It was shortly after this talk that I noticed the extraordinary intimacy which seemed to have sprung up between Katherine and Lillian.

I seemed to be quite set aside, almost forgotten, when Katherine came to the apartment. And there was such an air of mystery about their conversation! If they were talking together, and I came within hearing, they either abruptly stopped speaking, or shifted the subject.

I was just childish and weak enough from my illness to be a trifle chagrined at being so left out, and I am afraid my chagrin amounted almost to sulkiness sometimes. Lillian and Katherine, however, appeared to notice nothing, and their mysterious conferences increased in number as the days went on.

There came a day at last when my morbidness had increased to such an extent that I felt there was nothing more in the world for me, and that there was no one to care what became of me. I was huddled in one of Lillian's big chairs before the fireplace in the living room, drearily watching the flames, through eyes almost too dim with tears to see them. I could hear the murmur of voices in the hall, where Katherine and Lillian had been standing ever since Katherine's arrival, a few minutes before. Then the voices grew louder, there was a rush of feet to the door, a "Hush!" from Lillian, and then, pale, emaciated, showing the effects of the terrible ordeal through which he had gone, my brother-cousin, Jack Bickett, who, until Katherine came home, I had thought was dead, stood before me.

"Oh! Jack, Jack. Thank G.o.d! Thank G.o.d!"

As I saw my brother-cousin, Jack Bickett, whom I had so long mourned as dead, coming toward me in Lillian Underwood's living room, I stumbled to my feet, and, with no thought of spectators, or of anything save the fact that the best friend I had ever known had come back to me, I rushed into his arms, and clung to him wildly, sobbing out all the heartache and terror that had been mine since d.i.c.ky had left me in so cruel and mysterious a manner.

I felt as a little child might that had been lost and suddenly caught sight of its father or mother. The awful burden that had been mine lifted at the very sight of Jack's pale face smiling down at me. I knew that someway, somehow, Jack would straighten everything out for me.

"There, there, Margaret." Jack's well-remembered tones, huskier, weaker by far than when I had last heard them, soothed me, calmed me.

"Everything's going to come out all right. I'll see to it all. Sit down, and let me hear all about it."

There was an indefinable air of embarra.s.sment about him which I could not understand at first. Then I saw beyond him the lovely flushed face of Katharine Sonnot, and in her eyes there was a faintly troubled look.

I read it all in a flash. Jack was embarra.s.sed because I had so impetuously embraced him before Katherine. I withdrew myself from his embrace abruptly, and drew a chair for him near my own.

"Are you sure you are fully recovered?" I asked, and I saw Jack look wonderingly at the touch of formality in my tone.

"No, I cannot say that," he returned gravely, "but I am so much better off than so many of the other poor chaps who survived, that I have no right to complain. Mine was a body wound, and while I shall feel its effects on my general health for years, perhaps all my life, yet I am not crippled."

His tone was full of thankfulness, and all my pettiness vanished at the sudden, swift vision of what he must have endured. The next moment he had turned my thoughts into a new channel.

"Margaret," he said gravely, "I am terribly distressed to hear from Katherine that your husband has gone away in such a strange manner."

So she had already told him! The little pang of unworthy jealousy came back, but I banished it.

"Now, there must be no more time lost," he went on. "You have had no man to look after things for you, but remember now, your old brother, Jack, is on the job. First, I must know everything that occurred on that last day. Did you notice anything extraordinary in his demeanor on that last morning you saw him?"

This was the old Jack, going directly to the root of the matter, wasting no time on his own affairs or feelings, when he saw a duty before him. I felt the old sway of his personality upon me, and answered his questions as meekly as a child might have done.

"He was just the same as he had been every morning since my accident,"

I returned.

"H-m." Jack thought a long minute, then began again.

"Tell me everything that happened that day, every visitor you had; don't omit the most trifling thing," he commanded.

He listened attentively as I recalled Harry Underwood's visit, and Robert Gordon's. At my revelation that Robert Gordon had said he was my father, his calm, judicial manner broke into excitement.

"Your father!" he exclaimed, and then, after a pause; "I always knew he would come back some day. But go on. What happened when he told you he was your father?"

I went on with the story of my struggle with my own rancor against my father, of my conviction that I had heard my mother's voice urging my reconciliation with him, of my father's first embrace and kisses, even of the queer smothered sound like a groan and the slamming of a door which I had heard. Then I told him of my father's gift of money to me, which I had not yet touched, but I noticed that toward the last of my narrative Jack seemed preoccupied.

"Did your husband come home to Marvin at all that day?" he asked.

"No, he never came back from the city after he had once gone in, until evening."

"But are you sure that this day he did not return to Marvin?" he persisted. "How do you know?"

"Because no one saw him," I returned, "and he could hardly have come back without someone in the house seeing him."

He said no more, as Lillian and Katherine came up just then, and the conversation became general.

To my great surprise, I did not see him again after that first visit.

Katherine explained to me that he had been called out of town on urgent business, but the explanation seemed to me to savor of the mysterious excitement that seemed to possess everybody around me.

Finally one morning, Lillian came to me, her face shining.

"I want you to prepare to be very brave, Madge," she said. "There is some one coming whom I fear it will tax all your strength to meet."

"d.i.c.ky!" I faltered, beginning to tremble.

"No, child, not yet," she said, her voice filled with pity, "but someone who has done you a great wrong, Grace Draper."

XLIII

"TAKE ME HOME"

"Grace Draper coming to see me!"

My echo of Lillian's words was but a trembling stammer. The prospect of facing the girl the thread of whose sinister personality had so marred the fabric of my marital happiness terrified me. Her message to me, posted in San Francisco, where d.i.c.ky was, flaunted its insolent triumph again before my eyes:

"She laughs best who laughs last."

That she had intended me to believe she was with d.i.c.ky, I knew, whether her boast were true or not. But how was it that she was coming to see me? Lillian put a rea.s.suring hand upon my shoulder as she saw my face.

"Pull yourself together, Madge," she admonished me sharply. "Let me make this clear to you. Grace Draper is not in San Francisco now.

Whether she has been, or what she knows about d.i.c.ky she has refused so far to say. She has finally consented to see you, however."

"But, how?" I murmured, bewildered.

"Do you remember the girl of whom Katherine spoke when she first came, the girl who moaned at night in the room next hers?"

"Oh, yes! And she was--?"

"Grace Draper. I do not know what made me think of the Draper when Katherine spoke of the girl, but I did, although I said nothing about it at the time. A little later, however, when the girl became really ill and Katherine was caring for her as a mother or a sister would have done, I told our little friend of my suspicion. Of course, Katherine watched her mysterious patient very carefully after that, and when she became ill enough to require a physician's services, Katharine managed it so that Dr. Pett.i.t was called, and he recognized the girl at once.

"Ever since then, Katherine has been working on the subst.i.tute for honor and conscience which the Draper carries around with her--but she was hard as nails for a long time. She is terribly grateful to Katherine, however, as fond of her as she can be of anyone, and she has finally consented to come here. Don't anger her if you can help it."

When, a little later, Grace Draper and I faced each other, it was pity instead of anger that stirred my heart. The girl was inexpressibly wan, her beauty only a worn shadow of its former glory. But there was the old flash of defiant hatred in her eyes as she looked at me.

"Please don't flatter yourself that I have come here for your sake,"