"Where to, Mr. Lontaine?"

"No, by G.o.d!" Lontaine blurted into the man's astonished face, and whirling about, strode hastily back to the bungalow.

As he drew near he could hear f.a.n.n.y's voice. She was at the telephone in the living-room, calling a number he didn't catch; Summerlad's no doubt.

One had forgotten all about that wretched dinner. Then the connection was established, and he paused with foot lifted to the lower-most of the veranda steps. It couldn't be possible Fan was talking to Summerlad, in that voice whose tenderness called back old times....

"h.e.l.lo? Is it you, dear? f.a.n.n.y.... First chance I've had.... Poor darling! I've been aching to see you all day and tell you how I sympathized.... Yes, any time you please, as soon as you like.... No: he won't mind, he ... I mean, I'm all alone. Besides, we had a little talk tonight, came to an understanding. He won't be in our way after this, ever again, Barry dear...."

Something amused her, peals of musical laughter hunted Lontaine down the walk. "Union Pacific Station!" he cried, throwing himself into the car.

"Drive like h.e.l.l!"

x.x.xVIII

That sunset whose reluctant waning Lontaine was presently to watch from the bungalow veranda was still a glory in the sky when Lucinda motored to Beverly Hills. The heavens in the west had opened out like a many-petalled rose of radiant promise, whose reflected glow deepened the warm carnation of her face and found response in the slow fire that burned in dreaming eyes. Those whose chance it was to view so much mortal loveliness in too fleeting glimpses all envied its possessor, women her lot, men her lover's.

The soft air of evening, already tempered with an earnest of the coolth to come, was sweet to taste with parted lips. Upon the perfect highroad the car swung and swooped and swerved like a swallow, through a countryside lapped in perennial Spring. She thought: This blessed land!

and thought herself thrice-blessed to be at once in it, in love, and in the fairest flower of her years.

Odd, how completely that compact with Zinn, which the clasp of their hands had sealed so lately, had done away with every form of fear and discontent. Vanity had a deal to do with that, no doubt, self-esteem purring with conviction that Zinn would never have offered to invest one lonely dollar in the picture had not his apprais.e.m.e.nt of Lucinda's work on the screen approved the risk. Zinn smelt profits in the wind; that much was manifest; which meant that success was a.s.sured to Linda Lee.

The loss of half the little fortune she had sunk in the production was a mean price to pay for knowledge that failure could now reward her hopes only through some frown of fortune unantic.i.p.ated by one of the canniest of those sure-thing gamblers whom the American cinema acclaims its financial genii.

Best of all, this new a.s.sociation spelled an end to all that meaningless and inexcusable procrastination from which the work had suffered whenever Nolan felt over-worked or harkened to the call of the continuous c.r.a.p game, an inst.i.tution of the studio that had its permanent habitat behind one of the stages. Zinn was notoriously scant of patience with delays that meant money thrown away; and, he had a.s.sured Lucinda (after striking his bargain) no reason existed within his knowledge why another fortnight shouldn't see the last scenes of her production shot. Much admittedly depended on how little or much of Nolan's work might seem to need retaking, when the three of them, Lucinda, Zinn and the new director, sat in judgment on the rushes in rough a.s.semblage. But Zinn didn't believe they would find many instances of incompetent or indifferent direction so flagrant that they couldn't be cured in the cutting-room.... It's surprising what a cunning pair of shears and a neat subt.i.tle or two can do for a scene that, as originally photographed, is good for nothing but insomnia or to bring on sclerosis of the sense of humour.

Nolan had left to the direction of his successor only the sequences in two sets. Lucinda made out a mental timetable: a week for the supper club scenes, less time than that for the living-room; another week for possible retakes, one more in which to cut and a.s.semble the finished picture. In a month at most she ought to be able to call herself once more a free woman and bid farewell to Hollywood till the courts had made that boast a statement of consummated fact.

A single month! Such a little time when the journey's end was well in sight, a little time to wait for life to yield up all its riches. It was harder, truly, to be patient till this lesser journey should duly come to its appointed end in lovers' meeting. The car was a snail, minutes sluggards, the beauty of the land a bore to one bitterly jealous of every second which heed for speed laws stole from the half-hour she had schemed to have alone with Lynn before the Lontaines were to be expected. She had so much happiness to share with her beloved, so much to tell, everything that had happened since morning, a busy chapter of studio history of which he could know nothing, since he had not revisited the studio since leaving it for work on location that morning.

It seemed a churlish chance indeed that ordained a reception for her exclusively at the hands and glistening teeth of a semi-intelligible j.a.p, who, when he had uttered a.s.sorted fragments of English to the general sense that Mister was having his foot treated by an osteopath at the moment but would soon be disengaged, smirked himself into an indeterminate background and left Lucinda to make the best of this minor disappointment.

Resolutely denying this last, she put off her wrap, made herself at home, and sought but somehow failed to distill a compensating thrill from the reflection that she would ere long be called upon to make herself at home here for good and all. 'Ere long' meaning, of course, after Reno ... And why not? The house was excellently planned, amply big for two; no reason why Lynn need move unless he really wanted to.

Only ... the eye of the prospective chatelaine took on a critical cast ... some details would want a bit of readjustment, the all too patent stamp of the interior decorator's d.a.m.ned good taste would require obliteration before one would care to call the premises one's very own.

The present scheme, for example, lacked anything in the nature of a study, wherein one might lounge and read and acc.u.mulate quant.i.ties of books; according to Lucinda's notion, the real nucleus of a home for civilized people. Lynn, poor dear! worked so hard, he had little time to give to reading; a moan it was his wont to make whenever Lucinda gave their talks a literary turn. The few volumes of his collection stood in sadly broken ranks on a rack of shelves in an alcove that adjoined the living-room, a sort of glory-hole furnished with odds and ends of sham Oriental junk which Lynn called his "den" and f.a.n.n.y had rechristened "the vamp room."

Curiosity concerning Lynn's tastes, when he did find time to read, moved Lucinda to con the straggling squad of t.i.tles. Novels led in number, naturally, works of fiction old and new, in general such trash as furnishes the cinema with most of its plot material. In addition, a subscription set of De Maupa.s.sant with several volumes missing, another of O. Henry, Wells' _The Outline of History_ (uncut), the _Collected Verse_ of Rudyard Kipling, six copies of the same edition of "_Who's Who on the Screen_", Laurence Hope's _Indian Love Lyrics_ in an exceptionally beautiful binding....

With a chuckle Lucinda took possession of this last: Lynn _would_ have Laurence Hope!... Evidently a gift copy. When she opened the book at its fly-leaf, a slip of printed paper fluttered out. Without pausing to read the inscription, Lucinda retrieved the clipping: a half-tone from one of the motion-picture monthlies, a view of the bungalow grounds, with the house in the distance, and in the foreground Lynn and a young woman arm-in-arm, laughing at the camera....

The evening had grown quite dark when a crisp rattle of the telephone startled Lucinda into renewed contact with her surroundings. She found herself in the recess of one of the living-room windows that looked out over the lawn. The book was in her hand. Behind her a door opened, releasing upon the gloom a gush of golden light. Without moving she watched Summerlad, in a dressing-gown hastily thrown on over dress-shirt and trousers, hobble over to the telephone and conduct one end of a short conversation of which her wits made no sense whatever. He hung up, and peered blindly round the room.

"Linda, darling?" he called. "What's the big idea, sitting all alone in the dark?" At the same time he switched on wall-sconces and, blinking, saw her. "Just our luck!" he grumbled, trying to sound disconsolate.

"What do you think, sweetheart? f.a.n.n.y says they can't come tonight; Harry's laid up, got a sick headache or something, and she doesn't think she ought to leave him. I wonder if you'd mind dining here with me alone, this once. I can't very well go out with this foot. Eh? What do you think?"

Lucinda made no sound. His eyes narrowed as he perceived the abnormal absence of colour in her face, the dark dilation of her unwavering eyes.

Limping, he approached.

"What's the matter, Linda? Not cross with me, are you? Hadn't any idea you'd be so early; and today I gave my foot another nasty wrench, out on location, and had to call Cheney in to fix it up. He's just left, and I was starting to dress.... What?"

An entreating hand silenced him. All in a breath Lucinda said: "Those things don't matter, Lynn. Why didn't you ever tell me you were married?"

Summerlad said "d.a.m.nation!" half under his breath and moved nearer, till another flutter of her hand stopped him. "That wise husband of yours!"

he exploded then, vindictively. "I suppose he's been spilling all he knows!"

"Did Bel know? Yes: I presume he must have. But you're mistaken, he didn't tell me. It was this...."

Summerlad frowned, at a loss to identify the volume in her extended hand.

"I found it, Lynn, quite by accident, while I was waiting. Hope's _Indian Love Lyrics_. Don't you remember?... See, it's inscribed: '_To my Lynn, on the first anniversary of our marriage, with all my heart, Nelly._' And then this picture of you two, published just after you came here to live.... Oh, Lynn! _why_ did you lie to me about that poor girl?"

For a moment Summerlad gnawed his underlip without attempting to reply.

Then with a sign of despair he retreated to one end of the club-lounge, against which he rested, to ease his foot. He said something in an angry mumble, as Lucinda followed into the room.

"You might have told me, Lynn...."

"I didn't want you to know."

"You must have known I'd find out, sooner or later."

"I thought I could keep it from you until...."

"Till when? Till what?" He growled, inarticulate with vexation. "To let me go on thinking ... making such a fool of myself!... Since you don't live together, why aren't you divorced?"

"How do you know I'm not?"

"Because you told me that lying story about her. But you've lied to me so much and so long, no doubt you think it unreasonable of me now to expect you to remember everything.... Anyway, if you'd been divorced, you wouldn't have hesitated to own it. Why aren't you?"

"She refuses to divorce me."

"Why?"

"How do I know? I suppose she's still stuck on me, in her way--hopes to get me back some time."

"But what prevents you----?"

"Nelly said if I tried to divorce her she'd fight back, and she knows...."

He didn't finish, but shut his teeth on a blundering tongue and looked more than ever guilty. But Lucinda was in a pitiless temper.

"About you? You mean--about you and other women?"

"Hang it all! I've never pretended to be a saint, have I, Linda?"

"No wonder the poor thing hated the sight of me!... Oh, how could you have been so unkind!"

"If you'd only give me a show to explain...."