They had been engaged for four months. On the whole Pat found the status highly satisfactory. Everyone heartily approved the match. Because of Monty's college duties, which pressed sorely upon him as he was having constant difficulty in keeping up, they saw little of each other, a fortunate circumstance, as the glamour of her lover's physical beauty and personal charm persisted in her mind when they were separated, creating a romantic figure, to which no special mental attributes were essential. Had they been thrown more constantly together she might have been disillusioned by the torpid and unimaginative quality of his mind. But in their brief association over week-ends they were surrounded by others, and when they were alone his ardent love-making eked out the scantness of his conversational resources. If, sometimes, Cary Scott's words, "companionship, the rarest thing in life or love," recurred to her, arousing unwelcome questions, she put them away. Scott's image had dimmed again, in the hot radiance of this new attraction; she determinedly kept it far in the background. But there was one unrelenting memory which refused to be permanently immured in the past.
When the time for the wedding was set, mid-June immediately after Monty's graduation (if he succeeded in graduating), she realised that she must face that memory and dispose of it, for her own peace of mind. Her uneasy thoughts turned to Dr. Bobs. Perhaps he could lay the ghost.
"Bobs, what do you really think of Monty?" She had gone to his office, nerved up to the interview.
Osterhout considered. "He means well," was his judicial pronunciamento.
"What a rotten thing to say about a girl's best young man! What's the matter with him?"
"Stupid."
"Then you didn't really mean your congratulations."
"Certainly. It's an excellent engagement."
"Am I stupid, Bobs?" she pouted.
"No. But I think you'll be perfectly satisfied with a stupid husband."
"I don't know what makes you sorevoltingto-day!" complained Pat. "I'd be bored to death with a boob around the house, and you know it. He's not stupid."
"If you're satisfied, I am," said the amiable Bobs. "I don't have to live with him. He's a prize beauty all right.Andrich!"
"There you go again. I don't care. (Defiantly) I love Monty, and that's enough. Anyway I didn't come here to talk about him exactly. It's something else. Bobs, do many girls confess to their doctors?"
Osterhout looked up sharply and frowned. Almost word for word Mona had put that same query to him years before. But Pat's face was more child-like, graver, than that of the lovely, laughing, reckless Mona had been.
"Probably more than to their priests," he made reply. "That's what a doctor is for."
"Yes!" she cried eagerly. "Please be just the Fentriss family physician for a few minutes. Make it easy for me, Bobs dear."
Indefinably his manner changed with his next words, became quietly attentive, soothing, almost impersonal ashe said: "Take your time, Pat. And when you're ready, tell me as much or as little as you wish."
"It isn't too easy—even to you. Can't you guess?"
"Ah," said he, after a pause of scrutiny. "So that's it."
"Don't look at me." She put her hands up as if to shield her face from flame. "Just tell me what to do."
"Are you in trouble?"
"Of course," said she impatiently. "Do you think I'd come bothering you—— Oh, no! Notthatway. Though it might have happened. Now youdoknow."
"Go on, Pat."
"Aren't you shocked?" Her eyes darted up at him, at once supplicating and defiant, from out the tangle of her vagrant hair.
"Not a bit. We doctors don't judge. We help."
"Oh, Bobs! Youaredivine. I want to know—it's awfully hard to put it—to know whether—ifhe'llknow—when we're married."
"He?" Osterhout groped in a murk of bewilderment. "Who?"
"Monty, of course. Don't bedumb."
"Monty?Isn't Monty the man?"
"Oh, no!"
For the moment Osterhout was startled clean out of his professional attitude. "Who is?" he said sternly.
Instantly Pat was mutinous. "I won't tell you."
"I'm sorry I asked it. It's none of your doctor's affair who he is. You want me to tell you whether your husband, when you marry, will know that you have had experience before."
"Yes," answered Pat under her breath.
"I'll answer you as I always answer that question."
"Always! Have you had it asked you before?"
A slight, melancholy, tolerant smile lifted the corners of the strong mouth. "My dear, every doctor who has had among his patients specimens of the modern, high-strung girl has had that problem put up to him. The answer is simple; no, he won't know—unless you tell him."
She drew a soft breath of relief, but almost at once her face darkened, as the import of his last words made its way to her quick sensitiveness. "Do you want me to tell him?"
"That is not a question for a physician to answer."
Pat stamped her foot. "Stop being one, then. Be Bobs again. Shall I tell him, Bobs?"
"Has he ever told you anything of that nature?"
"No. Perhaps there isn't anything to tell. Though I don't suppose he's exactly one of them dam' virgins. What do you know about him?"
Osterhout gave himself full time to debate the answer within himself before responding. "There was a raid last year on a notorious roadhouse near here. Several of our best youth—if you reckon them by family—were caught. Montgomery Standish was one of them."
"Ugh!" shuddered Pat. "A vile joint like that! Why didn't you tell me before, Bobs?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "You'd have to go pretty wide of your own set to find a boy with a clean record. Monty is no worse than the rest."
"Whatbeastsmen are!"
"He might say, if he knew anything: 'What crooks girls are!'"
"You don't mean that it's the same thing," said Pat beneath her breath. "He goes to a rotten place, probably drunk——"
"Undoubtedly."
"And—and—— Oh, it makes me sick to think of it! Itisn't the same. I may have been a silly little fool, but—oh, Bobs! Can't you understand?"
"Who was the man, Bambina?"
At the old term of affection her face softened. "Can't you guess, Bobs, dear?" she whispered.
A blinding, burning illumination lighted up his memory of a hundred small, vitally significant facts, against which the sudden certainty stood forth, black and stark.
"Cary Scott, by God!"
Pat's face was set. Her eyes, sombre but fearless, answered him.
"The damned scoundrel!"
"Heisn't."
"Isn't? A man of his age to come into a house as a friend and seduce an innocent child!"
"He didn't seduce me any more than I seduced him."
"Don't talk infernal nonsense."
"It's true; it'strue, and you've got to believe it. It was as much my fault as his."
"Was it your fault that he left you, like a coward?"
"He didn't. I sent him away. He wanted to get free and marry me, and he would have done it if I'd let him. He was terribly in love with me, Bobs. Monty doesn't love me that way. Nobody ever will again."
"Well, why wouldn't you marry him?" queried the amazed physician.
"Oh,Idon't know." She gave her shoulders the childish petulant wriggle of old, again thepetite gamineof Scott's patient love. "He's so old."
"Then why in the name——"
"You're full of whys, Bobs. It happened; that's all. Nobody ever knows why nor how in these things, do they? I—I just lost my footing and drew him with me, if you want the truth of it."
"I'm beginning to believe you. But I still think he's——"
She flattened a hand gently across his lips. "No, you don't. He's the best man I've ever known. Except, perhaps, you, Bobs. If you were in Monty's place and I came to you and told the whole thing you'd marry me anyway, wouldn't you?"
"Yes, of course."
"But you don't think Monty would?"
"I didn't say so. He's very young and—and unformed."
Pat fell into a reverie. "It was really my mind that Cary seduced. He drew my mind into his and—and sort of absorbed it, so that I couldn't get any satisfaction out of other associations. You wouldn't call him a damned scoundrel for that——"
"I'm not so sure I wouldn't."
"—but it's the thing he's most to blame for. It's worse than the other. It goes deeper."
"You're getting profound, Pat, as well as clever." In spite of his perturbation, the doctor smiled. "Though you're talking casuistry."
"I don't know what that is. I'm talking sense. I've almost forgotten that Cary and I were lovers. But there's something way down deep in my mind that he'll never lose his hold on."
"You're in love with him yet, then!"
"I'm not!" she denied vehemently. "I'm in love with Monty. Violently."
"I wish he were ten years older. Or a thousand or so wiser. Then I'd say, 'Tell him the whole thing.' As it is, no. He's marrying your future, not your past. If you're going to play straight with him——"
"Absolutely!" she averred. "I won't look at another man after we're married."
"What about that restlessness of the mind, though?"
"All done with. What's the good? You have more fun if you're stupid.... You were always wanting me to marry somebody old enough to be my grandfather, Bobs, but——"
"Ah, yes," he cut in grimly. "Now you're going to answer me some questions. How came you to know that, about my wanting you to marry a man over thirty?"
"If I tell you, you'll be paralysed."
"Go ahead. Paralyse me."
"I read it in your letters."
"What letters?" he asked, stupefied.
"The ones to Mother. Oh, Bobs, I think they were too flawless. No one but a darling like you could have written them."
"Wait a moment." He put his hand to his head. His science-circumscribed world of materialism was toppling about him. "How did you know about them? That I was writing them? Where to find them?"
"Mother told me."
"Mona? Pat, I want the truth."
"I'm giving it to you. Before she died, when I saw her there in New York, she told me how she had made you promise to write and put the letters in the safe; and the real reason was, not that she thought she would ever come back to read them, but she thought you were the wisest and best man in the world, and she knew how fond you were of all of us, and she wanted me to know what you thought and be guided by what you said. I suppose she figured that you'd say more about me that way than you ever would to me. So you did."
Osterhout gave a great laugh, partly of relief, partly of tenderness. "That's so like Mona! Her passion for intrigue, just for the sake of the game itself; her eternal loving cleverness. There are mighty few people, Pat, in whom affection is a thing of the mind as well as the heart. Your mother was one of them."
"So'm I," asserted Pat promptly. "What's the matter now, Bobs?" For his face had altered again, his brow drawing heavily down, his eyes become still and brooding.
"It won't do, Pat. You're not telling me the truth. Not the whole truth. After your mother died, I changed the combination of the safe."
The girl's laugh had a queer, strained quality. "I know you did. What of it?"
"How could you get the letters to read?"
"I couldn't, at first."
"But you claim that you did. How?"
"Well—it was a dream. At least, it must have been a dream. Or else—I don't know. Mother came back one night and took me by the hand and led me into her room to the safe, and when I woke up the door was open and the numbers of the combination were in my brain as clearly as if someone had just spoken them in my ear."
"Were you frightened, Pat?"
"Not a bit. Isn't it strange? After that I could open it myself, any time."
"Pat, do you really think," he began hoarsely, and stopped.
"Do I think it was her spirit? I don't know. It wassomething."
"It was something," he repeated. "Something from the other side. A lifting of the curtain. For you; not for me. Well," he sighed, "no more letters."
"Why not?"
"Why should there be? Whatever I've got to say to you I can say direct, now that the secret is out. It was really to you that I was writing all the time, so it appears."
"It wasn't. It was to her. How do you know she doesn't know; doesn't read them—and love them? You must keep them up, Bobs."
He shook his head. But his veiled glance roved to the mahogany desk in the corner. Instantly Pat interpreted it:
"There's one there. An unfinished one. Let me read it."
"As you like. It's only just begun. About your engagement. It doesn't matter anyway now. A lost illusion."
From a locked secret drawer he took the letter, only a single sheet. An inspiration came to Pat. "I'm going to add a P. S. May I?"
"Yes."
Seating herself she ran through the few brief words, then wrote busily. Having finished she leaned back in her chair to consider her companion.
"Bobs," she announced with deliberation: "I think I'll let you read what I've written. Shall I?"
He held out his hand. She put the missive into it. He read:
"Dearest: Bobs thinks he is still in love with you. He means to be faithful, poor old boy. But he really loves Dee. She knows it, way inside her; the way women know. And she is coming to care for him, too. That is why she is so shy and stand-offish with him; not a bit like Con and me. But he hasn't the sense to see it. It's time he knew it; that both of them knew it. Poor, brave old Jimmie-jams is going to pass out one of these days, andbe rid of all his pains. He knows it; he told me last week—we're the greatest pals ever—that he wouldn't last a year. There was someone else that Dee was crazy about; but she's given that up. It's over. So when Jimmie-jams passes along it's up to Bobs, if he's a man and not an old fossil, to step forward. Dee's been a widow long enough. That is what you would want for them both, isn't it, dear? I know it is."
"Dearest: Bobs thinks he is still in love with you. He means to be faithful, poor old boy. But he really loves Dee. She knows it, way inside her; the way women know. And she is coming to care for him, too. That is why she is so shy and stand-offish with him; not a bit like Con and me. But he hasn't the sense to see it. It's time he knew it; that both of them knew it. Poor, brave old Jimmie-jams is going to pass out one of these days, andbe rid of all his pains. He knows it; he told me last week—we're the greatest pals ever—that he wouldn't last a year. There was someone else that Dee was crazy about; but she's given that up. It's over. So when Jimmie-jams passes along it's up to Bobs, if he's a man and not an old fossil, to step forward. Dee's been a widow long enough. That is what you would want for them both, isn't it, dear? I know it is."
Osterhout walked over to the window. His face was white, his bulky frame trembling. The betraying sheet of paper fluttered away from his fingers. Suddenly warm arms were about his neck; soft lips were pressed to his cheek; a breath that wavered against his ear like a fragrant breeze of spring formed the words, gaily spoken:
"Oh, Bobs! Who cares a darn for a lost illusion when the reality is so much sweeter!"
From the time when Dr. Osterhout assured her of her secret's safety, Pat knew that she must tell her fiancé, before the wedding. Some quirk of feminine psychology would have justified her in concealment, so long as there was risk. The chances of the game! But to go forward upon the path of marriage in perfect safety and with an unsuspecting mate—that was, in her mind,mean. Curiosity, too, that restless, morbid craving to know what exciting thing would result, pressed her. The daring experimentalist was rampant within her. How would Monty take it? What would he do?
... How should she tell him?...
Opportunity paved the way. A group of her set were at Holiday Knoll on a Saturday evening, discussing the local sensation of the day. Generously measured highballs had been distributed, and in the dim conservatory, lighted only by the glow of cigarettes, they discussed the event. A betrothed girl of another suburb had committed suicide after the breaking of her engagement and gossip ascribed the tragedy to the inopportune discovery of an old love affair. With the freedom of the modern flapper, Margaret Thorne, half lying in the arms of Nick Torrance on the settee, declared the position:
"It was the Teddy Barnaby business. Two years ago we all thought they were engaged."
"Weren't they?" asked someone.
"More or less," asseverated the sprightly Miss Thorne. "Chiefly more, from all accounts. Then Johnny Dupuy came here to live, and she shifted her young affections to him and caught him."
"Do you think he found out about Teddy?"
"Sure—like—a—Bible."
"How?"
"Why pick on me for a hard one like that?"
"Perhaps she told him," suggested one of the other girls.
"She wouldn't be such a boob; no girl would," offered a languid girlish voice.
"It'd be the square thing to do." This was a masculine opinion, and jejune, even for that crowd.
"Don't know—yah!" declared Miss Thorne, meaning to express her contempt for this view. "It was up to Dupuy to look in the mare's mouth before he bought."
The discussion played about the subject with daring sallies and prurient relish, the final conclusion of the majority being that the fiancé had "got wise" and the girl had killed herself because he broke the engagement, "as any fellow would" (Monty Standish's contribution, this last).
"What if she did go to him and own up?" suggested Selden Thorpe.
"It'd be just the same," opined Standish. "He'd have to quit."
"Oh, I don't know. It doesn't follow."
"Wouldn't you?"
"I don't know that I would. It depends."
"You'd be a pretty poor sort of fish if you wouldn't."
"Maybe, if I thought as you do. But we don't all think the same."
"Some of us don't think at all," put in Pat acidly. "We just talk."
"Meaning which, Treechy?" inquired Torrance.
"Oh, nothing!"
"I know John Dupuy," proceeded Thorpe. "He isn't just exactly the one to draw lines too strictly."
"I grant you that Johnnie would never win the diamond-set chastity belt of the world's championship," said the daring Miss Thorne, and elicited a chorus of appreciative mirth.
Pat did not join in it. She was thinking fast and hard.
After the rest had gone Monty stayed on, as of right. Something in Pat's expression struck even his torpid perceptions, as he put his arm around her and drew her to him for the customary "petting party."
"What's all the gloom about, sweetie?"
She released herself not over-gently. "Monty, would you have done what Dupuy did?"
"How do you mean?"
"Broken off your engagement—onthataccount?"
"Why, yes. Any fellow would." A convincing reason, for him.
"Selden Thorpe wouldn't."
"I'll bet he would. He's a bluff. He makes me sick."
"Well—then—you'd better break ours."
"I don't get you, Pat."
"It's been the same with me as with Elsie Dowden. I've been meaning to tell you."
"I don't believe it," he said violently. "It's a try-on. A trick."
"It's true. You've got to believe it."
"Who's the man?" bayed Monty like a huge dog.
"I'll never tell you."
He gathered his powerful frame together as if to spring upon her. If he did, if he beat her to the ground, choked her into helplessness, Pat thought, she would hate him and love him for it. But his rage ebbed, impotent of its culmination, a little pitiful, a little ridiculous.
"Wh-wh-what did you do it for?" It was almost a whimper.
"I don't know. I didn't mean to—at the beginning."
"Did you love him?"
"Yes. I thought I did."
"You love him now," he charged, his fury mounting again.
"I don't! I love you."
"This is a hell of a thing to tell a man you say you love," he faltered plaintively.
"You'd rather I hadn't told you. I'm not built that way! I had to tell."
Instantly he was suspicious. "Had to? Why did youhaveto?"
"Not for any reason that you'd understand." The slight emphasis on the "you" was the first touch of bitterness she had allowed herself.
"Wouldn't he marry you?"
"I wouldn't marry him."
Monty perceptibly brightened. Pat's womanly intuitions, supersensitised by the strain of the contest, told her why. If, to his male standards, she was a maiden despoiled, she was at least not a woman scorned; her rating had gone up sensibly.
"Where is he now?"
"I don't know. I haven't seen him for a long time. I'll never see him again."
"Pat," with an air of resolute magnanimity—"if you'll tell me who it was I'll marry you anyway."
At that her pale cheeks flamed. "I'm not begging you to marry me, Monty. I'm not that cheap in the market."
"Youwantour engagement broken?"
"That's up to you. Absolutely. If you think, nowI've told you, that you're so much better and purer than I am because I've done what I did——"
"What d'you mean, better and purer?"
"I suppose you've never had any affair with any girl——"
"Are you trying to pretend to believe that's the same thing?" His voice was incredulous, contemptuous.
"Why isn't it the same thing?"
Young Mr. Standish suffered a paralysis of scandalised amazement. "Because it isn't! For God's sake! You talk like one of those radical freaks that spout on soapboxes."
"I'm not so sure they aren't right about this man-and-woman thing," declared Pat recklessly. In so speaking she felt that she had broken with conventionalities far more than in anything, however bold, previously enunciated in their talk.
Monty's square jaw became ugly. "I'm giving you your chance. You won't tell me the man's name?"
Pat preserved the silence of obstinacy. It was more convincing than any negative. Also more exasperating.
"Good-night!" bellowed her lover, and strode from the room.
Almost immediately he was back, endued with a sad and noble expression. "Nobody shall ever know about this from me, Pat. You're safe."
For three nights Pat washed her troubled soul with tears. Her family knew that there had been a lovers' quarrel; that was all. Pat waited for Monty to break the engagement formally or send her word that he wished her to break it. Through all her grief of bereavement which, she repeatedly told herself, was the most sorrowful depth that her life had yet touched, that any life could touch,she impatiently awaited the definite solution. Relief from the strain of uncertainty; that was what she craved.
On the fourth evening Monty reappeared. All his nobleness was gone. He was haggard, nerve-racked, forlorn. He threw himself upon her compassion. He implored her. He would forgive everything; he would forget everything; he would make no conditions, if only she would take him back. Life without her——
"All right, Monty-boy," said Pat, really affected by his suffering. "I haven't changed. I love you, Monty. But if ever you let what I've told you make any difference, if ever you speak of it or let me know that you even think of it, I'mthrough. That minute and forever."
Humbly, abjectly, the upholder of man's superior privilege accepted the absurd condition. The stronger nature had completely dominated the weaker.
Back in his arms again, Pat savoured the delicious warmth of a passion the more ardent for the threat of frustration; the triumph of a crisis valorously met and successfully passed. But an encroaching thought tainted the rapture of the moment. What was it that he himself had so confidently said to Selden Thorpe? Was her splendid and beautiful young lover, holding the views which he had proclaimed and surrendering them so readily, indeed "a poor sort of fish"?
Again Pat was happy in her engagement. She frequently and insistently assured herself that she was. Certainly she had no just complaint of Monty. He was all that a lover should be when they were together; he kept to his pact and never in any manner referred to Pat's confession. But when he was away she sometimes wished that he wouldn't write so often, or, at least, expect her to answer so regularly. His letters added nothing to his charm. They innocently bristled with I's; but it was the monotony rather than the egotism of his style that annoyed her. Her answers, at first ardent, vivid and flashing like herself, soon became mere chronicles of petty events, interspersed with protestations of love. They were temporarily genuine enough, these latter, since each time he was with her she was re-warmed in the glow of their mutual passion.
But she could not stifle all misgivings. Incompetent though she was to analyse comprehensively her changeful emotions, she nevertheless had disturbing gleams of self-knowledge which added nothing to her confidence in a future whereof Monty Standish was to be a large part. Pat dimly recognised herself for that difficult and composite type of girlhood which, though imperatively sexed, will never fulfill itself through physical attraction and physical satisfactions alone. For such as she there must be the double response; if the mating be not both mentally and physically sufficient, ultimate disaster is inevitable.
Brooding upon these self-suspicions she would fall into moods of silence and withdrawal puzzling to the matter-of-factlover who would sometimes grow quite petulant over her perfunctory responses to his good-humoured ineffectualities of companionship. Once when he rallied her upon this she burst into angry tears and snapped out: "I'm so dam' worn with piffle and prattle," and darted upstairs.
But at their next meeting she was so prettily contrite and yielding that his vanity was quite soothed.
As the wedding day drew near, Pat dismissed whatever doubts she may have had, in the excitement of fitting-out. It was on one of these shopping expeditions, when she had gone into town by train, her runabout having suffered an attack of nervous breakdown, that, crossing the station plaza she came face to face with an old but unforgotten acquaintance. She saw his keen pleasant face light up, could read in his half-dismayed expression the struggle to remember exactly who she was, and went to him, holding out her hand:
"You've forgotten me, Mr. Warren Graves."
He took the hand. "Indeed, I haven't! It's Pat. Little Pat."
She nodded. "Better than I gave you credit for."
"I'm awfully sorry, but I have forgotten the rest of it."
"Pat'll do," she laughed.
"No; but let me think back."
"Want any help?"
"It was a party, somewhere about here. A corking party. I'd had one drink that I remember and some more that I don't. A funny, delightful kiddie was floating around outside like Cinderella. She wouldn't go in and dance with me, but—let me think——"
"I wouldn't think too far," urged Pat, her face tinged with pink.
"Ah, but I've got the name now!" he cried, triumphant and tactful at once. "Fentriss. Miss Patricia Fentriss, alias Pat, alias the Infant, alias the Demon——"
"What a relieving memory you've got!"
"—who stood at the bend of the stairs and said good-night so sweetly that I never quite got over it. But, I say; youhavegrown up."
He looked at her piquant, provocative, welcoming face and continued, with a gleam of mischief in his eyes:
"Now that I'm recovering from the shock I seem to recall an older sister protruding from a door most inopportunely."
"Aren't you afraid you'll miss your train, Mr. Graves?"
"I'm not going to the train."
"You're carrying that satchel for exercise?"
"I'm wishing it onto the parcels stand while I take a delightful young lady to luncheon."
"Surely you must be keeping her waiting."
"I'm daring to hope she'll come with me while I pry myself from this baggage. Will you, Pat?"
"Oh; you're asking me to lunch with you?"
"Such is my dark and deadly purpose."
"I ought not to. But I want to."
He laughed delightedly. "You haven't changed a bit inside and most marvellously outside. Then you'll come?"
"You'd make a fortune as a mind-reader. There's a condition though."
"Name it; it's agreed to."
"That you'll forget all about that foolishness of ours at the party. I was only fourteen."
It was his turn to flush. "You make me ashamed of myself," he said with such charming sincerity that Pat let fall a friendly and forgiving hand upon his arm for a second. "But let me tell you this. When I left yourhouse that night I was more than a little in love with you. Oh, calf-love, doubtless. But—it makes it a little better, doesn't it?"
"Yes," answered Pat gravely. "It makes it a lot better—for both of us."
"Then we'll forget all of it that you'd wish forgotten," said he.
In her italicised moments Pat would have described the luncheon that followed as "tooenticing." But Pat did not feel stressful in the company of Warren Graves; she felt quiet and attentive, and wonderfully receptive to the breath of the greater world which he brought to her. He had been in the diplomatic service since the war, in several European capitals, had read and thought and mingled with men who were making or marring not the politics alone, but the very geography of the malleable earth. After a little light talk, in which Pat was conscious that he was trying her out, therapprochementof their minds was established and he settled down to talk with her as if she had been a woman of the international world in which he moved. Her swift, apprehensive intelligence kept him up to his best form. As the coffee was finished he said reproachfully:
"You've made me chatter my head off. And I'm supposed to have rather a gift for silence. How do you work your spells?"
"By being sunk in admiring interest," she answered, smiling up at him as she put on her gloves. "You've given me the most delightful hour I've had for years."
"But it needn't end here, need it?" he protested anxiously. "Don't you want to go to a matinée, or something?"
"There aren't any. It's Friday."
"So it is. But there are always the movies."
Pat knew that she ought not to go; there were a dozen important errands to be done. But: "Oh, very well," she said. Duties could wait. Pleasure was something you had to grab before it got away from you. The philosophy of the flapper.
At the "motion picture palace" they got box seats, the chairs suggestively close together. She wondered whether he would try to hold her hand; also whether she would let him if he did. Probably she would; there was no harm in that, and it gave a pleasant sense of companionship. Most of the boys with whom she went to the theatre or movies expected it. Apparently Warren Graves didn't. He made no move in that direction. Piqued a little, nevertheless Pat liked him the better for it. Monty might perhaps have objected if he knew. And, with a start, she discovered that only just then had she thought of Monty Standish. He had been, for the time, quite forgotten in the interest of a more enlivening and demanding association.
What the "serial" of the play was, Pat could hardly have told; "some hurrah about the West," she informed T. Jameson James afterward. At the conclusion of it there came a "news feature," showing scenes about the building where the League of Nations session was being held. Various noted personages appeared, walked with the knee-slung, unnatural stalk of the screen across the space, and vanished. Then it was as if a blinding flash had been projected from the square. An unforgettable figure stood out amidst the crowd, the face turned toward her, the eyes, with the faint ironic lift of the brows, looking down into her soul, arousing a tumult and a throbbing which left her hardly breath enough to gasp out:
"Cary Scott!"
"Do you know Scott?" asked her escort interestedly.
"Yes. He used to visit in Dorrisdale. Do you?"
"Quite well. Everyone on the inside in Europe knows him; he's one of the men who are doing big things under the surface at the conference."
"Tell me," urged Pat as they left the place.
He sketched Scott's career as confidential adviser to several of the most important of the protagonists in that Titans' struggle. "He's a sort of liaison officer, knowing France and this country as he does. He's had a rather rough time of it, lately, poor chap."
"Is he ill?" Pat had a struggle to control her voice.
"No. A domestic smash. His wife—that was—is a demonish sort of female. However, he's got well rid of her now. To be accurate, he let her get rid of him. Over-decent of him, all things considered."
"Perhaps she had cause, too." Pat hated herself as she said it. But she craved to know.
"Nothing of that kind," was the positive reply. "Scott has been living like an anchorite. They say he was hard hit here in America. As to that, I don't know. Certainly he has been devoting himself to his work with no room for any other devotion. Which is more than can be said of his ex-wife."
"I never met her," Pat heard her voice saying, and quite admired it for its tone of casual interest. "She didn't come to Dorrisdale."
"Speaking of Dorrisdale, I'm at Washington for a while. Mayn't I run up to see you?"
"No. I'm afraid not."
"That's a little—disappointing."
"You see, I'm going to be terribly busy until my wedding."
"Wedding? Oh! All my felicitations. I didn't know."
"Yes. I'm to be married to Monty Standish next month."
Even as her lips spoke the words her soul denied them. In the dominant depths of her, she knew that she could never marry Monty Standish now. Her thoughts, so lightly detached from her fiancé by the easy charm of Warren Graves, had been claimed, coerced, irrevocably absorbed by the swift-passing phantom presentment of her former lover. The bond created when she had given herself to him was as nothing compared to this imperative summons across the spaces.
After a night of passionate struggle, succeeded by resolute thinking, she wired Monty to come on. When he came, she broke the engagement. It was ruthless, cruel, unfair. Pat had no excuses, no extenuations to offer. She simply stood firm. Monty returned to college, failed of his graduation, and let it be known among his indignant friends and relatives that Pat had ruined his career. Hot and righteous though his wrath was, he never so much as hinted at Pat's secret. Stupid, unstable, self-satisfied, spoiled; the plaster idol of an athlete-worshipping age; but nevertheless a gentleman within whom one flame of honour burned clear and constant behind its dull encasement.
Pat's family variously raged, begged, and protested. Pat let them. They prophesied social ostracism for her. She shrugged away the suggestion as improbable in the first place and not worth worrying about anyway. But she would have gone away had it not been for her self-assumed responsibility to her broken brother-in-law. And it was from him that her main support came. From the first he stood by her unquestioning.
"You're awfully good to me, Jimmie-jams," she said one day as she was wheeling him in the garden, havingdismissed the attendant. "What did you really think when I told you I wasn't going to marry Monty?"
A smile of justified cleverness lighted up his pain-worn face. "I'd never thought that you would."
"Cute little Jimmie! Why not?"
"Too much brains. He'd never keep you interested and you found it out in time."
"Not too soon," observed the girl with a grimace. "The family are still raising merry Hades about it."
"Naturally. You don't think you're entitled to any Sunday-school award for good behaviour on the thing, do you?"
"No. I don't," admitted Pat. But she pouted.
A silence fell between them. It lasted for a full turn around the garden. Tired of pouting, Pat broke it.
"Want to play bezique, Jimmie?"
"No."
"Want me to read to you?"
"No, dear."
"What the devil do you want? Oh, I'm sorry, Jimmie! I believe I've got nerves. Never knew there were such things before."
"Pat, stop the chair."
"What's the idea, Jimmie?"
"Come around here where I can see you."
"As per order."
"I know the man."
"What man?"
"The other man."
"I've been acquainted with several of 'em in my life."
"So I've been given to understand. I'm talking about the man on whose account you broke your engagement."
"You're seeing things, Jimmie. Monty himself is the nigger in that woodpile."
"What about Cary Scott?"
The look with which she faced him did not waver. "Well, what about him?"
"He's coming back."
"Coming back? Here?" Still her eyes were steady, but there was the faintest catch in her breathing.
"Well, no; he isn't. I just said that as an experiment. Though, of course, he might come if you wanted him. You do want him, don't you, Pat dear?"
"Sometimes. Other times I don't. How did you know?"
"When you've nothing to do but think," he explained, "you get tired of thinking about yourself by and by and begin to think about other people. I've been thinking a lot about you since we got to be pals."
"You're a dear, Jimmie-jams."
"I'm an old crab. But I'm fond of you. And Scott was good to me, too, when I was first laid up. When you think hard enough about people you're fond of you begin to see things about them, even things they may not see, themselves."
"Even things that maybe aren't there at all," she mocked.
"This is there," he asseverated. "There's no use your pretending. When we talk I'm always catching echoes of Scott's influence in what you say. You're a different Pat from what you were before you knew him. I don't think you get on so well with yourself."
"Youareclever, Jimmie. I don't. And it makes me furious."
"At him?"
"Yes. I don't know. At myself, too."
"I had a letter from him last week. We've carried on a desultory correspondence since he left."
Pat's eyes livened. "What does he say about me?"
"How do you know he says anything about you?"
"Don't tease. Tell Pattie."
"You ought to know Scott well enough to realise that he isn't the sort to display his feelings in a show window. But there are lines that one could read between. Have you written to him, Pat?"
"No."
"Aren't you going to send for him?"
Her face darkened with troubled memories. "I couldn't. You don't understand. I couldn't, Jimmie."
"I could write."
"You shan't. You mustn't; if you do I'll hate you. Promise."
"All right. I promise. But don't you really want to see him ever again?"
"Sometimes I think I'll die if I don't," she said simply. "Other times—I don't know."
"Why not find out? Won't you let me write?"
"No; no. You've promised."
"Very well. I'll keep to it. Take me inside, slave."
He did not write. He cabled.
Faint spice of budding clematis was fragrant in the air at Holiday Knoll. On her way to the street Pat passed through the arbour with a little, warm shiver of recollection. How long ago that other October seemed, that night when, amidst the scents and seductions of the year's late warmth she had opened her arms and her lips to Cary Scott in that first, unforgettable red kiss of their passion; how far away; how deep buried under other, varied experiences! Would he ever come back? It was many weeks since James had talked of him, suggesting the possibility, and the subject had not again been brought up. Would she really want him back if she could have him? And what would she do with him if he came? Or he with her? Or fate with them both? Pat had become a good deal of a fatalist. It was a convenient theory and dovetailed neatly with her religion, enabling her to compound with her conscience at the smallest expense of self-blame. Fate, she felt, had saved her from marrying Monty Standish, which was a large count to its credit.
Chiefly because of Monty she was now going down to the village. For he was due back after a long absence for repairs to his damaged heart, and the local old cats had prophesied that Pat would leave town, for a time anyway, "if she possesses a grain of decent feeling." Pat purposed to do nothing of the sort. Neither Monty Standish nor any other living specimen of the male sex could run her off the public streets! For excuse she had some marketing to do, and she set forth with her most nonchalant air and independent shoulder swing. She'dshow 'em whether she was ashamed or afraid to meet Monty! After pervading the town for a while she would run over for her daily chatter with Jimmie-jams. Jimmie was growing very frail and weary and had a look of eager, anxious expectancy, these days. Pat thought that she knew what he was waiting for. There would be a big void in her life when Jimmie got his release.
Emerging from the fruit shop where she hoped to find an avocado pear for him, she saw a man standing on the curb. His back was turned, but there was that in the set of his shoulders, the slender grace of the figure, the poise of the head which startled her heart to one great throb of excited delight. Here, indeed, was relief from dull days, food for that greed of excitement, of "thrill," which life had not yet begun to sate for her.
"Mist-er Scott!"
He whirled about. His face lighted up. Taking the hand which she held out, he said, with the old, mocking half-lift of the brows:
"Still that, Pat?"
"What are you doing in Dorrisdale?"
"I've just been telephoning Miss Patricia Fentriss."
"She's out."
"So I was informed. I begin to suspect it's true."
Both laughed. Pat, quite charmed with herself for the light and easy manner in which she was carrying off this potentially difficult situation, committed the error of looking up into his eyes. There she read a hunger and a want that made her avert her gaze. She sought hurriedly for something to say.
"I didn't even know that you were in this country."
"I wasn't until last night." He had fallen into step beside her.
"I was going to the Jameses'," she remarked a little lamely. "I go there every morning."
"Yes; I know. James has written me. You make life bearable for him. It's rather wonderful of you, Pat."
"I like to go there," she said in disclaimer of his praise. "Will you come with me?"
"Yes; if I may."
For two squares that was his only remark. Pat grew restless.
"You're not too conversational," she complained.
"I was thinking," he said quietly; "how very lovely you've grown."
"Have I, Cary?" The soft echo of the old, throaty crow was in her voice. "I ought to be a ruin. I've had troubles enough."
"Troubles? You? Haven't you been well?"
"D'you think that's the only kind of trouble a girl can have? There are others! I came near having the worst of 'em four months ago."
"Why then?"
"Date of my wedding," said Pat briefly, with intent to create a sensation. She failed.
"Yes; I heard you were to have been married," he remarked calmly.
"And the rest of it?"
"That you broke off your engagement? Yes."
"Who told you?"
"I found a letter when the ship docked. From James."
Pat's eyes snapped with suspicion. "Did Jimmie write you to come back here? From Europe, I mean."
"He cabled."
"Jimmie's a—— Never mind what he is. I'll tell him to his face, when we get there."
But when they got there T. Jameson James, it seemed, was not feeling very brisk. Well enough to have them come up to his room; oh, yes, that; and warmly glad to see Scott again. After a few moments' talk, however, hedisplayed symptoms of weariness. He even hinted that he would be better off for the time without visitors.
Pat, with the perverseness of her excitement and anticipations, insisted on staying to read to her brother-in-law as usual. This he vetoed outright.
"No. I don't want you. I'm sleepy. Take Scott over to the Knoll for luncheon. He's probably famished. And Dee had to go to town, so there's nothing to be had here. Run along."
Her hand being thus forced, Pat issued the invitation, and she and Scott left the sick-room. But they had not reached the front door when she turned and darted upstairs again. Throwing herself down by the cripple's couch she caught his head to her bosom and cherished it there.
"Oh, Jimmie! You promise-breaker. You old liar! I adore you." She pressed a swift kiss on his cheek and was gone.
Mr. T. Jameson James made a face at the Devil and chuckled himself to sleep.
Rejoining Scott outside Pat commanded: "Tell me everything you've been doing in the big, big world."
He was unprotestingly obedient, cheerfully impersonal throughout the walk to the Knoll. But never had she been more conscious of the quiet compulsion of his charm. Her arms ached for him. They entered the house by the side door. Instinctively Pat turned toward the conservatory, but some inexplicable revulsion of feeling checked her.
"No; not there," she said. "Let's go to the library."
No sooner had the door closed behind them, than she turned to his embrace not so much yielding to as claiming him back. After the long kiss she stood away from him, but with her hands still clinging upon his shoulders.
"That makes it seem all real again," she breathed.
"Have you grown so far away from me as that, my darling?"
"Well, I was going to marry Monty Standish, you know," she reminded him.
"Yes. Why didn't you?"
"I couldn't. You were in the way."
"Pat! That's what I've feared and dreaded more than——"
"Wait. It isn't what you think. And it isn't all. Before I was engaged to Monty I ran away with a boy to Boston. And you spoiled that."
"I don't understand," he said dully.
"I left him before—well, before anything. Because"—she whirled away from him, flung herself upon the lounge, and blew him an airy kiss—"because I happened to think of you at the wrong time. Or perhaps it was the right time. Anyway, his collar gaped. Like a sick fish. And yours always set so beautifully. So I beat it." She was allpetite gaminenow. "You're always getting in my way, Cary. Aren't you 'shamed?"
He smiled at her his little twisted, tolerant smile. "You don't change much, do you, little Pat?"
"Oh, I'm fer-rightfully changed. Much more serious. Years older. Lost my girlish illusions. All that sorta thing. You won't like me nearly as much, you're so serious yourself." Her eyes blazed with enjoyment of the situation and the excitement of his proximity. "Most of the time I haven't believed it, though. Have you?"
"Believed what, Pat?"
"About us. All of it, I mean. That we were—lovers. It got to seem like a dream to me; something way, far off. In another life. Or like something that had happened to some other girl. It didn't seem real to me, not even when I told Monty."
"Ah, you told him?"
"Had to. What'd you think I'd do?"
"Knowing your courage and honour, that's what I'd think you'd do."
The hard, excited glitter softened out of her eyes. "I knew you'd want me to, Cary. Of course I never told him who the man was."
"And is that what——"
"What broke the engagement? It did for a while. Then he came back. But I couldn't stand it. Nothing above the ears, Cary. It wasn't even the First Dreaming for me. You remember what you said that day you drove me over to Cissie's about my marrying, and about keeping you in the background of my mind?"
"Yes."
"But you don't stay there," she complained childishly. "You're always popping out and spoiling things." She gave him a challenging look. "I was sort of keeping you for my Second Dreaming."
Scott laughed. "Pat, dearest, are you flirting with me after I've come four thousand miles——"
"What did you come for?"
"For you."
Her loosely clasped hands stirred and parted. "Well—here I am."
"That's not enough."
"You don't want much, do you?" she murmured.
"Everything or nothing now. You know I'm free."
She nodded. "I can see what's coming," she said with a pretence of demureness. "If you've hopped across those four thousand miles from a sense of duty to the weeping girl that you left behind——"
"Pat!"
"Don't bark at me. It frazzles my nerves. I haven't done any weeping over you, Cary. Too busy with the thrills of life. Would you have come back, I wonder, ifyou could have known everything that's been going on. Suppose I'd stayed in Boston that time?"
"Well?"
"Wouldn't that make a difference?"
"In my wanting to marry you? No."
"Suppose," she said more slowly, "I'd had an affair, a real affair with Monty. Like ours."
A spasm of pain passed over his face. "I shouldn't blame you. How could I?"
"Wouldn't it make any difference in your loving me?"
"Not an iota."
"Wouldn't you evencare?" she flashed in resentful wrath.
"Care? Good God, Pat, if you saw a man in torture——"
"Oh, don't, Cary, dear," she cried, startled and remorseful. "It isn't true. It's just my sneaking, rotten curiosity to know how you'd feel about it." She pursed her lips, musing darkly. "I wonder," she began. "Have you been true to me? Not that I've got any right to ask or that it makes a bit of difference in my young life whether you have or not, but just——"
She broke off, leaning forward, studying his face as he looked at her in silence.
"Cary!Why don't you say something? Iwouldcare. I'd care like hell."
"I came back," he said slowly, "because you are the one and only woman in the world for me and always have been since I saw you. Is that enough answer?"
"From any other man in the world it wouldn't be an answer at all. From you it's enough."
"Will you marry me, Pat?"
She jumped to her feet, walked over to the window, and looked out to where the clematis blooms trembled in the wind.
"Oh, I suppose so," she said fretfully. "If you want to take the chance."
"What chance, dear love?"
"The chance every man takes that marries a girl of the kind you men all seem to want to marry. How many of the married set here d'you suppose are true to their husbands?"
"I don't like you cynical, Pat. You've been letting something poison your mind."
"Not me. I see things as they are; that's all. Ask Con. Ask Dee. Ask Bobs. Ask any of 'em. You know you could have had Con if you'd really wanted her. And then I butted in." Her chuckle was full of diablerie. It still persisted in her tone as she continued: "Cary, what would you do to me if I went straying off the reservation after we were married?"
"Nothing."
"Oh, don't be so calm and superior and noble about it," she fretted. "You'd tempt an angel to try a flutter just to see whether she would get by with it."
"What do you want me to say, Pat?"
"I want you to tell me honestly how you think you're going to hold me if I do marry you."
"Come over here."
She walked across to him, defiant, daring, provocative. "Well?"
"You love me, don't you, Pat?"
"You make me when you're with me."
"And when I'm not?"
"That's just the trouble. You're there all the time, parked just around the corner and you won't let me love anybody else enough to—to do any good."
"And if I asked you now," he said, low and insistent, "you'd come back to me and be to me what you were before. Wouldn't you?"
There was a quickening in her shadowed eyes, in her soft breathing. "You know I would," she whispered. "How could I help myself?"
"Then you couldn't very well marry anyone else, could you?"
"I've tried. It was a fliv, as you know. What's the answer?"
"Isn't it plain enough? Why not try me—on your own terms?"
"Where do you get that 'own term' stuff, Cary?" she demanded suspiciously. "Do you know about Dee and Jimmie; their arrangement?"
"No."
"It's a secret. But you belong to us," she added sweetly; "to the Fentrisses. So I'll tell you. They were to stay married for a month and after that if either of them wanted to quit, they were just to live like unmarried people without any fuss. Only Jimmie wouldn't keep to it. That's what made the row."
"Would you like to try that plan?" he asked in an inscrutable tone.
"Would you do it?" She looked at him doubtfully. "Would you really let me go after a month if I wanted to?"
"After a day. Do you think I'd try to hold you against your wish?"
"Then I don't think you can love me much," she objected with perverse jealousy.
"It strikes me as a perfectly fair bargain to both. I certainly ought to be willing to take the chance," he said reasonably, "if you are."
"IfIam! Cary! You mean that you—might—want—to leaveme?" A startled incredulity made the words jerky.
"One can never be quite certain how these things aregoing to turn out, can one?" he observed with a fine air of judicial detachment. "Shall I have my lawyer draw the agreement?"
"Cary; you're laughing at me," she accused.
"Far be it from me, in a matter of such serious import——"
"You are! You're hateful! It isn't fair. You know that's the way to hold me and you know you don't mean to let me get loose for a single minute. I don't like your knowing so dam' much about women," she continued plaintively. "It makes it so uneven."
"I'm trying to be fair," he pointed out. He drew a chair up to the writing desk. "Suppose I just sketch out the scheme. 'This agreement,' he dictated to himself, speaking the words slowly, 'between Patricia Fentriss——'"
"Scott," she interposed.
"—Scott—thank you, dearest—and—Cary—Scott—for—the—space—of—one—month—after——"
She bent across his shoulder, put a soft hand over his mouth, then slipped it aside to make place for the yearning of her own lips. When she finally leaned back from him it was to say judicially:
"I offer an amendment. Let's make it twenty years instead of a month. But, oh, Cary, darling!" Her eyes darkened, brooded, dreamed, grew sombre, subtle, prophetic as she gave voice to her warning. "As a husband you'll have to be a terribly on-the-job lover. There are so many men in the world!"
FINIS