When a Man Marries by Mary Roberts RinehartOr Seven Days (page 3)

explode–under Aunt Selina.

I was sunk in dejected reverie when some one came on the roof. When he was opposite the opening in the tent, I saw Mr. Harbison, and at that moment he saw me. He paused uncertainly, then he made an evident effort and came over to me.

“You are–better today?”

“Quite well, thank you.”

“I am glad you find the tent useful. Does it keep off the wind?”

“It is quite a shelter”–frigidly.

He still stood, struggling for something to say. Evidently nothing came to his mind, for he lifted the cap he was wearing, and turning away, began to work with the wiring of the roof. He was clever with tools; one could see that. If he was a professional gentleman-burglar, no doubt he needed to be. After a bit, finding it necessary to climb to the parapet, he took off his coat, without even a glance in my direction, and fell to work vigorously.

One does not need to like a man to admire him physically, any more than one needs to like a race horse or any other splendid animal. No one could deny that the man on the parapet was a splendid animal; he looked quite big enough and strong enough to have tossed his slender bridge across the gulf to the next roof, without any difficulty, and coordinate enough to have crossed on it with a flourish to safety.

Just then there was a rending, tearing sound from the corner and a muttered ejaculation. I looked up in time to see Mr. Harbison throw up his arms, make a futile attempt to regain his balance, and disappear over the edge of the roof. One instant he was standing there, splendid, superb; the next, the corner of the parapet was empty, all that stood there was a broken, splintered post and a tangle of wires.

I could not have moved at first; at least, it seemed hours before the full significance of the thing penetrated my dazed brain. When I got up I seemed to walk, to crawl, with leaden weights holding back my feet.

When I got to the corner I had to catch the post for support. I knew somebody was saying, “Oh, how terrible!” over and over. It was only afterward that I knew it had been myself. And then some other voice was saying, “Don’t be alarmed. Please don’t be frightened. I’m all right.”

I dared to look over the parapet, finally, and instead of a crushed and unspeakable body, there was Mr. Harbison, sitting about eight feet below me, with his feet swinging into space and a long red scratch from the corner of his eye across his cheek. There was a sort of mansard there, with windows, and just enough coping to keep him from rolling off.

“I thought you had fallen–all the way,” I gasped, trying to keep my lips from trembling. “I–oh, don’t dangle your feet like that!”

He did not seem at all glad of his escape. He sat there gloomily, peering into the gulf beneath.

“If it wasn’t so–er–messy and generally unpleasant,” he replied without looking up, “I would slide off and go the rest of the way.”

“You are childish,” I said severely. “See if you can get through the window behind you. If you can not, I’ll come down and unfasten it.” But the window was open, and I had a chance to sit down and gather up the scattered ends of my nerves. To my surprise, however, when he came back he made no effort to renew our conversation. He ignored me completely, and went to work at once to repair the damage to his wires, with his back to me.

“I think you are very rude,” I said at last. “You fell over there and I thought you were killed. The nervous shock I experienced is just as bad as if you had gone–all the way.”

He put down the hammer and came over to me without speaking. Then, when he was quite close, he said:

“I am very sorry if I startled you. I did not flatter myself that you would be profoundly affected, in any event.”

“Oh, as to that,” I said lightly, “it makes me ill for days if my car runs over a dog.” He looked at me in silence. “You are not going to get up on that parapet again?”

“Mrs. Wilson,” he said, without paying the slightest attention to my question, “will you tell me what I have done?”

“Done?”

“Or have not done? I have racked my brains–stayed awake all of last night. At first I hoped it was impersonal, that, womanlike you were merely venting general disfavor on one particular individual. But–your hostility is to me, personally.”

I raised my eyebrows, coldly interrogative.

“Perhaps,” he went on calmly–“perhaps I was a fool here on the roof–the night before last. If I said anything that I should not, I ask your pardon. If it is not that, I think you ought to ask mine!”

I was angry enough then.

“There can be only one opinion about your conduct,” I retorted warmly. “It was worse than brutal. It–it was unspeakable. I have no words for it–except that I loathe it–and you.”

He was very grim by this time. “I have heard you say something like that before–only I was not the unfortunate in that case.”

“Oh!” I was choking.

“Under different circumstances I should be the last person to recall anything so–personal. But the circumstances are unusual.” He took an angry step toward me. “Will you tell me what I have done? Or shall I go down and ask the others?”

“You wouldn’t dare,” I cried, “or I will tell them what you did! How you waylaid me on those stairs there, and forced your caresses, your kisses, on me! Oh, I could die with shame!”

The silence that followed was as unexpected as it was ominous. I knew he was staring at me, and I was furious to find myself so emotional, so much more the excited of the two. Finally, I looked up.

“You can not deny it,” I said, a sort of anti-climax.

“No.” He was very quiet, very grim, quite composed. “No,” he repeated judicially. “I do not deny it.”

He did not? Or he would not? Which?

Chapter XIV. ALMOST, BUT NOT QUITE

Dal had been acting strangely all day. Once, early in the evening, when I had doubled no trump, he led me a club without apology, and later on, during his dummy, I saw him writing our names on the back of an envelope, and putting numbers after them. At my earliest opportunity I went to Max.

“There is something the matter with Dal, Max,” I volunteered. “He has been acting strangely all day, and just now he was making out a list–names and numbers.”

“You’re to blame for that, Kit,” Max said seriously. “You put washing soda instead of baking soda in those biscuits today, and he thinks he is a steam laundry. Those are laundry lists he’s making out. He asked me a little while ago if I wanted a domestic finish.”

Yes, I had put washing soda in the biscuits. The book said soda, and how is one to know which is meant?

“I do not think you are calculated for a domestic finish,” I said coldly as I turned away. “In any case I disclaim any such responsibility. But–there is SOMETHING on Dal’s mind.”

Max came after me. “Don’t be cross, Kit. You haven’t said a nice word to me today, and you go around bristling with your chin up and two red spots on your cheeks–like whatever-her-name-was with the snakes instead of hair. I don’t know why I’m so crazy about you; I always meant to love a girl with a nice disposition.”

I left him then. Dal had gone into the reception room and closed the doors. And because he had been acting so strangely, and partly to escape from Max, whose eyes looked threatening, I followed him. Just as I opened the door quietly and looked in, Dallas switched off the lights, and I could hear him groping his way across the room. Then somebody–not Dal–spoke from the corner, cautiously.

“Is that you, Mr. Brown, sir?” It was Flannigan.

“Yes. Is everything here?”

“All but the powder, sir. Don’t step too close. They’re spread all over the place.”

“Have you taken the curtains down?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Matches?”

“Here, sir.”

“Light one, will you, Flannigan? I want to see the time.”

The flare showed Dallas and Flannigan bent over the timepiece. And it showed something else. The rug had been turned back from the windows which opened on the street, and the curtains had been removed. On the bare hardwood floor just beneath the windows was an array of pans of various sizes, dish pans, cake tins, and a metal foot tub. The pans were raised from the floor on bricks, and seemed to be full of paper. All the chairs and tables were pushed back against the wall, and the bric-a-brac was stacked on the mantel.

“Half an hour yet,” Dal said, closing his watch. “Plenty of time, and remember the signal, four short and two long.”

“Four short and two long–all right, sir.”

“And–Flannigan, here’s something for you, on account.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Dal turned to go out, tripped over the rug, said something, and passed me without an idea of my presence. A moment later Flannigan went out, and I was left, huddled against the wall, and alone.

It was puzzling enough. “Four long and two short!” “All but the powder!” Not that I believed for a moment what Max had said, and anyhow Flannigan was the sanest person I ever saw in my life. But it all seemed a part of the mystery that had been hanging over us for several days. I felt my way across the room and knelt by the pans. Yes, they were there, full of paper and mounted on bricks. It had not been a delusion.

And then I straightened on my knees suddenly, for an automobile passing under the windows had sounded four short honks and two long ones. The signal was followed instantly by a crash. The foot bath had fallen from its supports, and lay, quivering and vibrating with horrid noises at my feet. The next moment Mr. Harbison had thrown open the door and leaped into the room.

“Who’s there?” he demanded. Against the light I could see him reaching for his hip pocket, and the rest crowding up around him.

“It’s only me,” I quavered, “that is, I. The–the dish pan upset.”

“Dish pan!” Bella said from back in the crowd. “Kit, of course!”

Jim forced his way through then and turned on the lights. I have no doubt I looked very strange, kneeling there on the bare floor, with a row of pans mounted on bricks behind me, and the furniture all piled on itself in a back corner.

“Kit! What in the world–!” Jim began, and stopped. He stared from me to the pans, to the windows, to the bric-a-brac on the mantel, and back to me.

I sat stonily silent. Why should I explain? Whenever I got into a foolish position, and tried to explain, and tell how it happened, and who was really to blame, they always brought it back to ME somehow. So I sat there on the floor and let them stare. And finally Lollie Mercer got her breath and said, “How perfectly lovely; it’s a charade!”

And Anne guessed “kitchen” at once. “Kit, you know, and the pans and–all that,” she said vaguely. At that they all took to guessing! And I sat still, until Mr. Harbison saw the storm in my eyes and came over to me.

“Have you hurt your ankle?” he said in an undertone. “Let me help you up.”

“I am not hurt,” I said coldly, “and even if I were, it would be unnecessary to trouble you.”

“I can not help being troubled,” he returned, just as evenly. “‘You see, it makes me ill for days if my car runs over a dog.'”

Luckily, at that moment Dal came in. He pushed his way through the crowd without a word, shut off the lights, crashed through the pans and slammed the shutters closed. Then he turned and addressed the rest.

“Of all the lunatics–!” he began, only there was more to it than that. “A fellow goes to all kinds of trouble to put an end to this miserable situation, and the entire household turns out and sets to work to frustrate the whole scheme. You LIKE to stay here, don’t you, like chickens in a coop? Where’s Flannigan?”

Nobody understood Dal’s wrath then, but it seems he meant to arrange the plot himself, and when it was ripe, and the hour nearly come, he intended to wager that he could break the quarantine, and to take any odds he could get that he would free the entire party in half an hour. As for the plan itself, it was idiotically simple; we were perfectly delighted when we heard it. It was so simple and yet so comprehensive. We didn’t see how it COULD fail. Both the Mercer girls kissed Dal on the strength of it, and Anne was furious. Jim was not so much pleased, for some reason or other, and Mr. Harbison looked thoughtful rather than merry. Aunt Selina had gone to bed.

The idea, of course, was to start an embryo fire just inside the windows, in the pans, to feed it with the orange-fire powder that is used on the Fourth of July, and when we had thrown open the windows and yelled “fire” and all the guards and reporters had rushed to the front of the house, to escape quietly by a rear door from the basement kitchen, get into machines Dal had in waiting, and lose ourselves as quickly as we could.

You can see how simple it was.

We were terribly excited, of course. Every one rushed madly for motor coats and veils, and Dal shuffled the numbers so the people going the same direction would have the same machine. We called to each other as we dressed about Mamaroneck or Lakewood or wherever we happened to have relatives. Everybody knew everybody else, and his friends. The Mercer girls were going to cruise until the trouble blew over, the Browns were going to Pinehurst, and Jim was going to Africa to hunt, if he could get out of the harbor.

Only the Harbison man seemed to have no plans; quite suddenly with the world so near again, the world of country houses and steam yachts and all the rest of it, he ceased to be one of us. It was not his world at all. He stood back and watched the kaleidoscope of our coats and veils, half-quizzically, but with something in his face that I had not seen there before. If he had not been so self-reliant and big, I would have said he was lonely. Not that he was pathetic in any sense of the word. Of course, he avoided me, which was natural and exactly what I wished. Bella never was far from him and at the last she loaded him with her jewel case and a muff and traveling bag and asked him to her cousins’ on Long Island. I felt sure he was going to decline, when he glanced across at me.

“Do go,” I said, very politely. “They are charming people.” And he accepted at once!

It was a transparent plot on Bella’s part: Two elderly maiden ladies, house miles from anywhere, long evenings in the music room with an open fire and Bella at the harp playing the two songs she knows.

When we were ready and gathered in the kitchen, in the darkness, of course, Dal went up on the roof and signaled with a lantern to the cars on the drive. Then he went downstairs, took a last look at the drawing room, fired the papers, shook on the powder, opened the windows and yelled “fire!”

Of course, huddled in the kitchen we had heard little or nothing. But we plainly heard Dal on the first floor and Flannigan on the second yelling “fire,” and the patter of feet as the guards ran to the front of the house. And at that instant we remembered Aunt Selina!

That was the cause of the whole trouble. I don’t know why they turned on me; she wasn’t my aunt. But by the time we had got her out of bed, and had wrapped her in an eiderdown comfort, and stuck slippers on her feet and a motor veil on her head, the glare at the front of the house was beginning to die away. She didn’t understand at all and we had no time to explain. I remember that she wanted to go back and get her “plate,” whatever that may be, but Jim took her by the arm and hurried her along, and the rest, who had waited, and were in awful tempers, stood aside and let them out first.

The door to the area steps was open, and by the street lights we could see a fence and a gate, which opened on a side street. Jim and Aunt Selina ran straight for the gate; the wind blowing Aunt Selina’s comfort like a sail. Then, with our feet, so to speak, on the first rungs of the ladder of Liberty, it slipped. A half-dozen guards and reporters came around the house and drove us back like sheep into a slaughter pen. It was the most humiliating moment of my life.

Dal had been for fighting a way through, and just for a minute I think I went Berserk myself. But Max spied one of the reporters setting up a flash light as we stood, undecided, at the top of the steps, and after that there was nothing to do but retreat. We backed down slowly, to show them we were not afraid. And when we were all in the kitchen again, and had turned on the lights and Bella was crying with her head against Mr. Harbison’s arm, Dal said cheerfully,

“Well, it has done some good, anyhow. We have lost Aunt Selina.”

And we all shook hands on it, although we were sorry about Jim. And Dal said we would have some champagne and drink to Aunt Selina’s comfort, and we could have her teeth fumigated and send them to her. Somebody said “Poor old Jim,” and at that Bella looked up.

She stared around the group, and then she went quite pale.

“Jim!” she gasped. “Do you mean–that Jim is–out there too?”

“Jim and Aunt Selina!” I said as calmly as I could for joy. You can see how it simplified the situation for me. “By this time they are a mile away, and going!”

Everybody shook hands again except Bella. She had dropped into a chair, and sat biting her lip and breathing hard, and she would not join in any of the hilarity at getting rid of Aunt Selina. Finally she got up and knocked over her chair.

“You are a lot of cowards,” she stormed. “You deserted them out there, left them. Heaven knows where they are–a defenseless old woman, and–and a man who did not even have an overcoat. And it is snowing!”

“Never mind,” Dal said reassuringly. “He can borrow Aunt Selina’s comfort. Make the old lady discard from weakness. Anyhow, Bella, if I know anything of human nature, the old lady will make it hot enough for him. Poor old Jim!”

Then they shook hands again, and with that there came a terrible banging at the door, which we had locked.

“Open the door!” some one commanded. It was one of the guards.

“Open it yourself!” Dallas called, moving a kitchen table to reenforce the lock.

“Open that door or we will break it in!”

Dallas put his hands in his pockets, seated himself on the table, and whistled cheerfully. We could hear them conferring outside, and they made another appeal which was refused. Suddenly Bella came over and confronted Dallas.

“They have brought them back!” she said dramatically. “They are out there now; I distinctly heard Jim’s voice. Open that door, Dallas!”

“Oh, DON’T let them in!” I wailed. It was quite involuntary, but the disappointment was too awful. “Dallas, DON’T open that door!”

Dal swung his feet and smiled from Bella to me.

“Think what a solution it is to all our difficulties,” he said easily. “Without Aunt Selina I could be happy here indefinitely.”

There was more knocking, and somebody–Max, I think–said to let them in, that it was a fool thing anyhow, and that he wanted to go to bed and forget it; his feet were cold. And just then there was a crash, and part of one of the windows fell in. The next blow from outside brought the rest of the glass, and–somebody was coming through, feet first. It was Jim.

He did not speak to any of us, but turned and helped in a bundle of red and yellow silk comfort that proved to be Aunt Selina, also feet first. I had a glimpse of a half-dozen heads outside, guards and reporters. Then Jim jerked the shade down and unswathed Aunt Selina’s legs so that she could walk, offered his arm, and stalked past us and upstairs, without a word!

None of us spoke. We turned out the lights and went upstairs and took off our wraps and went to bed. It had been almost a fiasco.

Chapter XV. SUSPICION AND DISCORD

Every one was nasty the next morning. Aunt Selina declared that her feet were frost-bitten and kept Bella rubbing them with ice water all morning. And Jim was impossible. He refused to speak to any of us and he watched Bella furtively, as if he suspected her of trying to get him out of the house.

When luncheon time came around and he had shown no indication of going to the telephone and ordering it, we had a conclave, and Max was chosen to remind him of the hour. Jim was shut in the studio, and we waited together in the hall while Max went up. When he came down he was somewhat ruffled.

“He wouldn’t open the door, he reported, “and when I told him it was meal time, he said he wasn’t hungry, and he didn’t give a whoop about the rest of us. He had asked us here to dinner; he hadn’t proposed to adopt us.”

So we finally ordered luncheon ourselves, and about two o’clock Jim came downstairs sheepishly, and ate what was left. Anne declared that Bella had been scolding him in the upper hall, but I doubted it. She was never seen to speak to him unnecessarily.

The excitement of the escape over, Mr. Harbison and I remained on terms of armed neutrality. And Max still hunted for Anne’s pearls, using them, the men declared, as a good excuse to avoid tinkering with the furnace or repairing the dumb waiter, which took the queerest notions, and stopped once, half-way up from the kitchen, for an hour, with the dinner on it. Anyhow, Max was searching the house systematically, armed with a copy of Poe’s Purloined Letter and Gaboriau’s Monsieur LeCoq. He went through the seats of the chairs with hatpins, tore up the beds, and lifted rugs, until the house was in a state of confusion. And the next day, the fourth, he found something–not much, but it was curious. He had been in the studio, poking around behind the dusty pictures, with Jimmy expostulating every time he moved anything and the rest standing around watching him.

Max was strutting.

“We get it by elimination,” he said importantly. “The pearls being nowhere else in the house, they must be here in the studio. Three parts of the studio having yielded nothing, they must be in the fourth. Ladies and gentlemen, let me have your attention for one moment. I tap this canvas with my wand–there is nothing up my sleeve. Then I prepare to move the canvas–so. And I put my hand in the pocket of this disreputable velvet coat, so. Behold!”

Then he gave a low exclamation and looked at something he held in his hand. Every one stepped forward, and on his palm was the small diamond clasp from Anne’s collar!

Jimmy was apoplectic. He tried to smile, but no one else did.

“Well, I’ll be flabbergasted!” he said. “I say, you people, you don’t think for a minute that I put that thing there? Why, I haven’t worn that coat for a month. It’s–it’s a trick of yours, Max.”

But Max shook his head; he looked stupefied, and stood gazing from the clasp to the pocket of the old painting coat. Betty dropped on a folding stool, that promptly collapsed with her and created a welcome diversion, while Anne pounced on the clasp greedily, with a little cry.

“We will find it all now,” she said excitedly. “Did you look in the other pockets, Max?”

Then, for the first time, I was conscious of an air of constraint among the men. Dallas was whistling softly, and Mr. Harbison, having rescued Betty, was standing silent and aloof, watching the scene with non-committal eyes. It was Max who spoke first, after a hurried inventory of the other pockets.

“Nothing else,” he said constrainedly. “I’ll move the rest of the canvases.”

But Jim interfered, to every one’s surprise.

“I wouldn’t, if I were you, Max. There’s nothing back there. I had em out yesterday.” He was quite pale.

“Nonsense!” Max said gruffly. “If it’s a practical joke, Jim, why don’t you fess up? Anne has worried enough.”

“The pearls are not there, I tell you,” Jim began. Although the studio was cold, there were little fine beads of moisture on his face. “I must ask you not to move those pictures.” And then Aunt Selina came to the rescue; she stalked over and stood with her back against the stack of canvases.

“As far as I can understand this,” she declaimed, “you gentlemen are trying to intimate that James knows something of that young woman’s jewelry, because you found part of it in his pocket. Certainly you will not move the pictures. How do you know that the young gentleman who said he found it there didn’t have it up his sleeve?”

She looked around triumphantly, and Max glowered. Dallas soothed her, however.

“Exactly so,” he said. “How do we know that Max didn’t have the clasp up his sleeve? My dear lady, neither my wife nor I care anything for the pearls, as compared with the priceless pearl of peace. I suggest tea on the roof; those in favor–? My arm, Miss Caruthers.”

It was all well enough for Jim to say later that he didn’t dare to have the canvases moved, for he had stuck behind them all sorts of chorus girl photographs and life-class crayons that were not for Aunt Selina’s eye, besides four empty siphons, two full ones, and three bottles of whisky. Not a soul believed him; there was a a new element of suspicion and discord in the house.

Every one went up on the roof and left him to his mystery. Anne drank her tea in a preoccupied silence, with half-closed eyes, an attitude that boded ill to somebody. The rest were feverishly gay, and Aunt Selina, with a pair of arctics on her feet and a hot-water bottle at her back, sat in the middle of the tent and told me familiar anecdotes of Jimmy’s early youth (had he known, he would have slain her). Betty and Mr. Harbison had found a medicine ball, and were running around like a pair of children. It was quite certain that neither his escape from death nor my accusation weighed heavily on him.

While Aunt Selina was busy with the time Jim had swallowed an open safety pin, and just as the pin had been coughed up, or taken out of his nose–I forget which–Jim himself appeared and sulkily demanded the privacy of the roof for his training hour.

Yes, he was training. Flannigan claimed to know the system that had reduced the president to what he is, and he and Jim had a seance every day which left Jim feeling himself for bruises all evening. He claimed to be losing flesh; he said he could actually feel it going, and he and Flannigan had spent an entire afternoon in the cellar three days before with a potato barrel, a cane-seated chair and a lamp.

The whole thing had been shrouded in mystery. They sandpapered the inside of the barrel and took out all the nails, and when they had finished they carried it to the roof and put it in a corner behind the tent. Everybody was curious, but Flannigan refused any information about it, and merely said it was part of his system. Dal said that if HE had anything like that in his system he certainly would be glad to get rid of it.

At a quarter to six Jim appeared, still sullen from the events of the afternoon and wearing a dressing gown and a pair of slippers, Flannigan following him with a sponge, a bucket of water and an armful of bath towels. Everybody protested at having to move, but he was firm, and they all filed down the stairs. I was the last, with Aunt Selina just ahead of me. At the top of the stairs, she turned around suddenly to me.

“That policeman looks cruel,” she said. “What’s more, he’s been in a bad humor all day. More than likely he’ll put James flat on the roof and tramp on him, under pretense of training him. All policemen are inhuman.”

“He only rolls him over a barrel or something like that,” I protested.

“James had a bump like an egg over his ear last night,” Aunt Selina insisted, glaring at Flannigan’s unconscious back. “I don’t think it’s safe to leave him. It is my time to relax for thirty minutes, or I would watch him. You will have to stay,” she said, fixing me with her imperious eyes.

So I stayed. Jim didn’t want me, and Flannigan muttered mutiny. But it was easier to obey Aunt Selina than to clash with her, and anyhow I wanted to see the barrel in use.

I never saw any one train before. It is not a joyful spectacle. First, Flannigan made Jim run, around and around the roof. He said it stirred up his food and brought it in contact with his liver, to be digested.

Flannigan, from meekness and submission, of a sort, in the kitchen, became an autocrat on the roof.

“Once more,” he would say. “Pick up your feet, sir! Pick up your feet!”

And Jim would stagger doggedly past me, where I sat on the parapet, his poor cheeks shaking and the tail of his bath robe wrapping itself around his legs. Yes, he ran in the bath robe in deference to me. It seems there isn’t much to a running suit.

“Head up,” Flannigan would say. “Lift your knees, sir. Didn’t you ever see a horse with string halt?”

He let him stop finally, and gave him a moment to get his breath. Then he set him to turning somersaults. They spread the cushions from the couch in the tent on the roof, and Jim would poke his head down and say a prayer, and then curve over as gracefully as a sausage and come up gasping, as if he had been pushed off a boat.

“Five pounds a day; not less, sir,” Flannigan said encouragingly. “You’ll drop it in chunks.”

Jim looked at the tin as if he expected to see the chunks lying at his feet.

“Yes,” he said, wiping the back of his neck. “If we’re in here thirty days that will be one hundred and fifty pounds. Don’t forget to stop in time, Flannigan. I don’t want to melt away like a candle.”

He was cheered, however, by the promise of reduction.

“What do you think of that, Kit?” he called to me. “Your uncle is going to look as angular as a problem in geometry. I’ll–I’ll be the original reductio ad absurdum. Do you want me to stand on my head, Flannigan? Wouldn’t that reduce something?”

“Your brains, sir,” Flannigan retorted gravely, and presented a pair of boxing gloves. Jim visibly quailed, but he put them on.

“Do you know, Flannigan,” he remarked, as he fastened them, “I’m thinking of wearing these all the time. They hide my character.”

Flannigan looked puzzled, but he did not ask an explanation. He demanded that Jim shed the bath robe, which he finally did, on my promise to watch the sunset. Then for fully a minute there was no sound save of feet running rapidly around the roof, and an occasional soft thud. Each thud was accompanied by a grunt or two from Jim. Flannigan was grimly silent. Once there was a smart rap, an oath from the policeman, and a mirthless chuckle from Jim. The chuckle ended in a crash, however, and I turned. Jim was lying on his back on the roof, and Flannigan was wiping his ear with a towel. Jim sat up and ran his hand down his ribs.

“They’re all here,” he observed after a minute. “I thought I missed one.”

“The only way to take a man’s weight down,” Flannigan said dryly.

Jim got up dizzily.

“Down on the roof, I suppose you mean,” he said.

The next proceedings were mysterious. Flannigan rolled the barrel into the tent, and carried in a small glass lamp. With the material at hand he seemed to be effecting a combination, no new one, to judge by his facility. Then he called Jim.

At the door of the tent Jim turned to me, his bathrobe toga fashion around his shoulders.

“This is a very essential part of the treatment,” he said solemnly. “The exercise, according to Flannigan, loosens up the adipose tissue. The next step is to boil it out. I hope, unless your instructions compel you, that you will at least have the decency to stay out of the tent.”

“I am going at once,” I said, outraged. “I’m not here because I’m mad about it, and you know it. And don’t pose with that bath robe. If you think you’re a character out of Roman history, look at your legs.”

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said sulkily. “Only I’m tired of having you choked down my throat every time I open my mouth, Kit. And don’t go just yet. Flannigan is going for my clothes as soon as he lights the–the lamp, and–somebody ought to watch the stairs.”

That was all there was to it. I said I would guard the steps, and Flannigan, having ignited the combination, whatever it was, went downstairs. How was I to know that Bella would come up when she did? Was it my fault that the lamp got too high, and that Flannigan couldn’t hear Jim calling? Or that just as Bella reached the top of the steps Jim should come to the door of the tent, wearing the barrel part of his hot-air cabinet, and yelling for a doctor?

Bella came to a dead stop on the upper step, with her mouth open. She looked at Jim, at the inadequate barrel, and from them she looked at me. Then she began to laugh, one of her hysterical giggles, and she turned and went down again. As Jim and I stared at each other we could hear her gurgling down the hall below.

She had violent hysterics for an hour, with Anne rubbing her forehead and Aunt Selina burning a feather out of the feather duster under her nose. Only Jim and I understood, and we did not tell. Luckily, the next thing that occurred drove Bella and her nerves from everybody’s mind.

At seven o’clock, when Bella had dropped asleep and everybody else was dressed for dinner, Aunt Selina discovered that the house was cold, and ordered Dal to the furnace.

It was Dal’s day at the furnace; Flannigan had been relieved of that part of the work after twice setting fire to a chimney.

In five minutes Dal came back and spoke a few words to Max, who followed him to the basement, and in ten minutes more Flannigan puffed up the steps and called Mr. Harbison.

I am not curious, but I knew that something had happened. While Aunt Selina was talking suffrage to Anne–who said she had always been tremendously interested in the subject, and if women got the suffrage would they be allowed to vote?–I slipped back to the dining room.

The table was laid for dinner, but Flannigan was not in sight. I could hear voices from somewhere, faint voices that talked rapidly, and after a while I located the sounds under my feet. The men were all in the basement, and something must have happened. I flew back to the basement stairs, to meet Mr. Harbison at the foot. He was grimy and dusty, with streaks of coal dust over his face, and he had been examining his revolver. I was just in time to see him slip it into his pocket.

“What is the matter?” I demanded. “Is any one hurt?

“No one,” he said coolly. “We’ve been cleaning out the furnace.”

“With a revolver! How interesting–and unusual!” I said dryly, and slipped past him as he barred the way. He was not pleased; I heard him mutter something and come rapidly after me, but I had the voices as a guide, and I was not going to be turned back like a child. The men had gathered around a low stone arch in the furnace room, and were looking down a short flight of steps, into a sort of vault, evidently under the pavement. A faint light came from a small grating above, and there was a close, musty smell in the air.

“I tell you it must have been last night,” Dallas was saying. “Wilson and I were here before we went to bed, and I’ll swear that hole was not there then.”

“It was not there this morning, sir,” Flannigan insisted. “It has been made during the day.”

“And it could not have been done this afternoon,” Mr. Harbison said quietly. “I was fussing with the telephone wire down here. I would have heard the noise.”

Something in his voice made me look at him, and certainly his expression was unusual. He was watching us all intently while Dallas pointed out to me the cause of the excitement. From the main floor of the furnace room, a flight of stone steps surmounted by an arch led into the coal cellar, beneath the street. The coal cellar was of brick, with a cement floor, and in the left wall there gaped an opening about three feet by three, leading into a cavernous void, perfectly black–evidently a similar vault belonging to the next house.

The whole place was ghostly, full of shadows, shivery with possibilities. It was Mr. Harbison finally who took Jim’s candle and crawled through the aperture. We waited in dead silence, listening to his feet crunching over the coal beyond, watching the faint yellow light that came through the ragged opening in the wall. Then he came back and called through to us.

“Place is locked, over here,” he said. “Heavy oak door at the head of the steps. Whoever made that opening has done a prodigious amount of labor for nothing.”

The weapon, a crowbar, lay on the ground beside the bricks, and he picked it up and balanced it on his hand. Dallas’ florid face was almost comical in his bewilderment; as for Jimmy–he slammed a piece of slag at the furnace and walked away. At the door he turned around.

“Why don’t you accuse me of it?” he asked bitterly. “Maybe you could find a lump of coal in my pockets if you searched me.”

He stalked up the stairs then and left us. Dallas and I went up together, but we did not talk. There seemed to be nothing to say. Not until I had closed and locked the door of my room did I venture to look at something that I carried in the palm of my hand. It was a watch, not running–a gentleman’s flat gold watch, and it had been hanging by its fob to a nail in the bricks beside the aperture.

In the back of the watch were the initials, T.H.H. and the picture of a girl, cut from a newspaper.

It was my picture.

Chapter XVI. I FACE FLANNIGAN

Dinner waited that night while everybody went to the coal cellar and stared at the hole in the wall, and watched while Max took a tracing of it and of some footprints in the coal dust on the other side.

I did not go. I went into the library with the guilty watch in the fold of my gown, and found Mr. Harbison there, staring through the February gloom at the blank wall of the next house, and quite unconscious of the reporter with a drawing pad just below him in the area-way. I went over and closed the shutters before his very eyes, but even then he did not move.

“Will you be good enough to turn around?” I demanded at last.

“Oh!” he said wheeling. “Are YOU here?”

There wasn’t any reply to that, so I took the watch and placed it on the library table between us. The effect was all that I had hoped. He stared at it for an instant, then at me, and with his hand outstretched for it, stopped.

“Where did you find it?” he asked. I couldn’t understand his expression. He looked embarrassed, but not at all afraid.

“I think you know, Mr. Harbison,” I retorted.

“I wish I did. You opened it?”

“Yes.”

We stood looking at each other across the table. It was his glance that wavered.

“About the picture–of you,” he said at last. “You see, down there in South America, a fellow hasn’t much to do in the evenings, and a–a chum of mine and I–we were awfully down on what we called the plutocrats, the–the leisure classes. And when that picture of yours came in the paper, we had–we had an argument. He said–” He stopped.

“What did he say?”

“Well, he said it was the picture of an empty-faced society girl.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed.

“I–I maintained there were possibilities in the face.” He put both hands on the table, and, bending forward, looked down at me. “Well, I was a fool, I admit. I said your eyes were kind and candid, in spite of that haughty mouth. You see, I said I was a fool.”

“I think you are exceedingly rude,” I managed finally. “If you want to know where I found your watch, it was down in the coal cellar. And if you admit you are an idiot, I am not. I–I know all about Bella’s bracelet–and the board on the roof, and–oh, if you would only leave–Anne’s necklace–on the coal, or somewhere–and get away–“

My voice got beyond me then, and I dropped into a chair and covered my face. I could feel him staring at the back of my head.

“Well, I’ll be–” something or other, he said finally, and then he turned on his heel and went out. By the time I got my eyes dry (yes, I was crying; I always do when I am angry) I heard Jim coming downstairs, and I tucked the watch out of sight. Would anyone have foreseen the trouble that watch would make!

Jim was sulky. He dropped into a chair and stretched out his legs, looking gloomily at nothing. Then he got up and ambled into his den, closing the door behind him without having spoken a word. It was more than human nature could stand.

When I went into the den he was stretched on the davenport with his face buried in the cushions. He looked absolutely wilted, and every line of him was drooping.

“Go on out, Kit,” he said, in a smothered voice. “Be a good girl and don’t follow me around.”

“You are shameless!” I gasped. “Follow you! When you are hung around my neck like a–like a–” Millstone was what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t think of it.

He turned over and looked up from his cushions like an ill-treated and suffering cherub.

“I’m done for, Kit,” he groaned. “Bella went up to the studio after we left, and investigated that corner.”

“What did she find? The necklace?” I asked eagerly. He was too wretched to notice this.

“No, that picture of you that I did last winter. She is crazy–she says she is going upstairs and sit in Takahiro’s room and take smallpox and die.”

“Fiddlesticks!” I said rudely, and somebody hammered on the door and opened it.

“Pardon me for disturbing you,” Bella said, in her best dear-me-I’m-glad-I-knocked manner. “But–Flannigan says the dinner has not come.”

“Good Lord!” Jim exclaimed. “I forgot to order the confounded dinner!”

It was eight o’clock by that time, and as it took an hour at least after telephoning the order, everybody looked blank when they heard. The entire family, except Mr. Harbison, who had not appeared again, escorted Jim to the telephone and hung around hungrily, suggesting new dishes every minute. And then–he couldn’t raise Central. It was fifteen minutes before we gave up, and stood staring at one another despairingly.

“Call out of a window, and get one of those infernal reporters to do something useful for once,” Max suggested. But he was indignantly hushed. We would have starved first. Jim was peering into the transmitter and knocking the receiver against his hand, like a watch that had stopped. But nothing happened. Flannigan reported a box of breakfast food, two lemons, and a pineapple cheese, a combination that didn’t seem to lend itself to anything.

We went back to the dining room from sheer force of habit and sat around the table and looked at the lemonade Flannigan had made. Anne WOULD talk about the salad her last cook had concocted, and Max told about a little town in Connecticut where the restaurant keeper smokes a corn-cob pipe while he cooks the most luscious fried clams in America. And Aunt Selina related that in her family they had a recipe for chicken smothered in cream. And then we sipped the weak lemonade and nibbled at the cheese.

“To change this gridiron martyrdom,” Dallas said finally, “where’s Harbison? Still looking for his watch?”

“Watch!” Everybody said it in a different tone.

“Sure,” he responded. “Says his watch was taken last night from the studio. Better get him down to take a squint at the telephone. Likely he can fix it.”

Flannigan was beside me with the cheese. And at that moment I felt Mr. Harbison’s stolen watch slip out of my girdle, slide greasily across my lap, and clatter to the floor. Flannigan stooped, but luckily it had gone under the table. To have had it picked up, to have had to explain how I got it, to see them try to ignore my picture pasted in it–oh, it was impossible! I put my foot over it.

“Drop something?” Dallas asked perfunctorily, rising. Flannigan was still half kneeling.

“A fork,” I said, as easily as I could, and the conversation went on. But Flannigan knew, and I knew he knew. He watched my every movement like a hawk after that, standing just behind my chair. I dropped my useless napkin, to have it whirled up before it reached the floor. I said to Betty that my shoe buckle was loose, and actually got the watch in my hand, only to let it slip at the critical moment. Then they all got up and went sadly back to the library, and Flannigan and I faced each other.

Flannigan was not a handsome man at any time, though up to then he had at least looked amiable. But now as I stood with my hand on the back of my chair, his face grew suddenly menacing. The silence was absolute. I was the guiltiest wretch alive, and opposite me the law towered and glowered, and held the yellow remnant of a pineapple cheese! And in the silence that wretched watch lay and ticked and ticked and ticked. Then Flannigan creaked over and closed the door into the hall, came back, picked up the watch, and looked at it.

“You’re unlucky, I’m thinkin’,” he said finally. “You’ve got the nerve all right, but you ain’t cute enough.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I quavered. “Give me that watch to return to Mr. Harbison.”

“Not on your life,” he retorted easily. “I give it back myself, like I did the bracelet, and–like I’m going to give back the necklace, if you’ll act like a sensible little girl.”

I could only choke.

“It’s foolish, any way you look at it,” he persisted. “here you are, lots of friends, folks that think you’re all right. Why, I reckon there isn’t one of them that wouldn’t lend you money if you needed it so bad.”

“Will you be still?” I said furiously. “Mr. Harbison left that watch–with me–an hour ago. Get him, and he will tell you so himself!”

“Of course he would,” Flannigan conceded, looking at me with grudging approval. “He wouldn’t be what I think he is, if he didn’t lie up and down for you.” There were voices in the hall. Flannigan came closer. “An hour ago, you say. And he told me it was gone this morning! It’s a losing game, miss. I’ll give you twenty-four hours and then–the necklace, if you please, miss.”

Chapter XVII. A CLASH AND A KISS

The clash that came that evening had been threatening for some time. Take an immovable body, represented by Mr. Harbison and his square jaw, and an irresistible force, Jimmy and his weight, and there is bound to be trouble.

The real fault was Jim’s. He had gone entirely mad again over Bella, and thrown prudence to the winds. He mooned at her across the dinner table, and waylaid her on the stairs or in the back halls, just to hear her voice when she ordered him out of her way. He telephoned for flowers and candy for her quite shamelessly, and he got out a book of photographs that they had taken on their wedding journey, and kept it on the library table. The sole concession he made to our presumptive relationship was to bring me the responsibility for everything that went wrong, and his shirts for buttons.

The first I heard of the trouble was from Dal. He waylaid me in the hall after dinner that night, and his face was serious.

“I’m afraid we can’t keep it up very long, Kit,” he said. “With Jim trailing Bella all over the house, and the old lady keener every day, it’s bound to come out somehow. And that isn’t all. Jim and Harbison had a set-to today–about you.”

“About me!” I repeated. “Oh, I dare say I have been falling short again. What was Jim doing? Abusing me?”

Dal looked cautiously over his shoulder, but no one was near.

“It seems that the gentle Bella has been unusually beastly today to Jim, and–I believe she’s jealous of you, Kit. Jim followed her up to the roof before dinner with a box of flowers, and she tossed them over the parapet. She said, I believe, that she didn’t want his flowers; he could buy them for you, and be damned to him, or some lady-like equivalent.”

“Jim is a jellyfish,” I said contemptuously. “What did he say?”

“He said he only cared for one woman, and that was Bella; that he never had really cared for you and never would, and that divorce courts were not unmitigated evils if they showed people the way to real happiness. Which wouldn’t amount to anything if Harbison had not been in the tent, trying to sleep!”

Dal did not know all the particulars, but it seems that relations between Jim and Mr. Harbison were rather strained. Bella had left the roof and Jim and the Harbison man came face to face in the door of the tent. According to Dal, little had been said, but Jim, bound by his promise to me, could not explain, and could only stammer something about being an old friend of Miss Knowles. And Tom had replied shortly that it was none of his business, but that there were some things friendship hardly justified, and tried to pass Jim. Jim was instantly enraged; he blocked the door to the roof and demanded to know what the other man meant. There were two or three versions of the answer he got. The general purport was that Mr. Harbison had no desire to explain further, and that the situation was forced on him. But if he insisted–when a man systematically ignored and neglected his wife for some one else, there were communities where he would be tarred and feathered.

“Meaning me?” Jim demanded, apoplectic.

“The remark was a general one,” Mr. Harbison retorted, “but if you wish to make a concrete application–!”

Dal had gone up just then, and found them glaring at each other, Jim with his hands clenched at his sides, and Mr. Harbison with his arms folded and very erect. Dal took Jim by the elbow and led him downstairs, muttering, and the situation was saved for the time. But Dal was not optimistic.

“You can do a bit yourself, Kit,” he finished. “Look more cheerful, flirt a little. You can do that without trying. Take Max on for a day or so; it would be charity anyhow. But don’t let Tom Harbison take into his head that you are grieving over Jim’s neglect, or he’s likely to toss him off the roof.”

“I have no reason to think that Mr. Harbison cares one way or the other about me,” I said primly. “You don’t think he’s–he’s in love with me, do you, Dal?” I watched him out of the corner of my eye, but he only looked amused.

“In love with you!” he repeated. “Why bless your wicked little heart, no! He thinks you’re a married woman! It’s the principle of the thing he’s fighting for. If I had as much principle as he has, I’d–I’d put it out at interest.”

Max interrupted us just then, and asked if we knew where Mr. Harbison was.

“Can’t find him,” he said. “I’ve got the telephone together and have enough left over to make another. Where do you suppose Harbison hides the tools? I’m working with a corkscrew and two palette knives.”

I heard nothing more of the trouble that night. Max went to Jim about it, and Jim said angrily that only a fool would interfere between a man and his wife–wives. Whereupon Max retorted that a fool and his wives were soon parted, and left him. The two principals were coldly civil to each other, and smaller issues were lost as the famine grew more and more insistent. For famine it was.

They worked the rest of the evening, but the telephone refused to revive and every one was starving. Individually our pride was at low ebb, but collectively it was still formidable. So we sat around and Jim played Grieg with the soft stops on, and Aunt Selina went to bed. The weather had changed, and it was sleeting, but anything was better than the drawing room. I was in a mood to battle with the elements or to cry–or both–so I slipped out, while Dal was reciting “Give me three grains of corn, mother,” threw somebody’s overcoat over my shoulders, put on a man’s soft hat–Jim’s I think–and went up to the roof.

It was dark in the third floor hall, and I had to feel my way to the foot of the stairs. I went up quietly, and turned the knob of the door to the roof. At first it would not open, and I could hear the wind howling outside. Finally, however, I got the door open a little and wormed my way through. It was not entirely dark out there, in spite of the storm. A faint reflection of the street lights made it possible to distinguish the outlines of the boxwood plants, swaying in the wind, and the chimneys and the tent. And then–a dark figure disentangled itself from the nearest chimney and seemed to hurl itself at me. I remember putting out my hands and trying to say something, but the figure caught me roughly by the shoulders and knocked me back against the door frame. From miles away a heavy voice was saying, “So I’ve got you!” and then the roof gave from under me, and I was floating out on the storm, and sleet was beating in my face, and the wind was whispering over and over, “Open your eyes, for God’s sake!”

I did open them after a while, and finally I made out that I was laying on the floor in the tent. The lights were on, and I had a cold and damp feeling, and something wet was trickling down my neck.

I seemed to be alone, but in a second somebody came into the tent, and I saw it was Mr. Harbison, and that he had a double handful of half-melted snow. He looked frantic and determined, and only my sitting up quickly prevented my getting another snow bath. My neck felt queer and stiff, and I was very dizzy. When he saw that I was conscious he dropped the snow and stood looking down at me.

“Do you know,” he said grimly, “that I very nearly choked you to death a little while ago?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me to be told so,” I said. “Do I know too much, or what is it, Mr. Harbison?” I felt terribly ill, but I would not let him see it. “It is queer, isn’t it–how we always select the roof for our little–differences?” He seemed to relax somewhat at my gibe.

“I didn’t know it was you,” he explained shortly. “I was waiting for–some one, and in the hat you wore and the coat, I mistook you. That’s all. Can you stand?”

“No,” I retorted. I could, but his summary manner displeased me. The sequel, however, was rather amazing, for he stooped suddenly and picked me up, and the next instant we were out in the storm together. At the door he stooped and felt for the knob.

“Turn it,” he commanded. “I can’t reach it.”

“I’ll do nothing of the kind,” I said shrewishly. “Let me down; I can walk perfectly well.”

He hesitated. Then he slid me slowly to my feet, but he did not open the door at once. “Are you afraid to let me carry you down those stairs, after–Tuesday night?” he asked, very low. “You still think I did that?”

I had never been less sure of it than at that moment, but an imp of perversity made me retort, “Yes.”

He hardly seemed to hear me. He stood looking down at me as I leaned against the door frame.

“Good Lord!” he groaned. “To think that I might have killed you!” And then–he stooped and suddenly kissed me.

The next moment the door was open, and he was leading me down into the house. At the foot of the staircase he paused, still holding my hand, and faced me in the darkness.

“I’m not sorry,” he said steadily. “I suppose I ought to be, but I’m not. Only–I want you to know that I was not guilty–before. I didn’t intend to now. I am–almost as much surprised as you are.”

I was quite unable to speak, but I wrenched my hand loose. He stepped back to let me pass, and I went down the hall alone.

Chapter XVIII. IT’S ALL MY FAULT

I didn’t go to the drawing room again. I went into my own room and sat in the dark, and tried to be furiously angry, and only succeeded in feeling queer and tingly. One thing was absolutely certain: not the same man, but two different men had kissed me on the stairs to the roof. It sounds rather horrid and discriminating, but there was all the difference in the world.

But then–who had? And for whom had Mr. Harbison been waiting on the roof? “Did you know that I nearly choked you to death a few minutes ago?” Then he rather expected to finish somebody in that way! Who? Jim, probably. It was strange, too, but suddenly I realized that no matter how many suspicious things I mustered up against him–and there were plenty–down in my heart I didn’t believe him guilty of anything, except this last and unforgivable offense. Whoever was trying to leave the house had taken the necklace, that seemed clear, unless Max was still foolishly trying to break quarantine and create one of the sensations he so dearly loves. This was a new idea, and some things upheld it, but Max had been playing bridge when I was kissed on the stairs, and there was still left that ridiculous incident of the comfort.

Bella came up after I had gone to bed, and turned on the light to brush her hair.

“If I don’t leave this mausoleum soon, I’ll be carried out,” she declared. “You in bed, Lollie Mercer and Dal flirting, Anne hysterical, and Jim making his will in the den! You will have to take Aunt Selina tonight, Kit; I’m all in.”

“If you’ll put her to bed, I’ll keep her there,” I conceded, after some parley.

“You’re a dear.” Bella came back from the door. “Look here, Kit, you know Jim pretty well. Don’t you think he looks ill? Thinner?”

“He’s a wreck,” I said soberly. “You have a lot to answer for, Bella.”

Bella went over to the cheval glass and looked in it. “I avoid him all I can,” she said, posing. “He’s awfully funny; he’s so afraid I’ll think he’s serious about you. He can’t realize that for me he simply doesn’t exist.”

Well, I took Aunt Selina, and about two o’clock, while I was in my first sleep, I woke to find her standing beside me, tugging at my arm.

“There’s somebody in the house,” she whispered. “Thieves!”

“If they’re in they’ll not get out tonight,” I said.

“I tell you, I saw a man skulking on the stairs,” she insisted.

I got up ungraciously enough, and put on my dressing gown. Aunt Selina, who had her hair in crimps, tied a veil over her head, and together we went to the head of the stairs. Aunt Selina leaned far over and peered down.

“He’s in the library,” she whispered. “I can see a light.”

The lust of battle was in Aunt Selina’s eye. She girded her robe about her and began to descend the stairs cautiously. We went through the hall and stopped at the library door. It was empty, but from the den beyond came a hum of voices and the cheerful glow of fire light. I realized the situation then, but it was too late.

“Then why did you kiss her in the dining room?” Bella was saying in her clear, high tones. “You did, didn’t you?”

“It was only her hand,” Jim, desperately explaining. “I’ve got to pay her some attention, under the circumstances. And I give you my word, I was thinking of you when I did it.” THE WRETCH!

Aunt Selina drew her breath in suddenly.

“I am thinking of marrying Reggie Wolfe.” This was Bella, of course. “He wants me to. He’s a dear boy.”

“If you do, I will kill him.”

“I am so very lonely,” Bella sighed. We could hear the creak of Jim’s shirt bosom that showed that he had sighed also. Aunt Selina had gripped me by the arm, and I could hear her breathing hard beside me.

“It’s only Jim,” I whispered. “I–I don’t want to hear any more.”

But she clutched me firmly, and the next thing we heard was another creak, louder and–

“Get up! Get up off your knees this instant!” Bella was saying frantically. “Some one might come in.”

“Don’t send me away,” Jim said in a smothered voice. “Every one in the house is asleep, and I love you, dear.”

Aunt Selina swallowed hard in the darkness.

“You have no right to make love to me,” Bella. “It’s–it’s highly improper, under the circumstances.”

And then Jim: “You swallow a camel and stick at a gnat. Why did you meet me here, if you didn’t expect me to make love to you? I’ve stood for a lot, Bella, but this foolishness will have to end. Either you love me–or you don’t. I’m desperate.” He drew a long, forlorn breath.

“Poor old Jim!” This was Bella. A pause. Then–“Let my hand alone!” Also Bella.

“It is MY hand!”–Jim;’s most fatuous tone. “THERE is where you wore my ring. There’s the mark still.” Sounds of Jim kissing Bella’s ring finger. “What did you do with it? Throw it away?” More sounds.

Aunt Selina crossed the library swiftly, and again I followed. Bella was sitting in a low chair by the fire, looking at the logs, in the most exquisite negligee of pink chiffon and ribbon. Jim was on his knees, staring at her adoringly, and holding both her hands.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Bella was saying, looking as coy as she knew how–which was considerable. “I–I still wear it, on a chain around my neck.”

On a chain around her neck! Bella, who is decollete whenever it is allowable, and more than is proper!

That was the limit of Aunt Selina’s endurance. Still holding me, she stepped through the doorway and into the firelight, a fearful figure.

Jim saw her first. He went quite white and struggled to get up, smiling a sickly smile. Bella, after her first surprise, was superbly indifferent. She glanced at us, raised her eyebrows, and then looked at the clock.

“More victims of insomnia!” she said. “Won’t you come in? Jim, pull up a chair by the fire for your aunt.”

Aunt Selina opened her mouth twice, like a fish, before she could speak. Then–

“James, I demand that that woman leave the house!” she said hoarsely.

Bella leaned back and yawned.

“James, shall I go?” she asked amiably.

“Nonsense,” Jim said, pulling himself together as best he could. “Look here, Aunt Selina, you know she can’t go out, and what’s more, I–don’t want her to go.”

“You–what?” Aunt Selina screeched, taking a step forward. “You have the audacity to say such a thing to me!”

Bella leaned over and gave the fire log a punch.

“I was just saying that he shouldn’t say such things to me, either,” she remarked pleasantly. “I’m afraid you’ll take cold, Miss Caruthers. Wouldn’t you like a hot sherry flip?”

Aunt Selina gasped. Then she sat down heavily on one of the carved teakwood chairs.

“He said he loved you; I heard him,” she said weakly. “He–he was going to put his arm around you!”

“Habit!” Jim put in, trying to smile. “You see, Aunt Selina, it’s–well, it’s a habit I got into some time ago, and I–my arm does it without my thinking about it.”

“Habit!” Aunt Selina repeated, her voice thick with passion. Then she turned to me. “Go to your room at once!” she said in her most awful tone. “Go to your room and leave this–this shocking affair to me.”

But if she had reached her limit, so had I. If Jim chose to ruin himself, it was not my fault. Any one with common sense would have known at least to close the door before he went down on his knees, no matter to whom. So when Aunt Selina turned on me and pointed in the direction of the staircase, I did not move.

“I am perfectly wide awake,” I said coldly. “I shall go to bed when I am entirely ready, and not before. And as for Jim’s conduct, I do not know much about the conventions in such cases, but if he wishes to embrace Miss Knowles, and she wants him to, the situation is interesting, but hardly novel.”

Aunt Selina rose slowly and drew the folds of her dressing gown around her, away from the contamination of my touch.

“Do you know what you are saying?” she demanded hoarsely.

“I do.” I was quite white and stiff from my knees up, but below I was wavery. I glanced at Jim for moral support, but he was looking idolatrously at Bella. As for her, quite suddenly she had dropped her mask of indifference; her face was strained and anxious, and there were deep circles I had not seen before, under her eyes. And it was Bella who finally threw herself into the breach–the family breach.

“It is all my fault, Miss Caruthers,” she said, stepping between Aunt Selina and myself. “I have been a blind and wicked woman, and I have almost wrecked two lives.”

Two! What of mine?

“You see,” she struggled on, against the glint in Aunt Selina’s eyes. “I–I did not realize how much I cared, until it was too late. I did so many things that were cruel and wrong–oh, Jim, Jim!”

She turned and buried her head on his shoulder and cried; real tears. I could hardly believe that it was Bella. And Jim put both his arms around her and almost cried, too, and looked nauseatingly happy with the eye he turned to Bella, and scared to death out of the one he kept on Aunt Selina.

She turned on me, as of course I knew she would.

“That,” she said, pointing at Jim and Bella, “that shameful picture is due to your own indifference. I am not blind; I have seen how you rejected all his loving advances.” Bella drew away from Jim, but he jerked her back. “If anything in the world would reconcile me to divorce, it is this unbelievable situation. James, are you shameless?”

But James was and didn’t care who knew it. And as there was nothing else to do, and no one else to do it, I stood very straight against the door frame, and told the whole miserable story from the very beginning. I told how Dal and Jim had persuaded me, and how I had weakened and found it was too late, and how Bella had come in that night, when she had no business to come, and had sat down in the basement kitchen on my hands and almost turned me into a raving maniac. As I went on I became fluent; my sense of injury grew on me. I made it perfectly clear that I hated them all, and that when people got divorces they ought to know their own minds and stay divorced. And at that a great light broke on Aunt Selina, who hadn’t understood until that minute.

In view of her principles, she might have been expected to turn on Jim and Bella, and disinherit them, and cast them out, figuratively, with the flaming sword of her tongue. BUT SHE DID NOT!

She turned on me in the most terrible way, and asked me how I dared to come between husband and wife, because divorce or no divorce, whom God hath joined together, and so on. And when Jim picked up his courage in both hands and tried to interfere, she pushed him back with one hand while she pointed the other at me and called me a Jezebel.

Chapter XIX. THE HARBISON MAN

She talked for an hour, having got between me and the door, and she scolded Jim and Bella thoroughly. But they did not hear it, being occupied with each other, sitting side by side meekly on the divan with Jim holding Bella’s hand under a cushion. She said they would have to be very good to make up for all the deception, but it was perfectly clear that it was a relief to her to find that I didn’t belong to her permanently, and as I have said before, she was crazy about Bella.

I sat back in a chair and grew comfortably drowsy in the monotony of her voice. It was a name that brought me to myself with a jerk.

“Mr. Harbison!” Aunt Selina was saying. “Then bring him down at once, James. I want no more deception. There is no use cleaning a house and leaving a dirty corner.”

“It will not be necessary for me to stay and see it swept,” I said, mustering the rags she had left of my self-respect, and trying to pass her. But she planted herself squarely before me.

“You can not stir up a dust like this, young woman, and leave other people to sneeze in it,” she said grimly. And I stayed.

I sat, very small, on a chair in a corner. I felt like Jezebel, or whatever her name was, and now the Harbison man was coming, and he was going to see me stripped of my pretensions to domesticity and of a husband who neglected me. He was going to see me branded a living lie, and he would hate me because I had put him in a ridiculous position. He was just the sort to resent being ridiculous.

Jim brought him down in a dressing gown and a state of bewilderment. It was plain that the memory of the afternoon still rankled, for he was very short with Jim and inclined to resent the whole thing. The clock in the hall chimed half after three as they came down the stairs, and I heard Mr. Harbison stumble over something in the darkness and say that if it was a joke, he wasn’t in the humor for it. To which Jim retorted that it wasn’t anything resembling a joke, and for heaven’s sake not to walk on his feet; he couldn’t get around the furniture any faster.

At the door of the den Mr. Harbison stopped, blinking in the light. Then, when he saw us, he tried to back himself and his dishabille out into the obscurity of the library. But Aunt Selina was too quick for him.

“Come in,” she called, “I want you, young man. It seems that there are only two fools in the house, and you are one.”

He straightened at that and looked bewildered, but he tried to smile.

“I thought I was the only one,” he said. “Is it possible that there is another?”

“I am the other,” she announced. I think she expected him to say “Impossible,” but, whatever he was, he was never banal.

“Is that so?” he asked politely, trying to be interested and to understand at the same time. He had not seen me. He was gazing fixedly at Bella, languishing on the divan and watching him with lowered lids, and he had given Jim a side glance of contempt. But now he saw me and he colored under his tan. His neck blushed furiously, being much whiter than his face. He kept his eyes on mine, and I knew that he was mutely asking forgiveness. But the thought of what was coming paralyzed me. My eyes were glued to his as they had been that first evening when he had called me “Mrs. Wilson,” and after an instant he looked away, and his face was set and hard.

“It seems that we have all been playing a little comedy, Mr. Harbison,” Aunt Selina began, nasally sarcastic. “Or rather, you and I have been the audience. The rest have played.”

“I–I don’t think I understand,” he said slowly. “I have seen very little comedy.”

“It was not well planned,” Aunt Selina retorted tartly. “The idea was good, but the young person who was playing the part of Mrs. Wilson–overacted.”

“Oh, come, Aunt Selina, Jim protested, “Kit was coaxed and cajoled into this thing. Give me fits if you like; I deserve all I get. But let Kit alone–she did it for me.”

Bella looked over at me and smiled nastily.

“I would stop doing things for Jim, Kit,” she said. “It is SO unprofitable.”

But Mr. Harbison harked back to Aunt Selina’s speech.

“PLAYING the part of Mrs. Wilson!” he repeated. “Do you mean–?

“Exactly. Playing the part. She is not Mrs. Wilson. It seems that that honor belonged at one time to Miss Knowles. I believe such things are not unknown in New York, only why in the name of sense does a man want to divorce a woman and then meet her at two o’clock in the morning to kiss the place where his own wedding ring used to rest?”

Jim fidgeted. Bella was having spasms of mirth to herself, but the Harbison man did not smile. He stood for a moment looking at the fire; then he thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his dressing gown, and stalked over to me. He did not care that the others were watching and listening.

“Is it true?” he demanded, staring down at me. “You are NOT Mrs. Wilson? You are not married at all? All that about being neglected–and loathing HIM, and all that on the roof–there was no foundation of truth?”

I could only shake my head without looking up. There was no defense to be made. Oh, I deserved the scorn in his voice.

“They–they persuaded you, I suppose, and it was to help somebody? It was not a practical joke?”

“No,” I rallied a little spirit at that. It had been anything but a joke.

He drew a long breath.

“I think I understand,” he said slowly, “but–you could have saved me something. I must have given you all a great deal of amusement.”

“Oh, no,” I protested. “I–I want to tell you–“

But he deliberately left me and went over to the door. There he turned and looked down at Aunt Selina. He was a little white, but there was no passion in his face.

“Thank you for telling me all this, Miss Caruthers,” he said easily. “Now that you and I know, I’m afraid the others will miss their little diversion. Good night.”

Oh, it was all right for Jim to laugh and say that he was only huffed a little and would be over it by morning. I knew better. There was something queer in his face as he went out. He did not even glance in my direction. He had said very little, but he had put me as effectually in the wrong as if he had not kissed me–deliberately kissed me–that very evening, on the roof.

I did not go to sleep again. I lay wretchedly thinking things over and trying to remember who Jezebel was, and toward morning I distinctly heard the knob of the door turn. I mistrusted my ears, however, and so I got up quietly and went over in the darkness. There was no sound outside, but when I put my hand on the knob I felt it move under my fingers. The counter pressure evidently alarmed whoever it was, for the knob was released and nothing more happened. But by this time anything so uncomplicated as the fumbling of a knob at night had no power to disturb me. I went back to bed.

Chapter XX. BREAKING OUT IN A NEW PLACE

Hunger roused everybody early the next morning, Friday. Leila Mercer had discovered a box of bonbons that she had forgotten, and we divided them around. Aunt Selina asked for the candied fruit and got it–quite a third of the box. We gathered in the lower hall and on the stairs and nibbled nauseating sweets while Mr. Harbison examined the telephone.

He did not glance in my direction. Betty and Dal were helping him, and he seemed very cheerful. Max sat with me on the stairs. Mr. Harbison had just unscrewed the telephone box from the wall and was squinting into it, when Bella came downstairs. It was her first appearance, but as she was always late, nobody noticed. When she stopped, just above us on the stairs, however, we looked up, and she was holding to the rail and trembling perceptibly.

“Mr. Harbison, will you–can you come upstairs?” she asked. Her voice was strained, almost reedy, and her lips were white.

Mr. Harbison stared up at her, with the telephone box in his hands.

“Why–er–certainly,” he said, “but, unless it’s very important, I’d like to fix this talking machine. We want to make a food record.”

“I’d like to break a food record,” Max put in, but Bella created a diversion by sitting down suddenly on the stair just above us, and burying her face in her handkerchief.

“Jim is sick,” she said, with a sob. “He–he doesn’t want anything to eat, and his head aches. He–said for me–to go away and let him die!”

Dal dropped the hammer immediately, and Lollie Mercer sat petrified, with a bonbon halfway to her mouth. For, of course, it was unexpected, finding sentiment of any kind in Bella, and none of them knew about the scene in the den in the small hours of the morning.

“Sick!” Aunt Selina said, from a hall chair. “Sick! Where?”

“All over,” Bella quavered. “His poor head is hot, and he’s thirsty, but he doesn’t want anything but water.”

“Great Scott!” Dal said suddenly. “Suppose he should–Bella, are you telling us ALL his symptoms?”

Bella put down her handkerchief and got up. From her position on the stairs she looked down on us with something of her old haughty manner.

“If he is ill, you may blame yourselves, all of you,” she said cruelly. “You taunted him with being–fat, and laughed at him, until he stopped eating the things he should eat. And he has been exercising–on the roof, until he has worn himself out. And now–he is ill. He–he has a rash.”

Everybody jumped at that, and we instinctively moved away from Bella. She was quite cold and scornful by that time.

“A rash!” Max exclaimed. “What sort of rash?”

“I did not see it,” Bella said with dignity, and turning, she went up the stairs.

There was a great deal of excitement, and nobody except Mr. Harbison was willing to go near Jim. He went up at once with Bella, while Max and Dal sat cravenly downstairs and wondered if we would all take it, and Anne told about a man she knew who had it, and was deaf and dumb and blind when he recovered.

Mr. Harbison came down after a while, and said that the rash was there, right enough, and that Jim absolutely refused to be quarantined; that he insisted that he always got a rash from early strawberries and that if he DID have anything, since they were so touchy he hoped they would all get it. If they locked him in he would kick the door down.

We had a long conference in the hall, with Bella sitting red-eyed and objecting to every suggestion we made. And finally we arranged to shut Jim up in one of the servants’ bedrooms with a sheet wrung out of disinfectant hung over the door. Bella said she would sit outside in the hall and read to him through the closed door, so finally he gave a grudging consent. But he was in an awful humor. Max and Dal put on rubber gloves and helped him over, and they said afterward that the way he talked was fearful. And there was a telephone in the maid’s room, and he kept asking for things every five minutes.

When the doctor came he said it was too early to tell positively, and he ordered him liquid diet and said he would be back that evening.

Which–the diet–takes me back to the famine. After they had moved Jim, Mr. Harbison went back to the telephone, and found everything as it should be. So he followed the telephone wire, and the rest followed him. I did not; he had systematically ignored me all morning, after having dared to kiss me the night before. And any other man I know, after looking at me the way he had looked a dozen times, would have been at least reasonably glad to find me free and unmarried. But it was clear that he was not; I wondered if he was the kind of man who always makes love to the other man’s wife and runs like mad when she is left a widow, or gets a divorce.

And just when I had decided that I hated him, and that there was one man I knew who would never make love to a woman whom he thought married and then be very dignified and aloof when he found she wasn’t, I heard what was wrong with the telephone wire.

It had been cut! Cut through with a pair of silver manicure scissors from the dressing table in Bella’s room, where Aunt Selina slept! The wire had been clipped where it came into the house, just under a window, and the scissors still lay on the sill.

It was mysterious enough, but no one was interested in the mystery just then. We wanted food, and wanted it at once. Mr. Harbison fixed the wire, and the first thing we did, of course, was to order something to eat. Aunt Selina went to bed just after luncheon with indigestion, to the relief of every one in the house. She had been most unpleasant all morning.

When she found herself ill, however, she insisted on having Bella, and that made trouble at once. We found Bella with her cheek against the door into Jim’s room, looking maudlin while he shouted love messages to her from the other side. At first she refused to stir, but after Anne and Max had tried and failed, the rest of us went to her in a body and implored her. We said Aunt Selina was in awful shape–which she was, as to temper–and that she had thrown a mustard plaster at Anne, which was true.

So Bella went, grumbling, and Jim was a maniac. We had not thought it would be so bad for Bella, but Aunt Selina fell asleep soon after she took charge, holding Bella’s hand, and slept for three hours and never let go!

About two that afternoon the sun came out, and the rest of us went to the roof. The sleet had melted and the air was fairly warm. Two housemaids dusting rugs on the top of the next house came over and stared at us, and somebody in an automobile down on Riverside Drive stood up and waved at us. It was very cheerful and hopelessly lonely.

I stayed on the roof after the others had gone, and for some time I thought I was alone. After a while, I got a whiff of smoke, and then I saw Mr. Harbison far over in the corner, one foot on the parapet, moodily smoking a pipe. He was gazing out over the river, and paying no attention to me. This was natural, considering that I had hardly spoken to him all day.

I would not let him drive me away, so I sat still, and it grew darker and colder. He filled his pipe now and then, but he never looked in my direction. Finally, however, as it grew very dusk, he knocked the ashes out and came toward me.

“I am going to make a request, Miss McNair,” he said evenly. “Please keep off the roof after sunset. There are–reasons.” I had risen and was preparing to go downstairs.

“Unless I know the reasons, I refuse to do anything of the kind,” I retorted. He bowed.

“Then the door will be kept locked,” he rejoined, and opened it for me. He did not follow me, but stood watching until I was down, and I heard him close the roof door firmly behind me.

Chapter XXI. A BAR OF SOAP

Late that evening Betty Mercer and Dallas were writing verses of condolence to be signed by all of us and put under the door into Jim’s room when Bella came running down the stairs.

Dal was reading the first verse when she came. “Listen to this, Bella,” he said triumphantly:

“There was a fat artist named Jas,
Who cruelly called his friends nas. When, altho’ shut up tight,
He broke out over night
With a rash that is maddening, he clas.”

Then he caught sight of Bella’s face as she stood in the doorway, and stopped.

“Jim is delirious!” she announced tragically. “You shut him in there all alone and now he’s delirious. I’ll never forgive any of you.”

“Delirious!” everybody exclaimed.

“He was sane enough when I took him his chicken broth,” Mr. Harbison said. “He was almost fluent.”

“He is stark, staring crazy,” Bella insisted hysterically. “I–I locked the door carefully when I went down to my dinner, and when I came up it–it was unlocked, and Jim was babbling on the bed, with a sheet over his face. He–he says the house is haunted and he wants all the men to come up and sit in the room with him.”

“Not on your life,” Max said. “I am young, and my career has only begun. I don’t intend to be cut off in the flower of my youth. But I’ll tell you what I will do; I’ll take him a drink. I can tie it to a pole or something.”

But Mr. Harbison did not smile. He was thoughtful for a minute. Then:

“I don’t believe he is delirious,” he said quietly, “and I wouldn’t be surprised if he has happened on something that–will be of general interest. I think I will stay with him tonight.”

After that, of course, none of the others would confess that he was afraid, so with the South American leading, they all went upstairs. The women of the party sat on the lower steps and listened, but everything was quiet. Now and then we could hear the sound of voices, and after a while there was a rapid slamming of doors and the sound of some one running down to the second floor. Then quiet again.

None of us felt talkative. Bella had followed the men up and had been put out, and sat sniffling by herself in the den. Aunt Selina was working over a jig-saw puzzle in the library, and declaring that some of it must be lost. Anne and Leila Mercer were embroidering, and Betty and I sat idle, our hands in our laps. The whole atmosphere of the house was mysterious. Anne told over again of the strange noises the night her necklace was stolen. Betty asked me about the time when the comfort slipped from under my fingers. And when, in the midst of the story, the telephone rang, we all jumped and shrieked.

In an hour or so they sent for Flannigan, and he went upstairs. He came down again soon, however, and returned with something over his arm that looked like a rope. It seemed to be made of all kinds of things tied together, trunk straps, clothesline, bed sheets, and something that Flannigan pointed to with rage and said he hadn’t been able to keep his clothes on all day. He refused to explain further, however, and trailed the nondescript article up the stairs. We could only gaze after him and wonder what it all meant.

The conclave lasted far into the night. The feminine contingent went to bed, but not to sleep. Some time after midnight, Mr. Harbison and Max went downstairs and I could hear them rattling around testing windows and burglar alarms. But finally every one settled down and the rest of the night was quiet.

Betty Mercer came into my room the next morning, Sunday, and said Anne Brown wanted me. I went over at once, and Anne was sitting up in bed, crying. Dal had slipped out of the room at daylight, she said, and hadn’t come back. He had thought she was asleep, but she wasn’t, and she knew he was dead, for nothing ever made Dal get up on Sunday before noon.

There was no one moving in the house, and I hardly knew what to do. It was Betty who said she would go up and rouse Mr. Harbison and Max, who had taken Jim’s place in the studio. She started out bravely enough, but in a minute we heard her flying back. Anne grew perfectly white.

“He’s lying on the upper stairs!” Betty cried, and we all ran out. It was quite true. Dal was lying on the stairs in a bathrobe, with one of Jim’s Indian war clubs in his hand. And he was sound asleep.

He looked somewhat embarrassed when he roused and saw us standing around. He said he was going to play a practical joke on somebody and fell asleep in the middle of it. And Anne said he wasn’t even an intelligent liar, and went back to bed in a temper. But Betty came in with me, and we sat and looked at each other and didn’t say much. The situation was beyond us.

The doctor let Jim out the next day, there having been nothing the matter with him but a stomach rash. But Jim was changed; he mooned around Bella, of course, as before, but he was abstracted at times, and all that day–Sunday–he wandered off by himself, and one would come across him unexpectedly in the basement or along some of the unused back halls.

Aunt Selina held service that morning. Jim said that he always had a prayer book, but that he couldn’t find anything with so many people in the house. So Aunt Selina read some religious poetry out of the newspapers, and gave us a valuable talk on Deception versus Honesty, with me as the illustration.

Almost everybody took a nap after luncheon. I stayed in the den and read Ibsen, and felt very mournful. And after Hedda had shot herself, I lay down on the divan and cried a little–over Hedda; she was young and it was such a tragic ending–and then I fell asleep.

When I wakened Mr. Harbison was standing by the table, and he held my book in his hands. In view of the armed neutrality between us, I expected to see him bow to me curtly, turn on his heel and leave the room. Indeed, considering his state of mind the night before, I should hardly have been surprised if he had thrown Hedda at my head. (This is not a pun. I detest them.) But instead, when he heard me move he glanced over at me and even smiled a little.

“She wasn’t worth it,” he said, indicating the book.

“Worth what?”

“Your tears. You were crying over it, weren’t you?”

“She was very unhappy,” I asserted indifferently. “She was married and she loved some one else.”

“Do you really think she did?” he asked. “And even so, was that a reason?”

“The other man cared for her; he may not have been able to help it.”

“But he knew that she was married,” he said virtuously, and then he caught my eye and he saw the analogy instantly, for he colored hotly and put down the book.

“Most men argue that way,” I said. “They argue by the book, and–they do as they like.”

He picked up a Japanese ivory paper weight from the table, and stood balancing it across his finger.

“You are perfectly right,” he said at last. “I deserve it all. My grievance is at myself. Your–your beauty, and the fact that I thought you were unhappy, put me–beside myself. It is not an excuse; it is a weak explanation. I will not forget myself