"I know; but I had to be sure. You see, you told Mr. Nolan last night I was due at the bungalow for dinner."

"But Cindy!" f.a.n.n.y's wide eyes were a child's for candour--"that was before I knew there was any reason ... Mr. Nolan called up about nine, said he wanted to talk to Harry; and when I told him Harry was away on business (that was a lie--tell you presently) he guessed that Harry had come here to see you, and said he'd try to get in touch with him here.

So I told him I believed you were dining out with Lynn; we'd all been invited, but Harry found he couldn't make it, at the last moment, so we begged off. That's how it happened."

"I fancied it was something like that," Lucinda commented, unsuspiciously enough but in a thoughtful tone open to misconstruction by an inquiet conscience.

"But surely you don't doubt my word, Cindy!"

"Why should I, dear?" Lucinda asked, smiling; and pausing in her restless, aimless circling of the room she dropped an affectionate hand on f.a.n.n.y's shoulder. "What a silly notion!"

f.a.n.n.y cuddled the hand to her cheek. "Forgive me, dear: I don't know why I said that. I suppose it's because I'm as much upset about my own affairs as you are about yours, Cindy--most of all about this shocking business, of course, and so sorry for you, dear----"

"Don't be sorry for me." Lucinda's fingers tightened on f.a.n.n.y's. "Be glad I've learned a good lesson and had a fortunate escape. I ought to be glad the hurt's no worse...."

"Poor darling! you were fearfully fond of Lynn, weren't you?"

"Was I? I've been wondering. In love with Lynn, or just in love with Love: which? I'm afraid the shock of it all is too new for me to be sure as yet, but.... Oh, I'm sorry for Lynn, of course! but only as one would be for any acquaintance who was in pain and at death's door. But in the light of what I know now, of how Lynn lied to me, and how shamefully he treated that poor creature he married, it seems impossible I could ever have been in love, actually in love with such a man.... In love with being loved, yes, I'm afraid I shall never get better of that weakness; and so absurdly conscious that Lynn Summerlad, the great lover, had chosen me, I never stopped to consider him in comparison with other men.

But I don't think I was in love with Lynn.... Or am I sincere? is what I'm saying just sophistry to salve my poor, sore vanity?"

She laughed consciously, then in swift variation of mood added a pensive, wistful note: "f.a.n.n.y: Bel loves me...."

The countenance turned up to hers was quick with mirth: f.a.n.n.y started to speak, gurgled rapturously, and broke down in laughter so infectious that Lucinda could not but respond, if ruefully.

"You great goose! if that's news to you, it's news to no one else."

"It is to me." Lucinda sobered. "Daresay I might have guessed if I'd been a wiser woman, but I wasn't, not till just now, when Bel was going away, after a wretched little squabble. Then something, I'm sure I don't know what...."

"I could have told you long ago, sweetest; in fact, I was only awaiting the right moment. I've been sounding Bel out, you may have noticed.

There isn't anything one can teach him about flirting, Cindy, all the same there's only one woman in the world Bel can see."

"I'm sure of that," Lucinda agreed ... "just now."

"Cindy!" f.a.n.n.y insisted, tugging at her hand--"tell me something--"

"Very well, dear. No: I shan't give Bel another chance. I'm not in love with him at all, and I dare not run the risk of falling in love with him again, I daren't risk going mad with happiness, as I should if what once was could be again ... and then having to live through all the misery of breaking with him another time."

"But surely--if he promised faithfully----"

"The promises men make to win us, f.a.n.n.y, are not the sort that they know how to keep. It's always what they can't have they want most. Give them all they ask today, and tonight they'll lie awake longing for the things they've forsworn. The only woman who could hold Bel to his good behaviour would be one who could keep him guessing. I'm not that woman, I can't pretend, with me it's all or nothing--always!"

"Poor lamb!" f.a.n.n.y drew her down to sit on the arm of the chair and nestled her frivolous, fair head upon Lucinda's bosom. "You have such desperate troubles, I'm ashamed to tell you my own...."

"Your own, f.a.n.n.y?"

"We're both in the same boat, Cindy," f.a.n.n.y lamented--"two lorn women this very day as ever was! Harry has left me ... flat!"

"f.a.n.n.y!" Lucinda caught the girl's face between tender hands and looked incredulously into its swimming eyes. "You're not joking?"

"Divvle the joke's in me the day," f.a.n.n.y declared between gulps, dabbling her tears with a handkerchief. "I didn't want to tell you, when you had so much else to worry you, but I'm afraid you've got to know.

Because, you see, you're mixed up in it, too."

"I! what do you mean?"

"Well, Harry and I haven't been happy together for ever so long. Love with us you know, was rather a flash in the pan. Last night we had a scene, I mean another scene--forget the serial number. When I went home I found him trying to drink himself to death. He was half out of his head, and wouldn't tell me why. But I had a suspicion and wormed it out of him finally: he's been speculating with the company's money, your money, Cindy; and, now, with Zinn taking over the production, his shortage is sure to be found out. I couldn't make him say how much it was, but there's no question, it will run into a good sum. Well: I promised to intercede with you, and managed to quiet him down and get him to bed. Next thing I knew he was in the bathroom, trying to cut his throat. Then I hid his razors and let him go back to his whiskey, hoping he'd drink himself asleep. And presently he did. At least, he seemed to.

So I went to bed--about three this morning, that was--worn out. When you called up, Cindy, I fibbed to you: I'd been awake about half an hour, howling like a lost child because I knew that Harry had deserted me at last."

"But how did you know--? Did he leave a note?"

"No, dear--that's how I knew. He didn't leave me a note or much of anything else except my clothes; everything that was portable and easy to turn into money he'd taken, all my jewels, everything. So you see, dear"--the face of an unworldly child quivered with a pitifully sad smile--"I'm not only an embezzler's wife, I'm a pauper--and a friendless pauper unless you keep on being my friend!"

The woebegone voice died away in sobs, and with a broken cry of compa.s.sion Lucinda gathered that unhappy little body into her arms.

XLIV

The finding of Nelly's body crushed beneath the wreckage of a motor-car on the beach some fifty miles north of Los Angeles, gave the story of the Summerlad shooting an extended lease of twenty-four hours only on front-page s.p.a.ce in the newspapers. In none of these was the ownership of the car called in question; in which circ.u.mstance Lucinda thought to detect the influential hand of "Mr. Bellamy Druce of New York," finding further support for this surmise in the fact that even Bel's name came in for astonishingly occasional mention, considering his active part in the aftermath of the affair, and especially considering the civic zeal ordinarily displayed by the local press in playing up the presence in "the Queen City of the Sunny Southland" of personages of social or financial consequence in the East.

Then, since the death of the unhappy woman had defeated all hope of lurid court proceeding, and rendered piquant exploitation of "wild life inside the movie colony" an open invitation to actions for criminal libel as soon as Summerlad got well enough to reckon damages to his reputation, the cause celebre went into quick eclipse. The newspapers of the third morning carried brief notices inconspicuously placed to the effect that Summerlad was reported out of danger, though his complete recovery promised to be a matter of many weeks, and that the body of his wife was being shipped East to her parents. And the affair was never mentioned more.

Lucinda spent the best part of that day (and a good part of the next two as well) in the projection-room with Zinn and Wallace Day, her new director, sitting in judgment on thirty-six reels of film, the acc.u.mulated sum of Nolan's fumbling with about two-thirds of a picture.

Not that such extravagance was anything extraordinary under prevailing methods of production. It remains to this day quite in order for a director to photograph between fifty and sixty-thousand feet of scenes on celluloid, only forty-five hundred feet of which will ever be revealed to the public. The ordinary photoplay, Lucinda learned, runs to not more than six reels, or six-thousand feet of film, approximately one-fourth of which is devoted to reading matter, leaving forty-five hundred feet or less to carry on the story in terms of pictorial action.

The more than seven miles of photography which const.i.tuted Nolan's legacy to his successor would consequently require boiling down to about one-twelfth its length to make room for the third of the picture which he had left undirected.

This monumental feat of waste had been achieved by means of photographing every scene, even the simplest, in inordinate length, over and over again, and from every conceivable angle, much of the time with three cameras in simultaneous operation, and by making provision to break up each scene with close-ups of the princ.i.p.al players heaving their chests and mugging intimately at audiences as yet undreaming of their treat in store.

Thus it came to pa.s.s that Lucinda, who had at first welcomed the prospect of the seclusion which the projection-room was to afford her, the freedom which those blank black walls would insure from consciousness of fleering eyes and tongues over-ready to whisper evil concerning her relations with the wounded man--Lucinda, long before a fourth part of the rough footage had been unreeled for her inspection, began to find inexpressibly tiresome the sight of her shadow-self mincing and simpering through endless repet.i.tions of business with which she was already conversant to satiety, and with all her heart wished herself back again in the uncompromising glare of the Kliegs, where at least, though onlookers might mock and mouth lies, she would have work to do that would help her to forget.

As it was, though her eyes were constant to the screen, her attention was forever flagging, her thoughts harking back along old trails where heartaches haunted....

The lively disputes between Zinn and Day which from time to time interrupted the procession of the scenes, as those two debated ways and means to cut and eliminate and avoid retaking, contributed little to the relief of her afflicted spirit. Hourly its burden of boredom grew more nearly insufferable, toleration of it more seemingly insane.

The business as a whole seemed so stupid, so puerile, so hopelessly inconsequential.

Pictures! her very soul sickened at the sound of the word. As if motion-pictures mattered, or whether they were good or bad, inanely done or cleverly. People went to see them anyway, paid money to sit goggling at them, and incomprehensibly dispersed without tearing down the theatres which had taken such cheap advantage of their confidence!

All this bickering about "saving" a production whose asininity one esteemed beyond repair as long as one lacked the moral courage to touch a match to its interminable footage of footless photography!

If it hadn't been for that last quarrel with Bellamy, if it were not for seeming to give in to his wishes and thus giving him more encouragement to tamper with her concerns, Lucinda before the end of that first day in the projection-room would have cried off her agreement with Zinn, abandoned the production then and there, pocketed her loss without murmur, and let the looks of it go hang.

But still the secret springs of vanity were subtly at work. For her own sake, she insisted, for the sake of her pride, false pride though it might prove in the end, she couldn't draw back at this juncture, she had to go on and, if it were in her so to do, make good her claims to consideration as one who had shown at least a certain promise of value to the screen.

So though she shuddered to contemplate the weeks to come, she steeled heart and soul to see her picture through to the very end.