."

"It sounds like a sin to me," Savage commented.

"But I call you all to witness that, if anything like that happens in
this family, I hereby declare in on the profits. It's worth something,
this trip to town--and nobody sorry to see me go!"

After luncheon the party dispersed without formality. Mrs. Artemas
vanished bodily, Mrs. Standish in the car with her brother to see him
off; Bob and Babs murmured incoherently about a boat, and disappeared
forthwith; and Lyttleton, pleading overdue correspondence, Trego was
snapped up for auction bridge by Mrs. Gosnold and Miss Pride, Sally
being elected to fourth place as one whose defective education must be
promptly remedied, lest the roof fall in.

She found it very pleasant, playing on a breeze-fanned veranda that
overlooked the terrace and harbour, and proved a tolerably apt pupil.
A very little practice evoked helpful memories of whist-lore that she
had thought completely atrophied by long disuse, and she was aided
besides by a strong infusion in her mentality of that mysterious
faculty we call card-sense. Before the end of the second rubber
she was playing a game that won the outspoken approval of Trego and
Mrs. Gosnold, and certainly compared well with Miss Pride's, in spite
of the undying infatuation for auction professed by dear Abigail's one
true friend.

It was noteworthy that dear Abigail seemed to have no interests of any
character that were not passionately indorsed by her faithful
Mercedes.

Pondering this matter, Sally found time to wonder that Mercedes had
not been deemed a sufficiently vigilant protector for the poor rich
widow; it was her notion that Mercedes missed few bets.

A circumstance which Sally herself had overlooked turned out to be the
tacit understanding on which the game had been made up; and when, at
the conclusion of the third rubber, Mr. Trego summed up the score,
then calmly presented her with a twenty-dollar bill and some loose
silver--Mercedes with stoic countenance performing the same painful
operation on her own purse in favour of dear Abigail--the girl was
overcome with consternation.

"But--no!" she protested, and blushed. "We weren't playing for money,
surely!"

"Of course we were!" Miss Pride snapped, with the more spirit since
Sally's stupidity supplied an unexpected outlet. "I never could see
the amusement in playing cards without a trifling stake--though
I always do say five cents a point is too much for a friendly game."

"It's our custom," Mrs. Gosnold smiled serenely. "You haven't
conscientious scruples about playing for money, I hope?"

"Oh, no; but"--Sally couldn't, simply couldn't confess her penniless
condition before Miss Pride and Mr. Trego--"but I didn't understand."

"That's all right," Trego insisted. "You won it fairly, and it wasn't
all beginners' luck, either. It was good playing; some of your
inferences were as sound as any I ever noticed."

"It really doesn't seem right," Sally demurred.

None the less she could not well refuse the money.

"I must have my revenge!" Miss Pride announced briskly, that
expression being sanctioned by convention. "To-night, dear Abigail? Or
would you like another rubber now?"

Mrs. Gosnold shook her head and laughed. "No, thank you; I've had
enough for one afternoon, and I'm sleepy besides." She thrust back her
chair and rose. "If you haven't tried the view from the terrace, Miss
Manwaring, I'm sure you'll find it worth while. And let your
ill-gotten gains rest lightly on your conscience; put them in the
war-chest against the rainy day that's sure to dawn for even the best
players. I myself play a rather conservative game, you'll find, but
there are times when for days on end I can't seem to get a hand
much better than a yarborough."

"Do you," Sally faltered, timidly appreciating the impertinence, "do
you lose very much?"

"I? No fear!" Mrs. Gosnold laughed again. "It amuses me to keep a
bridge account, and there's seldom a year when it fails to show a
credit balance of at least a thousand."

If Sally's bewilderment was only the deeper for this information, she
was sensible enough to hold her tongue.

Why need Mrs. Standish deliberately have uttered so monumental a
falsehood about the losses of her aunt at cards? She might, of course,
be simply and sincerely mistaken, misled by over-solicitude for a
well-beloved kinswoman.

On the other hand, the gesture of Adele Standish was not that of a
woman easily deceived.

Thus the puzzle swung full circle.

"Mind if I show you the way, Miss Manwaring?"

"Oh, no!" Sally started from her abstraction to find Trego had
lingered, and, smiling, turned to the steps that led down to the
terrace. "I'll be very glad . . ."

But the truth was that she was not glad of this unsolicited company;
she wanted uninterrupted opportunity to think things over;
furthermore, she thought the sheer weight and masculine force of
Trego's personality less ingratiating than another's--Savage's, for
instance, however shallow, was all ways amusing--or Lyttleton's, with
his flashing insouciant smile, his easy grace and utter repose of
manner.

But this Mr. Trego, swinging ponderously by her side down the terrace
walks, maintaining what was doubtless intended as a civil silence but
what achieved only oppressiveness, of a sudden inspired a sharp
impression that he would prove a man easy to dislike intensely--the
sort of man who is capable of inspiring fear and makes enemies without
any perceptible difficulty.

And if that were so--if, as it seemed, she had already, intuitively,
acquired a distaste for Mr. Trego--how could she at once retain her
self-respect and his money--money which she had won in defiance of the
rules of fair play?

It stuck in her fist, a hard little wad of silver wrapped in the bill;
nearly twenty-one dollars, the equivalent of three weeks' pay for
drudgery, the winnings of an idle hour, the increment of false
pretences.

"There's your view," Trego's voice broke upon the reverie. "Pretty
fine, isn't it?"

They paused in a corner of the terrace, where a low stone wall, grey,
weathered and lichened, fenced the brow of the cliff; and Sally's
glance compassed a panorama of sea and sky and rocky headlands,
with little appreciation of its wild, exquisite beauty.

She uttered an absent-minded "Yes," hesitated, plunged boldly: "Mr.
Trego, I do wish you'd let me give back this money!"

His slowness in replying moved her to seek an answer in his face. He
was unquestionably sifting his surprise for some excuse for her
extraordinary request; a deep gravity informed his heavy-lidded eyes
that were keen with an intelligence far more alert than she had
previously credited.

He said deliberately: "Why?"

"I'd rather not say." She offered the money in her open hand. "But I'd
feel--well, easier, if you'd take it back."

He clasped his hands behind him and shook his head. "Not without good
reason. I don't understand, and what I don't understand I can't be
party to."

She tried the effect of a wistful smile. "Please! I wish you wouldn't
make me tell you."

"I wish you wouldn't put me in such an uncomfortable position. I don't
like to refuse you anything you've set your heart on, but my notion of
playing the game is to lose like a loser and--win like a winner."

"That's just it. I can't win like a winner because--because I didn't
win fairly."

"You never cheated."

It was less a question than an assertion.

"How do you know?"

"I'd have known quick enough if you'd tried. Anyway, you're not that
kind."

"How do you know I'm not?"

There was a pause. Then Trego smiled oddly. "Better not ask me. You
don't know me very well yet."

She coloured faintly. "Then I must tell you you are wrong. I did
cheat. I did, I tell you! I played for money without a cent to pay my
losses if I lost. You don't call that fair play, do you?"

"Depends. Of course, it's hard to believe."

"I'm penniless. You don't understand my position here. I'm--nobody.
Mrs. Standish took pity on me because I was out of work and brought me
here to act as secretary to Mrs. Gosnold."

Trego nodded heavily. "I guessed it. I mean I felt pretty sure you
were--well, of another world." He jerked a disrespectful head toward
the smiling face of Gosnold House. "The same as me," he added. "That's
why I thought . . . But it doesn't matter what I thought."

An unreasonable resentment held her true to the course of her purpose.

"Well, now you know, you must see it's impossible--"

"I don't," he contended stubbornly. "Maybe I'm the devil's advocate,
but the way I see it--to begin with, I was playing for money; if I had
won I'd have expected you to pay up."

"But I couldn't--"

"You would have; that is, Mrs. Gosnold would have paid for you. It was
up to her. She meant it that way. She was staking you against the
Pride person and myself; that's why you played together; if you and
she had lost, she'd have paid for both. So, you see, you may as well
quit trying to make me touch that money."

His sophistry baffled her. She shook her head, confused and a little
angry in defeat, liking him less than ever.

"Very well. But I don't feel right about it--and I think it most
unkind of you."

"Sorry. I only want to play the game as it lies, and this is my idea
of doing it."

There was a brief pause while Sally, at a loss, stared out over the
shining harbour, now more than ever sensible of the profound, peaceful
beauty of its azure floor over which bright sails swung and swayed
like slim, tall ladies treading a measure of some stately dance.

"If you ask my definition of unfair play," Trego volunteered, "it's
this present attitude of yours--forcing a quarrel on me and getting
mad because I stick up for my notion of a square deal!"

"Oh, you misunderstand!" she protested. "I'm only distressed by my
conception of what's wrong."

"It's the worst of gambling," he complained: "always winds up in some
sort of a row."

"Why gamble, then?"

"Why not? We've got to do something here to keep from yawning in one
another's faces."

"Is there so much of it going on all the time--gambling--here?"

"Oh, not a great deal. Not bad gambling, at least." He smiled faintly.
"Not what I call gambling. But I was bred on strong meat--in mining
camps--where my father made his money. There men gambled with their
lives. Here--_hmp!_" He grunted amusedly. "It's just enough like the
real thing to make a fellow restless. Sometimes I wish the old man
hadn't struck it quite so rich. If he hadn't, we'd both be happier. As
it is, he fluffs around, making a pest of himself in Wall Street
because he thinks it's the proper thing. And here am I, instead of
earning dividends on what little knowledge I do happen to possess,
sticking round with a set of idle egoists, simply because the old
man's got his heart set on his son being in society! He won't be happy
till he sees me married to one of these--er--women. Sometimes. . ."

Morosely he ruminated on the suppressed adjective for a moment.
"Sometimes I feel it coming over me that the governor's liable to be
happy, according to his lights, considerably quicker than I am."



CHAPTER VIII

A THIEF IN THE NIGHT

She sat beside the wide window of her bed-chamber, on that third
midnight at Gosnold House, in a state of lawless exaltation not less
physical than spiritual and mental, a temper that proscribed sleep
hopelessly.

The window was open, the night air still and suave and warm, her sole
protection a filmy negligee over a night-dress of sheerest silk and
lace. And in that hour Sarah Manvers was as nearly a beautiful woman
as ever she was to be--her face faintly flushed in the rich moonlight,
faintly shadowed from within by the rich darkness of her blood, her
dreaming eyes twin pools of limpid shadow, her dark lips shadowed by a
slight elusive smile.

She was relishing the sensation of life intensely, almost painfully;
she was intensely alive for the first time in all her life, it seemed;
in throat and wrists and temples pulses sang, now soft, now loud; and
all her body glowed, from crown of head to tips of toes nestling
in silken mules, with the warmth and the languor of life.

She was deeply and desperately in love.

The genius of her curious destiny, not content with making her free of
all the good material things of life, had granted her as well this
last and dearest boon. For though her years were twenty-seven she had
not loved before. She had dreamed of love, had been in love with love
and with being loved, had believed she loved; but nothing in her
experience compared with such rapture as to-night obsessed her being,
wholly and without respite.

Life, indeed, grants no compensation for the ignominious necessity of
love but this, that no other love was ever real but to-day's alone.

And so the beauty of that moonlight midnight seemed supernal.
Becalmed, the island lay steeped in floods of ethereal silver, its sky
an iridescent dome, its sea a shimmering shield of opalescence, its
lawns and terraces argentine shadowed with deepest violet. There was
never a definite sound, only the sibilance of a stillness made of many
interwoven sounds, soft lisp of wavelets on the sands a hundred feet
below, hum of nocturnal insect life in thickets and plantations,
sobbing of a tiny, vagrant breeze lost and homeless in that vast
serenity, wailing of a far violin, rumour of distant motor-cars. A
night of potent witchery, a woman willingly bewitched. . . .

In fancy she still could feel the pulsing of his heart against her
bosom, the caressing touch of his hands, the warm flutter of his
breath in her hair and upon her cheek, as in that last dance; and with
an inexpressible hunger at once of flesh and soul she yearned to feel
them all again, to be once more within the magic circle of his arms,
to live once more in the light of his countenance.

It mattered nothing that she loved hopelessly a graceless
runagate--and knew it well. She had not needed the indirect warnings
of Adele Standish and Mercedes Pride that the man was nothing better
than an engaging scamp. Who was she to demand worthier object for her
love? She was precisely Nobody, and might waste her passion as she
would, and none but herself the worse for it.

Nor did it matter that her love was desperate of return. She knew that
he recognised and was a little amused and a little flattered by her
unspoken admiration, but more deeply than that affected not at all.
But that was his imperial prerogative; she did not mind; temporarily
she believed herself quite content, and that she would continue so as
long as permitted to hug to her secret heart the unutterable sweetness
of being in love with him. Again, she was Nobody and didn't count,
while he was precisely all that she had longed for ever since she was
of an age to dream of love. He was not only of an admirable
person, he wore the habit of distinction like a garment made for him
alone. In short, the man was irresistible, and the woman didn't even
want to resist but only despaired of opportunity ever to capitulate.

She was as love-sick as a schoolgirl of sixteen; a hundred times, if
once, her barely parted lips breathed his name to the sympathetic
night that never would betray her: "_Donald--Donald--Donald
Lyttleton_. . . ."

Now all the while she wasted sighing for him by the window Mr.
Lyttleton spent idly speculating about her--lounging in a corner of
the smoking-room, on the edge of a circle of other masculine guests
making common excuse of alcohol to defer the tiresome formalities of
going to bed and getting up again in the morning.

If this gentleman was Sally's junior in the matter of a year or two,
he was overwhelmingly her senior in knowledge of his world--a world
into which he had been brought neither to toil nor yet to spin, but
simply to be the life and soul of the party. And at twenty-five he was
beyond permitting sentiment to run away with judgment; he could resist
temptation with as much fortitude as any man, always providing he
could see any sound reason for resisting it--any reason, that is,
promising a profit from the deed of abstinence.

Mr. Lyttleton had ten thousand a year of his own, income from a
principal fortunately beyond his power to hypothecate; he spent twenty
thousand with an easy conscience; he earnestly desired to be able to
spend fifty without fear of consequences. Talents such as his merited
maintenance--failing independent means, such maintenance as comes from
marrying money and a wife above suspicion of parsimony. If only he had
been able, or even had cared to behave himself, Mr. Lyttleton's
fortunes might long since have been established on some such
satisfactory basis. But he was sorely handicapped by the weakness of a
sentimental nature; women would persist in falling in love with
him--always, unhappily, women of moderate means. He couldn't help
being sorry for them and seeking to assuage their sufferings; he
couldn't forever be running away from some infatuate female; and so he
was forever being found out and forgiven--by women. Most men, meanly
envious, disliked him; all men held him in pardonable distrust.
Devilish hard luck.

Take this Manwaring girl--pretty, intelligent, artless little woman,
perhaps a bit mature, but fascinating all the same, affectingly naive
about her trouble, which was simply spontaneous combustion, one more
of those first-sight affairs. He had noticed the symptoms immediately,
that night of her introduction to Gosnold House. He hadn't paid much
attention to her during luncheon, and only sought her out--when
they got up, on the spur of the moment, that informal after-dinner
dance by moonlight on the veranda--partly because he happened to
notice her sitting to one side, so obviously longing for him to ask
her, partly because it was his business to dance, and partly
because--well, because it was less dangerous, everything considered,
than dancing with Mrs. Standish.

And then the eloquent treachery of Sally's eyes and that little
gesture of surrender with which she yielded herself to his guidance.
It was really too bad, he thought, especially since she had made
occasion to tell him frankly she hadn't a dollar to bless herself
with. Still, he must give himself credit for behaving admirably; he
hadn't encouraged the girl. Not much, at all events. Of course, it
wasn't in human nature to ignore her entirely after that; moreover, to
slight her would have been conspicuous, not to say uncivil. But one
must draw the line somewhere.

To-night, for example, he had danced with her perhaps too often for
her own good, to say nothing of his own. And they had sat out a dance
or two--awfully old-fashioned custom; went out years ago--still, one
did it, regardless, now and then.

Curious girl, the Manwaring; one moment almost melting into his arms,
the next practically warning him against herself. And curiously
reticent--said she was "Nobody"--let it go at that. Very probably told
the truth; she seemed to know nobody who was anybody; and though she
was apparently very much at her ease most of the time, and not readily
impressed, he noticed now and then a little tensity in her manner, a
covert watchfulness of other women, as though she were waiting for her
cue.

At this juncture in his reverie Mr. Lyttleton peremptorily dismissed
luckless Miss Manwaring from his mind, compounded his nightcap at the
buffet, and joined in the general conversation.

Coincidentally the reverie of Miss Manwaring at her bedchamber window
digressed to review fragmentarily the traffic and discoveries of three
wonderful days.

Days in whose glamorous radiance the romance of Cinderella paled to
the complexion of a sordidly realistic narrative of commonplaces;
contemplating them, Sally, for the sake of her self-conceit, felt
constrained to adopt an aloof, superior, sceptical pose. Conceding
freely the incredible reality of this phase of her history, she none
the less contended that in it no more true permanence inhered than in
a dream.

She recapitulated many indisputable signs of the instability of her
affairs. And of all those the foremost, the most glaring, was her
personal success, at once actual and impossible. She saw herself
(from that remote and weather-beaten coign of scepticism) moving
freely to and fro in the great world of the socially elect,
unhindered, unquestioned, tacitly accepted, meeting, chatting,
treating and parting with its denizens with a gesture of confidence
that was never the gesture of S. Manvers of the Hardware Notions; a
Nobody on terms of equality with indisputable Somebodies--vastly
important Somebodies indeed, for the most part; so much so that by
common consent mankind had created for them a special world within the
world and set it apart for their exclusive shelter and delectation,
for them to live in and have their being untroubled and uncontaminated
by contact with the commonalty.

For all that, Sally couldn't see why they must be so cared for and
catered to. The only thing that apparently distinguished them from
those who lacked their advantages, who looked up reverently to them
and read enviously of their doings in the papers, was their assurance,
a quality ostensibly inimitable; yet she imitated it with seemingly
flawless art. A contradiction that defied her wits to reconcile.

She wasted time in the endeavour; her own personality was
prepossessing; she had sufficient tact never to seek to ingratiate
herself; her solecisms were few and insignificant, and the
introduction of Abigail Gosnold was an unimpeachable credential.

As for her antecedents, the lie which credited her to the city of
Massillon passed unchallenged, while a conspiracy of silence kept
private to the few acquainted with it that hideous secret of her
department-store servitude. Mrs. Gosnold would have said nothing out
of sheer kindness of heart even if it had not been her settled habit
to practise the difficult arts of minding her own business and keeping
her own counsel. Savage was still in New York, but had he been at
Gosnold House would have imitated the example set by his amiable
sister and held his tongue even when most exasperated with Sally. Mr.
Trego, of course, knew no more than what he had been free to surmise
from the girl's impulsive confession that she had been out of both
work and money when befriended by Mrs. Standish; but, whatever his
inferences, he kept them to himself.

A simple, sincere, stubborn soul, this Mr. Trego; so, at least, he
made himself appear to Sally, persistently seeking her and dumbly
offering a friendship which she, in the preoccupation of her grand
passion, had neither time nor wish to cultivate, and which he himself
ingenuously apologised for on the plea of self-defence. He frankly
professed a mortal dread of "these women," one of whom, he averred
mysteriously, was bent on marrying him by main strength and
good-will first time she caught him with lowered guard.

His misgivings were measurably corroborated by the attitude toward
Sally adopted by Mrs. Standish in her capacity as close friend, foil,
and confidant of Mrs. Artemas. In the course of those three days the
girl had not been insensible to intimations of a strong, if as yet
restrained, animus in the mind of the older woman. In alarm and regret
she did her futile best to discourage this gentleman without being
overtly discourteous. She could hardly do more; impossible to explain
to her benefactress that he was not the man of her heart's choice.

Unfortunately, Trego was indifferent to tempered rebuffs.

"If you don't mind," he interrupted one of Sally's protracted snubs,
"I'll just stick around and keep on enjoying the society of a human
being. Of course, I know these others are all human in their way, but
it isn't your way or mine. Perhaps it only seems so to me because I
don't understand 'em. It's quite possible. One thing's sure, they
don't understand me. At least, the women don't; I can get along with
the men--most of 'em. They're not a bad lot, if immature. You can
stand a lot of foolishness from children once you realise their
grown-uppishness is only make-believe."

"They don't know how to enjoy themselves," he expatiated; "they've got
too much of everything, including spare time. What's a holiday to
anybody who has never done a stroke of work? You and I know the
difference; we can appreciate the fun of loafing between spells of
work; but these people have got no standards to measure their fun by,
so it's all the same to them--flat, vapid, monotonous, unless they
season it up with cocktails and carrying on; and even that gets to
have all the same flavour of tastelessness after a while. That's why
so many of these women are going in for the suffragette business; it
isn't that they care a whoop for the vote; it's because they want the
excitement of wanting something they haven't got and can't get by
signing a check for it."

"You're prejudiced," the girl objected. "You're at loose-ends
yourself, idle and restless, and it distorts your mental vision. For
my part, I've never met more charming people--"

"That's your astigmatism," he contended. "You've been wanting this
society thing all your life, and now you've got it you're as pleased
as a child with a new toy. Wait till the paint wears off and it won't
shut its eyes when you put it down on its back and sawdust begins to
leak out at the joints."

"Wouldn't it be more kind of you to leave me to discover the sawdust
for myself?"

"It unquestionably would, and I ought to be kicked," Trego agreed
heartily. "I only started this in fun, anyway, to make you see why it
is you look so good to me--different--so sound and sane and wholesome
that I just naturally can't help pestering you."

She did not know what to say to that. She suffered him. . . .

Her duties as secretary to Mrs. Gosnold proved, when inaugurated the
second morning after her arrival, to be at once light and interesting.
Her employer was conservative enough in an unmannerly age to insist on
answering all personal correspondence with her own hand; what passed
between her and her few intimates was known to herself alone. But she
carried on, in addition, an animated correspondence with numberless
frauds--antique dealers, charities, professional poor relations,
social workers, and others of that ilk--which proved tremendously
diverting to her amanuensis, especially when it transpired that Mrs.
Gosnold had a mind and temper of her own, together with a vocabulary
amply adequate to her powers of ironic observation. This last gift
came out strongly in her diary, a daily record of her various
interests and activities which she dictated, interspersing dry details
with many an acid annotation.

When all was finished Sally found she had been busied for little
more than two hours, and was given to understand that her duties would
be made more burdensome only by the addition of a little light
bookkeeping when she settled down to the routine of regular
employment.

Of the alleged high play, at cards or otherwise, she had yet, at this
third midnight, to see any real evidence. Mrs. Gosnold most
undoubtedly played a stiff game of bridge, but she played it with a
masterly facility, the outcome of long practice and profound study;
her losses, when she lost, were minimised. Nor was there ever a sign
of cheating that came under Sally's observation. Everybody played who
didn't dance, and vice versa, but nobody seemed to play for the mere
sake of winning money. And while the influx of week-end guests by the
Friday evening boat brought the number at Gosnold House up to
twenty-two, they were all apparently amiable, self-centred folk of
long and intimate acquaintance with one another as well as with their
hostess and all her neighbours on the Island. Of that dubious crew of
adventurers she had been led to expect there was never a hint.

Such provision as their hostess made for her guests' entertainment and
amusement they patronised or ignored with equal nonchalance, according
to individual whim; they commanded breakfasts for all hours of the
morning, and they lunched at home and dined abroad, or reversed
the order, or sought all their meals in the homes of neighbouring
friends, quite without notice or apology. Such was the modish manner
of that summer of 1915--a sedulous avoidance of anything resembling
acknowledgment of obligation to those who entertained. Indeed, if one
interpreted their attitude at its face value, the shoe was on the
other foot.

And they brimmed the alleged hollowness of their days with an
extraordinary amount of running about. There was incessant shifting of
interest from one focal point to another of the colony, a perpetually
restless swarming hither and yon to some new centre of distraction, a
continual kaleidoscopic parade of the most wonderful and extravagant
clothing the world has ever seen.

To the outsider, of course, all this was not merely entertaining and
novel, if much as she had imagined it would be, it was more--it was
fascination, it was enchantment, it was the joy of living made
manifest, it was life.

If only this bubble might not burst!

Of course, it must; even if not too good to be true, it was too
wonderful to be enduring; the clock strikes twelve for every
Cinderella, and few are blessed enough to be able to leave behind them
a matchless slipper.

But whatever happened, nothing now could prevent her carrying to
her grave the memory of this one glorious flight: "better to have
loved and lost--" The wraith of an old refrain troubled Sally's
reverie. How did it go? "Now die the dream--"

Saturate with exquisite melancholy, she leaned out over the
window-sill into the warm, still moonlight, drinking deep of the
wine-scent of roses, dwelling upon the image of him whom she loved so
madly.

What were the words again?

  ". . . The past is not in vain,   For wholly as it was your life,
  Can never be again, my dear,   Can never be again."

She shook a mournful head, sadly envisaging the loveliness of the
world through a mist of facile tears; that was too exquisitely, too
poignantly true of her own plight; for, wholly as it was, her life
could never be again.

And not for worlds would she have had it otherwise.

Below, in the deserted drawing-room, a time-mellowed clock chimed
sonorously the hour of two.

Two o'clock of a Sunday morning, and all well; long since Gosnold
House had lapsed into decent silence; an hour ago she had heard the
last laggard footsteps, the last murmured good nights in the
corridor outside her door as the men-folk took themselves reluctantly
off to their beds.

She leaned still farther out over the sill, peering along the gleaming
white facade; no window showed a light that she could see. She
listened acutely; not a sound but the muttering of fretful little
waves and the drowsy complaint of some bird troubled in its sleep.

Of all that heedless human company, it seemed, she alone remained
awake.

Something in that circumstance proved almost resistlessly provocative
to her innate lust for adventure. For upward of two hours she had been
passive there in her chair, a prey to uneasy thoughts; now she was
weary with much thinking, but as far as ever from the wish to sleep;
never, indeed, more wide awake--possessed by a demon of restlessness,
consumed with desire to rise up and go out into the scented moonstruck
night and lose herself in its loneliness and--see what she should see.

Why not? No one need ever know. A staircase at her end of the
corridor--little used except by servants--led to a small door opening
directly upon the terrace. Providing it were not locked and the key
removed, there was no earthly reason why, if so minded, she should not
go quietly forth that way and drink her fill of the night's
loveliness.

To a humour supple to such temptation the tang of lawlessness in
a project innocent enough was irresistible. Besides, what was the
harm? What could be the objection, even were the escapade to be
discovered by misadventure?

Among other items in her collection of borrowed plumage she possessed
an evening wrap, somewhat out of fashion, but eminently adapted to her
purpose--long enough to cloak her figure to the ground, thus
eliminating all necessity for dressing against chance encounter with
some other uneasy soul. Worn with black stockings and slippers, it
would render her almost invisible in shadow.

In another minute, without turning on a light, she had found and
donned those several articles, and from her door was narrowly
inspecting the hallway before venturing a step across the threshold.

It was quite empty and silent, its darkness moderated only by the
single nightlight burning at the head of the main staircase.

Satisfied, she closed the door and crept noiselessly down the steps,
to find the side door not even locked.

Leaving it barely ajar, she stepped out beneath the stars, hesitated
for a moment of cautious reconnaissance, then darted across an open
space of moonlight as swiftly as the shadow of a cloud wind-sped
athwart the moon, and so gained the sheltering shadow of the high
hedge between the formal garden and tennis-court.

The dew-drenched turf that bordered the paths muffled her footsteps as
effectually as could be wished, and keeping circumspectly in shadow,
the better to escape observation from any of the windows, she gained
at length that corner of the terrace overlooking the water where she
and Trego had paused for their first talk.

Nothing now prevented her from appreciating the view to the full.
Enchanted, she withdrew a little way from the brow of the cliff to a
seat on the stone wall, overshadowed by the hedge, and for a long time
sat there motionless, content.

Below her the harbour lay steel-grey and still within its guardian
headlands, a hundred slim, white pleasure craft riding its silent
tide. Far out a Sound steamer crawled like some amphibious glowworm,
its triple tier of deck-lights almost blended into one. Farther still
the lights of the mainland glimmered low upon the horizon. .

At a little distance, from a point invisible, an incautious footstep
grated upon a gravel path of the terrace and was instantly hushed.

But the girl, stiffened to rigidity in her place, fancied she could
hear the whisper of grass beneath stealthy feet.

Abruptly a man came out into broad moonlight and, pausing on a stone
platform at the edge of the cliff by the head of the long, steep,
wooden zigzag of stairs to the sands, looked back toward the
house.

Sally held her breath. But her heart was like a mad thing--the man was
Donald Lyttleton. He still wore evening dress, but had exchanged the
formal coat for that hybrid garment which Sally had lately learned
should _not_ be termed a Tuxedo. The brim of a soft, dark hat masked
his eyes. He carried one shoulder stiffly, as if holding something in
the hollow of his arm. She could not make out or imagine what this
might be.

His hesitation was brief. Satisfied, he swung round to the stairway,
in another instant had vanished. Only light footfalls on the wooden
steps told of a steady descent, and at the same time furnished
assurance that Sally had not victimised herself with a waking vision
bred of her infatuation.

The footfalls, not loud at best, had become inaudible before she found
courage to approach the platform. With infinite pains to avoid a
sound, she peered over the edge of its stone parapet.

For a little the gulf swam giddily beneath her who was never quite
easy at any unusual height. But she set herself with determination to
master this weakness and presently was able to examine the beach with
a clear vision.

It was only partially shadowed by the cliffs, but that shadow was
dense, and outside it nothing stirred. None the less, after a
time she was able to discern Lyttleton's figure kneeling on the sands
at the immediate foot of the cliff, a hundred feet or so to one side
of the steps. And while she watched he rose, stood for a little
staring out to sea, wasted a number of matches lighting a cigarette
(which seemed curious, in view of the unbroken calm) and moved on out
of sight beyond a shoulder of stone.

She waited fully ten minutes; but he did not reappear.

Then, retreating to her seat on the stone wall, she waited as long
again--still no sign of Lyttleton.

But something else marked that second period of waiting that intrigued
her no less than the mysterious actions of her beloved--this although
she could imagine no link between the two.

Some freak of chance drew her attention to a small, dark shape, with
one staring red eye, that was stealing quietly across the Sound in the
middle distance--of indefinite contour against the darkening waters,
but undoubtedly a motor-boat, since there was no wind to drive any
sailing vessel at its pace, or indeed at any pace at all.

While she watched it incuriously it came to a dead pause, and so
remained for several minutes. Then, deliberately, with infinitely
sardonic effect, it winked its single eye of red at her--winked
portentously three times.

She made nothing of that, and in her profound ignorance of all things
nautical might have considered it some curious bit of sea etiquette
had she not, the next instant, caught out of the corner of her eye the
sudden glow of a window lighted in the second story of Gosnold House.

As she turned in surprise the light went out. A pause of perhaps
twenty seconds ensued. Then the window shone out again--one in the
left wing, the wing at the end of which her bedchamber was located.
But when she essayed to reckon the rooms between it and her own it
turned black again, and after another twenty seconds once more shone
out and once more was lightless.

After this it continued stubbornly dark, and by the time Sally gave up
trying to determine precisely which window it had been, and turned her
gaze seaward again, the boat had vanished. Its lights, at least, were
no longer visible, and it was many minutes before the girl succeeded
in locating the blur it made on the face of the waters. It seemed to
be moving, but the distance was so great that she could not be sure
which way.

A signal--yes, obviously; but between whom and for what purpose?

Who was on that boat? And who the tenant of that room of the flashing
window? She was satisfied that the latter was one of a row of six
windows to three rooms occupied by Mrs. Standish, Mrs. Artemas,
and a pretty young widow who had arrived late Saturday afternoon and
whose name Sally had yet to learn.

She pondered it all with ever-deepening perplexity until a change came
over the night--a wind stirred, leaves rattled, boughs soughed
plaintively, the waters wakened and filled the void of silence with
soft clashing. Then, shivering, Sally rose and crept back toward the
house.

But when she paused on the edge of the last shadow, preparatory to the
dash across the moonlit space to the door, a step sounded beside her,
a hand caught at her cloak.

She started back with a stifled cry.

"Steady!" Lyttleton's voice counselled her guardedly. "Don't make a
row! Blessed if it ain't Miss Manwaring!"



CHAPTER IX

PICAROON

Plucking peremptorily at her cloak, Lyttleton drew the girl to him
and, seizing her hand, without further ceremony dragged her round the
clump of shrubbery to a spot secure from observation.

She submitted without a hint of resistance. But she was trembling
violently, and the contact with his hand was as fire to her blood.

Pausing, he stared and laughed uncertainly.

"Of all people!" he said in an undertone. "I never for an instant
thought of you!"

Controlling her voice tolerably, she asked directly: "How did you get
up again without my seeing you?"

"Simply enough--by the steps of the place next door. I saw you
watching me--saw your head over the edge of the landing, black against
the sky--and knew I'd never know who it was, unless by strategy. So I
came up the other way and cut across to head you off."

He added, after a pause, with a semi-apologetic air: "What do you mean
by it, anyway'?"

"What--?"

"Watching me this way--spying on me--?"

"But I didn't mean to. I was as surprised to see you as you were, just
now, to see me."

"Honestly?"

His eyes searched hers suspiciously. Flushing, she endeavoured to
assume some little dignity--drew up, lifted her chin, resumed
possession of her hand.

"Of course," she said in an injured voice.

"Sure Mrs.--sure nobody sent you to spy on me?"

"Mr. Lyttleton!"

"I want to believe you."

"You've no right not to!"

"But what, will you tell me, are you doing out here this time of
night?"

"I came out because I wanted to--I was restless, couldn't sleep."

He reflected upon this doubtfully. "Funny freak," he remarked.

"You're impertinent!"

"I don't mean to be. Forgive me. I'm only puzzled--"

"So am I puzzled," she retorted with spirit. "Suppose you tell me what
you're doing out here at this time of night--down on the
beach--anxious to escape notice. If you ask me, I call that a funnier
freak than mine!"

"Quite so," he agreed soberly; "and a very reasonable retort. Only I
can't tell you. It's--er--a private matter."

"So I presumed--"

"Look here, Miss Manwaring; this is a serious business with me. Give
me your word---"

"What makes that essential? Why do you think I'd lie--to you '?"

It was just that little quaver prefacing her last two words which
precipitated the affair. Otherwise a question natural enough under the
circumstances would have proved innocuous. But for the life of her she
could not control her voice; on those simple words it broke; and so
the question became confession--confession, accusation and challenge
all in, one.

It created first a pause, an instant of breathless suspense, while
Lyttleton stared in doubt and Sally steeled herself, with an effect of
trembling, reluctant, upon the brink of some vast mystery.

Then: "To me?" he said slowly. "You mean me to understand you might
lie to another-but not to me?"

Her response was little better than a gasp: "You know it!"

He acknowledged this with half a nod; he knew it well, too well.

Now she must have seemed very lovely to the man in that moment of
defiance. She saw his eyes lighten with a singular flash, saw his face
darken suddenly in the paling moonlight, and heard the sharp sibilance
of his indrawn breath.

And whether or not it was so, she fancied the wind had fallen, that
the night was hushed once more, and now more profoundly than it had
ever been, as though the very world were standing still in
anticipation.

She heard him cry, almost angrily: "Oh, damn it, I must not!"

And with that she was in his arms, sobbing, panting, going to heaven
against his lips. . . .

Then fell a lull. She was conscious that his embrace relaxed a trifle,
heard the murmur of his consternation: "Oh, this is madness, madness!"

But when she tried to release herself his arms tightened.

"No!" he said thickly, "not now--not after this. Don't. I love you!"

She braced her hands against his breast, struggled, thrust him away
from her, found herself free at last.

"You don't!" she sobbed miserably; "You don't love me. Don't lie to
me! Let me go!"

"Why do you say that? You love me, and I--"

"Don't say it! It isn't true! I know. I threw myself at your head.
What else could you do? You care nothing about me; to you I'm just one
more silly woman. No; let me be, please! You do not love me--you
don't, you don't, you don't!"

He shrugged, relinquished his effort to recapture her, muttered
uncertainly: "Blessed if I know!"

Recovering a little, she drew her hands swiftly across face and eyes
that still burned with his kisses.

"Oh!" she cried brokenly, "why did you--why did I--?"

"What's the good of asking that? It's done now," he argued with a
touch of aggrieved resentment. "I didn't mean--I meant to--I don't
know what I meant. Only--never this."

He took an impatient stride or two in the shelter of the shadow,
turned back to her, expostulant: "It's too bad! I'd have given
worlds--"

"But now I've gone and done it!" she retorted bitterly. In chagrin,
her own indignation mounted. "It is too bad, poor Mr. Lyttleton!"

That was too much; he came closer and grasped her wrist. "Why do you
talk that way to me?" he demanded wrathfully. "What have I done--?"

"You? Nothing!" she broke in, roughly wrenching her hand free in a
fury of humiliation. "Do you ever do anything? Isn't the woman always
the aggressor? Never your fault--of course not! But don't,
please, worry; I shan't ever remind you. You're quite free to go and
forget what's happened as quickly as you like!"

She scrubbed the knuckles of one hand roughly across her quivering
lips. "Forget!" she cried. "Oh, if only I might ever . . . But that's
my penance, the mortification of remembering how I took advantage of
the chivalry of a man who didn't care for me--and couldn't!"

"You don't know that," Lyttleton retorted.

Provoked to imprudence by this sudden contrariety, this strange
inconsistence, he made a futile attempt to regain her hand. "Don't be
foolish. Can't you see I'm crazy about you?"

"Oh, yes!" she laughed, contemptuous.

"You're no fool," he declared hotly. "You know well you can't--a woman
like you--play with a man like me as if he were a child. I tell you
I--"

He checked himself with a firm hand; since, it seemed, she was one who
took such matters seriously. "I'm mad about you," he repeated in a
more subdued tone, "and I'd give anything if . . . Only . . . the
deuce of it is, I can't . . ."

"You can't afford to!" she snapped him up. "Oh, I understand you
perfectly. Didn't I warn you I was penniless? You can't afford to love
a penniless Nobody, can you--a shop-girl masquerading in
borrowed finery! No--please don't look so incredulous; you must have
guessed. Anyway, that's all I am, or was--a shop-girl out of
work--before I was brought here to be Mrs. Gosnold's secretary. And
that's all I'll be to-morrow, or as soon as ever she learns that I way
lay her men guests at all hours and--steal their kisses!"

"She won't learn that from me," said Lyttleton, "not if you hold your
tongue."

She drew back a pace, as though he had made to strike her, and for a
moment was speechless, staring into the new countenance he showed
her--the set, cold mask of the insolent, conquering male. And chagrin
ate at her heart like an acid, so that inwardly she writhed with the
pain of it.

"I--!" she breathed, incredulous. "I hold my tongue! Oh! Do you think
for an instant I'm anxious to advertise my ignominy?"

"It's a bargain, then?" he suggested coolly. "For my part, I don't
mind admitting I'd much rather it didn't ever become known that I,
too, was--let's say--troubled with insomnia to-night. But if you say
nothing, and I say nothing--why, of course--there's not much I
wouldn't do for you, my dear!"

After a little she said quietly: "Of course I deserved this. But I'm
glad now it turned out the way it has. Two minutes ago I was wild with
the shame of making myself so cheap as to let you--of being
such a fool as to dream you would lower yourself to the level of a
woman not what you'd call your social equal, who could so far forget
her dignity as to let you see she cared for you. But, of course, since
I am not that--your peer--but only a shop-girl, I'm glad it's
happened. Because now I understand some things better--you, for
example. I understand you very well now--too well!"

She laughed quietly to his dashed countenance: "Oh, I'm cured, no
fear!" and turned as if to leave him.

He proved, however, unexpectedly loath to let her go.

Such spirit was not altogether new in his experience, but it wasn't
every day one met a girl who had it; whatever her social status, here
was rare fire--or the promise of it. Nor had he undervalued her; he
had suspected as much from the very first; connoisseur that he was,
his flair had not deceived him.

His lips tightened, his eyes glimmered ominously.

And she was, in a way, at his mercy. If what she said of herself were
true, he need only speak a word and she would be as good as thrown
out. Even Abigail Gosnold couldn't protect her, insist on people
inviting a shop-girl to their houses. And if such drudgery were really
what she had come up from, you might be sure she'd break her
heart rather than forfeit all this that she had gained.

And then again she had been all for him from the very first. She had
admitted as much out of her own mouth. Her own mouth, for that matter,
had taken his kisses--and hungrily, or he was no judge of kissing.
Only the surprise of it, his own dumb unreadiness, his unwonted lack
of ingenuity and diplomatics had almost lost her to him. Not quite,
however; it was not yet too late; and though the risk was great, the
penalty heavy if he were discovered pursuing an affair under this
roof, the game was well worth the candle.

Thus Mr. Lyttleton to his conscience; and thus it happened that, when
she turned to go, he stepped quickly to her side and said quietly:
"Oh, please, my dear--one minute."

The unexpected humility of his tone, mixed with the impudence of that
term of endearment, so struck her that she hesitated despite the
counsel of a sound intuition.

"We mustn't part this way--misunderstanding one another," he insisted,
ignoring the hostility in her attitude and modulating his voice to a
tone whose potency often had been proved. "Three words can set me
right with you, if you'll only listen--"

She said frostily: "Well?"

"Three words." He drew still nearer. "I've said them once
to-night. Will you hear them again? No--please listen! I meant what I
said, but I was carried out of myself--clumsy--bungled my meaning. You
misunderstood, misconstrued, and before I could correct you I'd lost
my temper. You said cruel things--just enough, no doubt, from your
point of view--and you put words into my mouth, read thoughts into my
mind that never were there. And I let you do me that injustice because
I'm hot-tempered. And then, I'm not altogether a free agent; I'm not
my own master, quite; and that's difficult to explain. If I could make
you understand--"

Grown a little calmer, she couldn't deny there was something
reasonable in his argument. She really had given him little chance;
impulse and instinct had worked upon her, causing her to jump at
conclusions which, however well founded in fact, were without excuse
in act. If he had kissed her, it wasn't without provocation, nor
against her will; she had got no more than she asked for. The trouble
was, she no longer wanted it. She had been the dupe of her own folly,
by her own romantic bent and the magnetism of the man blinded to the
essentially meretricious spirit clothed in the flesh of his engaging
person.

It had been a simple and perhaps inevitable infatuation of a mind all
too ready to be infatuated, needing heroic treatment--such as she'd
had and blushed to remember--to cure. And the shock of waking
from that mad dream, no less than the shock of physical contact, had
made her frantic and unreasonable. She could but admit that and,
admitting it, be generous enough to let him clear himself.

If only he would not insist on his declaration of love, that she knew
to be untrue, as if the compliment of it must be a balm to a spirit as
bruised as her own!

He went on: "And all this because I seemed to hesitate--because I did
hesitate, knowing I couldn't say all I wanted to. And before I could
explain--"

"You're not married?" she inquired with an absence of emotion that
should have warned him.

"Of course not. But I'm dependent, and good for nothing in a business
way. My income is from my family, and depends on their favour. What
can I say? I love you--I do--on my soul, I do!"

He put his arms once more round her shoulders, and she did not resist
him, but none the less held her head up and back, eying him steadily.

"I love you desperately, but I can't ask you to marry me until I get
the permission of my family. Till then . . . is there any reaso

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