Gard interrupted. "I don't want the 'who's who,' Brencherly, or I wouldn't have sent for you. I want to know the worst about him. Cut loose."

"Well, his deals haven't been square, you know. He's had two or three nasty suits against him; he's got more enemies than you can shake a stick at. His confidential lawyer is Twickenbaur, the biggest scoundrel unhung. Of course n.o.body knows that; Twickenbaur's reputation is too bad--Mahr goes to _your_ lawyers, apparently."

"There isn't any blackmail in any of _that_," the older man snarled.

"Oh!" cried the youth, his blue eyes lighting. "Oh, it's blackmail you want! Well, the only thing that looks that way is a story that n.o.body has been able to substantiate. We heard it as we hear lots of things that don't get out; but there was a yarn that Mahr was a bigamist; that his first wife was living when he married Miss Theobald. She died when the boy was born, and in that case she was never his legal wife, and of course now never can be. The other woman's dead, too, they say; but who's to prove it? That would be a fine tale for the coin, if anyone had the goods to show."

"I suppose the office looked that up when they got it, didn't they? Good for the coin, eh? What did you find?"

The informant actually blushed. "You aren't accusing us, Mr. Gard!"

"Accusing nothing. I know a few things, Brencherly, remember. Baker Allen told me your office held him up good and plenty to turn in a different report when his wife employed you, and you 'got the goods on him.' Now, don't give me any bluff. I want facts, and I pay you for them, don't I? Well, when you got that story, you looked it up hard, didn't you?"

Brencherly, thoroughly cowed, nodded a.s.sent. "But we couldn't get a line on it anywhere. If there were any proofs, somebody else had them--that's all."

"U'm!" said Marcus, and sat a moment silent. When he spoke again it was with an apparent frankness that would have deceived the devil himself.

"See here, I'll tell you my reason for all this, so perhaps you can answer more intelligently. Martin Marteen was a friend of mine, and I'm interested in his little daughter, who has just come out. Theodore Mahr is attentive to her, and I'm not keen about it, and what you tell me about his father doesn't make me any happier. What sort of a woman is Mrs. Marteen--from your point of view? Of course I know her well socially, but what's her rating with you?"

"Ai, sir," Brencherly answered promptly. "Exceptionally fine woman--very intelligent. I should say that, with a word from you, she ought to be able to handle the situation, and any girl living. But the boy's all right, Mr. Gard, even if Mahr isn't. And after all, there may not be a word of truth in that romance I spun to you. We couldn't land a thing.

What made us think there might be something in it was that we got it second hand from an old servant of Mahr's. _He_ told the man that told us; but the old boy's gone, too."

Gard rose from his chair and resumed his pacing. Brencherly remained seated, patiently waiting. Presently Gard turned on him.

"That'll do, Brencherly. You may go; and don't let me catch you tipping Mahr off that I've been having you rate him, do you understand?"

The detective sprang to his feet with alacrity. "Oh, no, Mr. Gard--never a word. You know, sir, you're one of our very best clients."

Left alone, Gard sat down wearily, ran his hands through his hair, then held his throbbing temples between his clenched fists. Somehow, on his slender evidence, that was no evidence in fact, he was convinced of the truth of Mahr's perfidy; convinced that the lady rated A1 by the keenest detective bureau in the country had obtained the proofs of guilt and used them with the same perfect business sagacity she had used in his own case. It sickened him. Somehow he could forgive her handling such a case as his. It was purely commercial; but this other was uglier stuff.

His soul rebelled. He would not have it so; he would not believe--and yet he was convinced against his own logic. He had tried to cheat the arithmetic when he had tried to make her extortion money an honestly made acquisition. And she had refused to be a party to the flimsy self-deception.

Mrs. Marteen was a blackmailer, an extortioner--that was the truth, the truth that he would not let himself recognize. Her depredations probably had much wider scope than he guessed. He must save her from herself; he must somehow reach the submerged personality and awaken it to the hideousness of that other, the soulless, heartless automaton that schemed and executed crimes with mechanical exact.i.tude. He took a long breath of determination, and again grinned at the farce he was playing for his own benefit. Through repet.i.tion he was beginning to believe in the fiction of his former intimacy with Marteen. True, he had known him slightly, had once or twice s.n.a.t.c.hed a hasty luncheon in his company at one of his clubs; but far from liking each other, the two men had been fundamentally antagonistic. Neither was Dorothy an excuse for his peculiar state of mind. He was drawn to her with strong protective yearning. Her childlike beauty pleased him. He wished she were his daughter, or a little sister to pet and spoil. But it was not for her sake that he savagely longed to make the mother into something different, "remolded nearer to his heart's desire." Was it the woman herself, or her enigmatic dual personality that held him? He wished he knew. He found his mind divided, his emotions many and at cross purposes. His keen, almost clairvoyant intuition was at fault for once.

It sent no sure signal through the fog of his troubled heart.

How would it all end? Ah, how would it end? He sensed the situation as one of climax. It could not quietly dissolve itself and be absorbed in the sea of time and forgotten commonplace.

As an outlet for his mental discomfort, his restless spirit busied itself in hating Victor Mahr. He had always disliked the man; now he malignantly resented his very existence; Mahr became the personification of the thing he most wished to forget--the victimizing power of the woman who had enthralled him. Gard had met the one element he could not control or change--the past; and his conquering soul raged at its own impotence.

"There shall be no more of this!" he said aloud. "She sha'n't again.

I'll--"

"I'll what?" the demon in his brain jeered at him. "What will you do?

She will not 'be under obligations.' Perhaps, even, she likes her strange profession; perhaps she finds the delight of battle, that you know so well, in pitting her wits against the brains of the mighty; perhaps she has a cynic soul that finds a savage joy in running down the faults of the seemingly faultless--running them to earth and taking her profit therefrom. Who are you, Marcus Gard, to cavil at the l.u.s.t of conquest--to sneer at the controlling of destinies?"

"I won't be beaten," declared his ego, "even if I have no weapon. I'll search till I find the way to the citadel, and if there is none open, I'll smash one through!"

V

"Mrs. Martin Marteen requests the pleasure of Mr. Marcus Gard's company at dinner"--the usual engraved invitation, with below a girlish scrawl: "You'll come, won't you? It's my very last dinner before we go South.--D."

He took a stubby quill, which, for some occult reason, he preferred for his intimate correspondence, and scribbled: "Of course, little friend.

The crowned heads can wait." He tossed the envelope on the pile for special delivery, and speared the invitation on a letter file.

Two months had pa.s.sed, and he was no nearer the solution of the problem he had set himself. His affection for the girl had deepened--become ratified by his experience of her sweetness and intelligence. They were "pally," as she put it, happily contented in each other's society. On the other hand, the fascination that Mrs. Marteen exercised over him was far from being placid enjoyment. She continued to vex his heart and irritate his imagination. Her tolerance of young Mahr's attentions to Dorothy drove him distracted, his only relief being that Miss Gard, his sister, swayed, as always, by his slightest wish, had developed a most maternal delight in Dorothy's presence, and was doing all in her power to make the girl's season a most successful one; also, in accord with his obvious desire--her influence was antagonistic to Mahr, his son and his motor car, his house and his flowers, everything that was his; in spite of which, Dorothy's manner toward Teddy Mahr was undoubtedly one of encouragement. Honesty compelled Gard to own that he could not find in the boy the echo of the objectionable sire. Perhaps the long dead mother, who was never a lawful wife, had, by some retributive turn of justice, endowed him wholly with her own qualities. Gard could almost find it in his breast to like the big, large-hearted, gentle boy, but for a final irony of fate--the son's blind adoration of his father, and that father's obvious but helpless dislike of the impending romance.

Every element of contradiction seemed to be present in the tangle and to bind the older watchers to silence. What could anyone do or say? And meanwhile, in the pause before the storm, Dorothy's violet eyes smiled into her Teddy's brown devoted ones with tender approval.

One move only had Gard made with success, and the doing thereof had given him supreme satisfaction. The account opened in his office in Mrs.

Marteen's name had been transferred to Dorothy, and with such publicity that Mrs. Marteen was unable to raise objections. Right and left he told the tale of his having desired to advise the widow of his old friend, of his successful operations, of Mrs. Marteen's refusal to accept her just gains as "too great," and his determination that the account, transferred to the daughter, should reach its proper destination. The first result of his outwitting of the beneficiary was a doubling of the usual letters inclosing a cheque and requesting advice. The secretary was plainly disgusted, but Gard grimly paid the price of his checkmate, and by his generosity certainly precluded any accusation of favoritism.

As he read Dorothy's note on the invitation, he chuckled at the thought of his own cleverness, and rejoiced in the knowledge that his debutante had become somewhat his ward and protegee.

The bell of his private telephone rang--only his intimates had the number of that wire--and he raised the receiver with sudden conviction that the voice he would hear was Dorothy's. "Well, my dear?" he said.

There was a little gurgle, and an obviously disguised voice replied:

"And who do you think this is?"

"Why, the queen of the debutantes, of course. I felt it in my bones; it was a pleasurable sensation."

"Wrong," the voice came back, "quite wrong. This is the superintendent of the Old Ladies' Home, and we want autographed photographs of you for all the old ladies' dressers--to cheer them up, you know."

"Certainly, my dear madam; they shall be sent at once. To your apartment, I suppose. Is there anything else?"

"Yes; you might bring them yourself. Did you know that mother has been ordered off to Bermuda at once? The doctor says she's dreadfully run down. She won't let me go with her. She wants me to do a lot of things; and then in three weeks we all go South. Mother's doctor says she mustn't wait. Isn't it a bore? And Tante Lydia is coming to-day to chaperon me. Did you get my invitation?"

Gard's heart sank. "Dear me! That's bad news. How long will your mother be gone?"

"Oh, just the voyage and straight home again. But do come in this afternoon and have tea; perhaps you could persuade her to stay a week there--she won't obey me."

"They are very insubordinate in the Old Ladies' Home. I'll drop in this afternoon. Good-by, my dear."

He hung up the receiver and glowered. "Not well! Mrs. Marteen in the doctor's care!" He could not a.s.sociate her perfection with illness of any kind. It gave him a distinct pang, and for the first time a feeling of protective tenderness. This instantly translated itself into a lavish order of violets, and a mental note to see that, her stateroom was made beautiful for her voyage.

Adding his signature to the pile of letters that Saunders handed him served to pa.s.s the moments till he could officially declare himself free for the day and be driven to the abode of the two beings who had so absorbed his interest.

He found Mrs. Marteen reclining on a _chaise-longue_ in her library-sitting room, the Pekinese spaniel in her lap and Dorothy by her side. She looked weary, but not ill, and Gard felt a glow of comfort.

"Dear lady, I came at once. Dorothy advised me of your impending journey, and led me to believe you were not well. But I am rea.s.sured--you do not seem a drooping flower."

Mrs. Marteen laughed. "How 1830! Couldn't you put it into a madrigal? It really is absurd, though, sending me off like this. But they threatened me with nerves--fancy that--nerves! And never having had an attack of that sort, of course I'm terrified. I shall leave my b.u.t.terfly in good hands, however. My sister is to take my place; and I sha'n't be gone long, you know."

"We hope not, don't we, Dorothy? What boat do you honor, and what date?"

Mrs. Marteen hesitated. "I'm not sure. The _Bermudian_ sails this week.

If I cannot go then, and that is possible, I may take the _Cecelia_, and make the Caribbean trip. It's a little longer, but on my return I would join Dorothy and Mrs. Trevor, crossing directly from Bermuda to Florida.

It's absurd, isn't it, to play the invalid! But insomnia is really getting its hold on me. A good sleep would be a novelty just now, and bromides depress me, so--there you are! I suppose I must take the doctor's advice and my maid, and fly for my health's sake."