"Sure, go to it," he exclaimed with a grin, as Stuart bewailed his lack of a ready excuse. "It'll be a bore, but it will make you appreciate your return to the companionship of genius."

"The Crags" was that palatial establishment up the Hudson where the Reinold Heaths hold court during the solstices between the months at Newport and the brief frenzy of the New York season, and the house party which introduced Stuart Farquaharson to Society with a capital S was typical. One person in the household still had, like himself, the external point of view, and her ditties threw her into immediate contact with each new guest.

"Miss Andrews," he laughed, when the social secretary met him shortly after his arrival, "I'm the poor boy at this frolic, and I'm just as much at my ease as a Hottentot at college. When I found that I was the only man here without a valet, I felt--positively naked."

The young woman's eyes gleamed humorously. "I know the feeling," she said, "and I'll tell you a secret. I took a course of education in higher etiquette from the butler. You can't do that, of course, but when in doubt ask me--and I'll ask the butler."

But it was Mrs. Heath's prerogative to knight her proteges with the Order of the Chosen, and Stuart Farquaharson would have graced any picture where distinction of manner and unself-conscious charm passed current.

"Who is the girl with the red-brown hair and the wonderful complexion and the dissatisfied eyes?" he asked Miss Andrews later, and that lady answered with the frankness of a fellow-countryman in foreign parts:

"Mrs. Larry Holbury. That's her husband over there--it's whispered that they're not inordinately happy."

Farquaharson followed the brief glance of his companion and saw a man inclining to overweight whose fingers caressed the stem of a cocktail glass, and whose face was heavy with surliness.

It subsequently developed, in a tete-a-tete with the wife, that she had read all of Mr. Farquaharson's stories and adored them. It leaked out with an air of resignation that her husband was a bit of a brute--and yet Mrs. Holbury was neither a fool nor a bore. She was simply a composite of flirtatious instinct and an amazing candor.

In the life of Stuart Farquaharson the acceptance of that invitation would have passed as a disconnected incident had it been altogether a matter of his choosing, but he had let himself be caught. Mrs. Reinold Heath had chosen to present him as her personal candidate for lionizing and whom she captured she held in bondage.

"Honestly, now, Miss Andrews," he pleaded over the telephone when that lady called him to the colors a second time, "entirely between ourselves, I came before because I couldn't think of an excuse in time.

Let me off and I'll propose a substitute arrangement. Suppose we have dinner together somewhere where the _hors d'oeuvres_ aren't all gold fish."

Her laugh tinkled in the telephone. "I wish we could," she said. "I knew you let yourself in for it the first time--but now you're hooked and you _have_ to come." So he went.

On later occasions it was more flattering than satisfying to him that the beautiful Mrs. Holbury should drop so promptly into a sort of easy intimacy and treat him almost from the start with a proprietary manner.

It soon became an embarrassment of riches. Stuart was thinking of himself as a woman-hater, these days, and he held a normal dislike for wagging tongues. Holbury, too, who was reputed to be of jealous tendency, seemed to regard him unfavorably and took no great pains to affect cordiality.

One day Wayne dropped, coatless, into Farquaharson's room and grinned as he tossed a magazine down on the table. "_Sic fama est_" was his comment, and Stuart picked up the sheet which his visitor indicated with a jerk of the thumb. The magazine was a weekly devoted ostensibly to the doings of smart society, but its real distinction lay in its innuendo and its genius for sailing so close to the wind of libel that those who moved in the rarified air of exclusiveness read it with a delicious and shuddering mingling of anticipation and dread. Its method was to use no names in the more daring paragraphs, but for the key to the spicy, one had only to refer back. The preceding item always contained names which applied to both.

Stuart found his name and that of Mrs. Holbury listed in an account of some entertainment--and below that:

"A young Southerner, recently arrived and somewhat lionized, is whispered to be complicating the already uneven balance of domesticity in the home of a couple whose status in society antedates his own. This gallant has all the attractiveness of one untouched with ennui. He rides like a centaur, talks like a diplomat and flatters as only a Virginian or an Irishman can flatter. The same whisper has it that the husband suffers in the parallel."

Farquaharson's face darkened and he reached for his discarded coat.

"Hold on; you have company," suggested Wayne placatingly. "Where do you think you're going in such hot haste?"

Stuart was standing with his feet well apart and his mouth set in a stern line.

"Wayne," he said with a crisp and ominous decisiveness, "I've never slandered any man intentionally--and I require the same decency of treatment from others."

"Go easy there. Ride wide! Ride wide!" cautioned the visitor. "That little slander is mild compared with many others in the same pages. Are the rest of them rushing to the office to cane the editors? They are not, my son. Believe me, they are not."

"They should be. Submission only encourages a scoundrel."

"In the first place they would find no one there but a rather fragile and extremely polite young lady. The editor himself doesn't sit around waiting to be horsewhipped. In the second, society tacitly sanctions and supports that sheet. Your fashionable friends would call you a barbarian and what is worse--a boob."

Farquaharson stood in a statuesque ire, and Wayne went philosophically on. "Take the advice of a singularly wise bystander. At least treat it with the contempt of silence until you've consulted the lady. Caning people in New York is attended with some degree of notoriety and she would have to share it. When you're in Rome, be as Romanesque as possible."

"For my part," declared Stuart, "I like another version better. When you're a Roman, be a Roman wherever you are."

Yet after some debate he took off his coat again and announced cryptically, "After all, the one unpardonable idiocy is sectionalism of code--damn it!"

He knew that Marian Holbury and her husband were near a break and that the husband's jealousy looked his way. But, conscious of entire rectitude, he gave no thought to appearances and treated the matter lightly. But the Searchlight Investigation Bureau, whose employment had been discontinued as not paying for itself, was now re-employed and instructed to send a marked copy of the weekly to Miss Conscience Williams. That copy was anonymously mailed, bearing a New York postmark, and its sending was a puzzle which its recipient never solved.

Spring came, and Stuart, who had begun the writing of a novel, took a small house in Westchester County, where he could work apart from the city's excitement. Had he been cautious he would not have selected one within two miles of the Holbury country house, yet the fact was that Marian Holbury had discovered it and he had taken it because of its quaintness. He had been there several weeks alone except for a man servant when, one night, he sat under the lamp of his small living-room with sheets of manuscript scattered about him. It was warm, with clouds gathering for a storm, and the scent of blossoms came in through the open doors and windows. There was no honeysuckle in the neighborhood, but to his memory there drifted, clear and strong and sweet, the fragrance of its heavy clusters.

He sat up straight, arrested by the poignancy of that echo from the past. The typewriter keys fell silent and his eyes stared through the open window, wide and full of suffering. He heard himself declaring with boyhood's assurance, "They may take you to the North Pole and surround you with regiments of soldiers--but in the end it will be the same."

Then without warning a wild sob sounded from the doorway and he looked up, coming to his feet so abruptly that his overturned chair fell backward with a crash.

"Marian!" he exclaimed, his voice ringing with shocked incredulity.

"What are you doing here--and alone?"

Mrs. Holbury stood leaning limply against the door-frame. She was in evening dress, and a wrap, glistening with the shimmer of silver, drooped loosely about her gleaming shoulders.

"It's over," she declared in a passionate and unprefaced outburst. "I can't stand it! I'm done with him! I've left him!"

Stuart spread his hands in dumfounded amazement. "But why, in God's name, did you come here? This is madness--this is inconceivable!"

She went unsteadily to the nearest chair and dropped into it. "I came to stay--if you don't turn me out," she answered.

CHAPTER XII

Except for the low yet hysterical moaning of the woman in the chair and the distant whistle of a Hudson River boat, there was complete silence in the small room, while the man stood dumfounded and speechless.

Marian's evening gown was torn and one silk stocking sagged at the ankle. Stuart Farquaharson noted these things vaguely and at last he inquired, "How did you get here?"

Her answer came between sobs, "I walked."

"You have done an unspeakably mad thing, Marian," he said quietly. "You can't stay here. There is no one in this house but myself; even my servant is away to-night. Why didn't you go to 'The Crags'?"

She lifted a tear-stained face and shot her answer at him scornfully.

"'The Crags'! I had to talk to some one who was _human_. They would have bundled me back with cynical advice--besides, they're off somewhere."

"You're in distress and God knows I sympathize with you. I shall certainly offer no cynical advice, but I mean to call your husband on the telephone and tell him that you're here."

He turned toward the side table and lifted the desk instrument, but with the impetuous swiftness of a leopardess she came to her feet and sprang upon him. For an instant he was borne back by the unexpected impact of her body against his own and in that moment she seized the telephone from his hand and tore loose its wires from the wall. Then she hurled it with a crashing violence to the stone flagging of the hearth where it lay wrecked, and stood before him a palpitating and disordered spirit of fright and anger.

He had sought in that brief collision to restrain her, but she had wrenched herself free so violently that she had torn the strap which held her gown over one shoulder. Then as she reeled back, with a wildly ungoverned gesture she ran her fingers through her hair until it fell in tangled waves about her shoulders. It was perhaps a full minute before she could speak and while she stood recovering her breath, Stuart Farquaharson looked helplessly down at the instrument which she had succeeded in rendering useless.

With blazing eyes and quivering nostrils, the woman rushed headlong into explanation, accusation and pleading.