"I was wondering," suggested Burton, "whether we couldn't arrange a little rubber." He caught the eye of a waiter at the same moment and beckoned. "What will yours be, general?" he genially inquired.

"I don't believe I care to play." The voice was chilling at the start and became more icy with each added syllable, "and I won't have anything to drink."

Tom Burton stood looking down somewhat blankly.

"Nothing to drink?" he repeated in a perfectly warrantable astonishment.

His ears must have tricked him.

The general rose stiffly. "With you--no," he spoke curtly, and took himself away with a waddle of studied dignity. For a full minute Hamilton Burton's father gazed vacantly out at the avenue, then he turned on his heel. Henry O'Horrissy was just entering the door and with him were two other members of a little group which had lunched and chatted and played bridge inseparably for several years. Each knew all the others' anecdotes and could laugh at the proper moments. They formed one of those small cliques of intimates into which this club resolved itself, and Tom Burton was of their valued brotherhood.

"Good-afternoon, gentlemen," accosted Burton. "How are you all today?"

With three silent nods the trio at the door turned and drifted aimlessly across to the billiard-room.

Tom Burton went and sat alone by a window. Slowly a brick-like flush spread and deepened on his full face. This club life had become very important to him--even indispensable. There was nothing with which to replace it. He wheeled his chair so that he might be plainly seen from the door, and as man after man came in, with whom he had spent his time and his son's money, men who had been pleased to court the father of the great Hamilton Montagu Burton, he genially accosted them--and one after another they returned greetings of frigid formality.

Then he turned his chair with its back to the room and looked out and the stubborn pride died in his eyes and his face grew old and pathetic.

There was no further room for doubt. He was tasting ostracism and being included in this wave of hatred for his son, which he had regarded as newspaper rubbish. He leaned forward with his gloved hands on his cane and once or twice under his fastidiously trimmed beard, his lips twitched painfully. Finally he rose, ordering his next cocktail over a hotel bar, and though the stubbornness of pride forced him back on the morrow to lunch at his accustomed club table, he lunched alone, and was grateful for the solicitous courtesy of the negro who served him.

One afternoon Paul made his way down Fifth avenue on foot.

The sky was unbelievably blue and a flashing brilliancy sparkled in all the splinters of color that embroidered themselves along the parquetry of the street. The avenue has, at times, a magic of its own and today it was a swiftly flowing stream of brilliancy and life and laughter. But this was a mood to which Paul Burton found no response. His heart was attuned to echoes of a more somber tone--and he was bound on a mission which was, for him, a bold one. He was disobeying orders which until now he had not ventured to disobey. Marcia Terroll had banished him from her presence. Since that day in her apartment he had seen less of her than before and for many weeks now nothing at all. Marcia, unlike Loraine Haswell, recognized that they could not meet without dangerous drifting, and that such drifting could end only in disaster, so at last she had forbidden his visiting her even occasionally and to all his arguments she had steadfastly shaken her head with gentle obduracy.

For a time they had met as they might have met had the interview in her apartment on the drizzly afternoon never occurred. She had torn that page out of their chronicles of acquaintanceship, and assumed that it had never been included. Her wit had sparkled for him and her individual charm had blossomed as though her life had never known a season other than spring and blossom-time. Sometimes he found himself wondering if that afternoon had been actual.

He discovered himself using quaint phrases of her invention as part of his own conversational equipment, and often he found himself applauded for some flash of repartee which he knew was only a quotation from her.

But also he found himself incapable of that continuous self-restraint which she required of him under their agreement of a future basis. He had his moments when he could no more avoid feeling and acting and declaring himself her lover than he could avoid later regretting them, and, for this inability, he had been exiled.

"To you," she told him, "it means a minor thing--but it's not minor to me. I have had unhappiness enough without risking more. We must not see or write to each other." Paul knew nothing of what this decision cost her or of the many letters she had written to him--and destroyed unmailed.

Now he was utterly miserable and his heart was aching for companionship outside the two houses where the mildew of misery tainted even the sunshine that came through the windows. He craved the cheer and strength of a heart braver than his own, and in defiance of her orders he was going to see the woman in whose presence he should find these things; the woman whom he had not seen for months.

CHAPTER XXVI

As he reached Washington square it seemed that the quiet of the section held a sort of benediction, and such peace as hangs between old walls, where the fever of stress has passed and left in its wake a philosophy and a contentment.

But when he came to the house where he had visited her, he was told that she no longer lived there. With a sudden pang it occurred to him that once more she might have moved a step down the economic scale toward the furnished room in one of those dingy lodging-houses which she had dreaded; places where the heart sickens at the forlornness of its environment.

He inquired for the girl with whom Marcia had shared the little apartment, and to his relief learned that she still had her abode here and would receive him. As he opened the door, Dorothy Melliss was bending over her drawing-board by a north window, rushing through some fashion illustrations which must be delivered on the morrow. She greeted Paul with a nod and went on with her work, while he explained his mission.

Dorothy was a wholesome young person of clear complexion and straightforward eyes and she spoke with an independence of manner amounting to slanginess. She was one of those girls whom an unaided life in the city fosters. She could take care of herself--and did--but she knew life and looked it in the face--and dispensed with anything like a baby stare in doing so. Now she listened to Paul's talk, then suddenly shoved back her India-ink bottle and wiped her pen, while her pupils met his with directness.

"Before I answer any of your questions, Mr. Burton, I've got a few to ask you myself," she announced. "I might as well talk straight from the shoulder. Just how anxious you are to see Marcia isn't going to make such a great difference in my young life. Whether or not she wants you to find her--does make a great deal of difference."

"What do you mean, Miss Melliss?" Paul was genuinely puzzled.

"I mean that of course I know her address--or addresses--because they change every day. I also know that she gave me the most explicit orders not to tell you where she could be found."

"Oh!" he exclaimed in disappointment, relinquishing his inquiry at the first obstacle. "Then I suppose I may as well go."

"Hold on," she commanded tersely. "I'm Marcia Terroll's friend. I think I'm enough her friend to decide for myself whether I can help her most by obeying or disobeying her. Sit down for five minutes and listen to me. I feel like talking."

He obeyed, and the young woman's face flushed with her interest as she took a chair near him and lighted a cigarette. After that she sat for a few moments reflectively silent.

"I guess there isn't so much similarity between Marcia and me, but there's one thing--and it's a bond of kinship in a way." She looked at him unwaveringly. "We've both been on our own for some time in a town where there are more Don Juans than Walter Raleighs--and we're both straight. To the women of _your_ protected set that wouldn't be so much to brag of--about as much as for a millionaire to boast that he'd never picked a pocket. None of those sheltered girls in your own world, where women nibble at life like bon-bons, have anything on Marcia Terroll. In brain and character and charm she has it over those female noncombatants like a tent."

"I know all that, Miss Melliss." His reply was vaguely apologetic.

"Maybe you do, but I'm not through yet. She was cut to a delicate pattern and meant for life's sunshine and God knows she's had plenty of shadow. She's kept a smile on her lips and a laugh in her eyes through things that would have crumpled up lots of those tender creatures you know. You don't guess what it means to that sort of woman--well, to see life from the angle we get on it, but Marcia knows. You came along and she--" The young woman broke off in sudden silence.

"She what?" Anxiety sounded through his question.

"Oh, she never told me anything. It's not her fashion to tell such things, but I have a pair of eyes myself. I figure that Marcia let herself in for a danger she thought she had put behind her. She allowed herself to have a dream." She paused and her gaze was almost accusing in its directness. "From the look in her eyes before she went away I guess she realized that it was a dream."

Miss Melliss had eyes of a brown softness, but just now they flashed hard as agate and her voice rose to a scornful indignation.

"As if we haven't enough to handle with the facts of Life, without hopeless dreams! I'm no anarchist railing at wealth and luxury ... but you men that want everything ... and give nothing--" She broke off and abruptly demanded, "Well, when you think about it, what do you call it to yourselves?"

"Where is she?" demanded Paul.

"She's out with a dinky, barnstorming company, playing one-night stands--on a route of tank-towns and whistling stations. It was all she could get. She's making early-morning jumps between shabby hotels with a bunch of cheap actors and cheaper actresses that are just about as congenial to her as a herd of goats." The voice vibrated with sincere feeling.

"Are you going to tell me where I can find her?"

The girl studied her cigarette, drew a puff upon it and exhaled a cloud of smoke before she answered. Then she spoke reflectively.

"I'm just wondering whether I am or not. If you're going to follow her up and make her dream again--only to wake up again, I certainly am not.

If you're going to be any comfort to her I am, because God knows she needs some comfort. She is only going on her nerve."

"Please tell me," he urged very persuasively. At that moment it was in his mind to write a truthful letter to Loraine Haswell and go to Marcia with a proposal of marriage. He felt only his need of her--and her importance to himself. He failed to reckon on the thousand misgivings and indecisions which would assail him between the moment of impulse and that of execution. But his eyes were sincere and Dorothy believed them.

She went to her desk and brought back a sheet of paper.

"That's the route for this week--and next," she said. "After that you must either find out for yourself or go without knowing."

That night with the holiday spirit of a lad let out of a cheerless school Paul Burton walked along the principal street of a small New England town where old-fashioned houses sprawled between stark elms.

When he reached the Palace Theater, the performance had begun, so he hurriedly bought a ticket and found himself sitting near the front with many empty seats about him. It was a cheap "follow up" company with an old piece that had once been a Broadway hit. He had never seen Marcia act. Now he was seeing her under the most inauspicious circumstances--and he knew that only want of opportunity and the uncompromising plane on which she had pitched her dealings in managerial offices had balked her ambitions. She could act and was acting with a force, intelligence and finesse that were wasted here, and as he watched her suddenly their eyes met and across the blazing separation of the "foots" she recognized him. For just an instant her pupils dilated and she missed a cue. It looked as though she would "go up" in her lines, but before the prompter could come to her aid she had recovered herself and her performance went on unbroken. But during the following intermission the women who dressed near by could hear her humming a gay tune, and as she came out at her call they saw in her eyes a sparkle that had not been there before.

As Marcia sat in her dressing-room before the mirror which was fastened against a brick wall, the squalidness of the cubbyhole ceased to depress her. On the slab before her lay scattered the details of make-up, and crowded into one corner stood her open wardrobe trunk. A placard near a light-bulb read, "Please remember that YOU are here for a few days, but we are here all the time. Do not deface our home," and under that notice, probably tempted by it into irony, a former occupant had scrawled in huge letters "Oh, you home!"

But now the chilly little dressing-room was no longer a dingy cell. She had recognized Paul Burton's face out in front, and, as she changed for the next act, little snatches of song broke from her lips, and she smiled at herself in the glass until the small, glistening teeth flashed like those of a pleased child.

Fate gives no guarantee of responsibility for the targeting of the Love-God's darts. This whimsical deity seems to owe no duty to fitness or consistency. He may choose to make a strong and excellent character love one too weak to be worthy its thought and no higher power intervenes. After all, Marcia had met Paul when she was lonely and they had for a while comforted each other's unhappiness. When she had ordered him to stay away the damage was already done, and since then she had been infinitely more lonely--had craved more desperately companionship with someone of the world from which her poverty had so long exiled her, though its memories remained. Now he had disobeyed her and come to her.

He had sought her out contrary to command and that must mean that he had found a new strength and would have something to say to her which a man may worthily say to a woman. He had so thoroughly understood her edict that his coming could have no other meaning. She could not know that he was still actuated solely by his own selfish craving for comfort, nor that he had occupied his time on the train countering and balancing considerations until his sudden determination had oozed miserably out of him. Although he could no longer awaken a throbbing of his pulses with the thought of Loraine Haswell, neither could he fortify his mind to cut the tie and give her up.