"Besides, Skippie dear, I'm engaged."

"Already?"

"Yes."

"You woiked that excuse on me when you tried to explain why you toined me down when I wrote you the letter at the stage door."

"Yes, I did."

"Say, Anitar, you'd oughter git some new material. Your act is growin'

familiar."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Oh no! You wasn't never in vawdvul, was you, oh, no! not a tall!"

Kedzie played her pout on him, but Skip glared at her, shook his head, kicked himself with his game leg, and said, "I gotta give you credit, Anitar, you're the real thing as a user."

"A what?" said Kedzie.

"A user," he explained in his elliptical style. "You're one them dames uses a fella like he was a napkin, then trows him down. You used me twice and used me good. I desoived the second one, for I'm the kind o'

guy gets his once and comes back for more in the same place. I'd go tell Jimmie Dyckman I was a liar but I ain't anxious to be run up for poijury, and I ain't achin' to advertise what a John I been. So long, Anitar, and Gaw delp the next guy crosses your pat'."

That was the last Kedzie saw of Skip. She did not miss him. She hated him for annoying her pride and she hated the law that she used for her divorce, because it required her to wait three months before the interlocutory decree should become final. The time was hazardously long yet short, in a sense, for her alimony was to end at the end of three months if she married again, and marrying again was her next ambition.

The judge had fixed her alimony at $30,000 a year, and an allowance for costs. Beattie tried to make a huge cost settlement, but McNiven knew of Kedzie's interest in the Marquess and he refused the bait. So Kedzie got only $7,500. She found it a ruinously small capital to begin life as a Marchioness on--she that had had only two dollars to begin life in New York on! The Marquess was very nice about it, and said he didn't want any of Dyckman's dirty money. But Kedzie thought of life in England with alarm, especially as she had the American comic-opera idea that all foreign peers are penniless. She dreaded to think what might happen in that three months' interregnum between husband II and husband III.

Enough was happening in the rest of the world.

The _annus miserabilis_ 1917 had begun with the determination of the German Empire to render the seas impa.s.sable and to withdraw the pledge to President Wilson that merchant ships should not be sunk till the pa.s.sengers and crew had a chance to get into open boats. On January 31, 1917, "Frightfulness" began anew, and the undersea fleets, enormously increased, were set loose in shoals. Having no commerce of her own afloat, it was safe for Germany to sink any vessel anywhere.

Kedzie began to wonder if she would ever dare to sail for he future ancestral home, and if she did how long her ship would last.

On February 3d the U-53, which had sunk Strathdene's ship off Newport, sank an American freighter bound from Galveston to Liverpool. Other American vessels followed her into the depths. On February 27th the Laconia, of 18,000 tons burden, was torpedoed and twelve pa.s.sengers died of exposure in the bitter weather. In one of the open boats a Catholic priest administered the last rites to seven persons.

Mrs. Hoy, of Chicago, died in the arms of her daughter and her body slipped into the icy waves, to be followed by her daughter's a few minutes later.

These seemed to make up a sufficient total of American women drowned, and on the next day the President declared that the long-awaited "overt act" had been committed. He asked Congress to declare that peace with Germany was ended. Her amba.s.sador was sent home and ours called home.

In March the British captured Bagdad and the Germans suddenly retreated along a sixty-mile front in France; then the Russian revolution abruptly changed the almighty Czar into a weeping prisoner digging snow. And the vast burying-ground of Siberia gave up its living dead in a sudden apocalypse of freedom. Fifty thousand sledges sped across the steppes laden with returning exiles, chains stil dangling at many a wrist from the dearth of blacksmiths to strike them off.

Kedzie did not value the privilege of living in times when epochs of history were crowded into weeks and cycles completed in days. The revolution in Russia disturbed Kedzie as it did many a monarch, and she said to her mother:

"What a shame to treat the poor Czar so badly! Strathie and I were planning to visit Russia after the war, too. The Czar was awfully nice to Strathie once and I was sure we'd be invited to live right in the Duma or the Kremlin or whatever they call the palace. And now they've got a cheap and nasty old republic over there! And they're talking of having republics everywhere. What could be more stupid? As if everybody was born free and equal. Mixing all the aristocrats right up with the common herd!"

Mrs. Thropp agreed that it was simply terrible.

"Do you know what?" Kedzie gasped.

"What?" her mother echoed.

"I've just had a hunch. I'll bet that by the time I get married to Strathie there'll be nothing left but republics, and no t.i.tles at tall.

His people came over with Henry the Conqueror and his t.i.tle will last just long enough for me to reach for it, and then--woof! Wouldn't it be just my luck to become plain Mrs. Strathdene after all I've had to go through! Honestly, m'mah, don't I just have the dog-on'dest luck!"

"It's perfectly awful," said Mrs. Thropp, "but bad luck can't go on forever."

On April 2d the future Mrs. Strathdene was cheered by an extraordinary spectacle--newspapers in the Metropolitan Opera House! Kedzie was there with her waning Marquess. The occasion was rare enough in itself, for an American opera was being heard: "The Canterbury Pilgrims," with Mr.

Reginald De Koven's music to Mr. Percy Mackaye's text.

Suddenly, in the _entr'acte_ the unheard-of thing--the newspapers--appeared in the boxes and about the house! People spread evening extras on the rails and read excitedly that President Wilson had gone to Congress and asked it to declare that a state of war existed and had existed.

The Italian manager directed the Polish conductor to play "The Star-Spangled Banner" and the three thousand men and women of the audience made a chorus on the obverse side of the curtain.

Mr. Gerard, lately returned from Germany, called for "Three cheers for President Wilson," and there were loud huzzahs for him and for the Allies.

"You and I are allies now," Kedzie murmured to the Marquess. She thought a trifle better of her country.

The Austrian prima donna fainted and could not appear in the last act, and everybody went home expecting to see the vigor of Uncle Sam displayed in a swift and tremendous delivery of a blow long, long withheld.

The vigor was displayed in a tremendous delivery of words far better withheld.

It was a week before Congress agreed that war existed and over a month pa.s.sed before Congress agreed upon the nature of the army to be raised.

Nearly four months pa.s.sed before the draft was made.

Jim Dyckman was almost glad of the delay, for it gave him hope of settling his spiritual affairs in time to be a soldier. He was determined to marry Charity as soon as the three months' probation term was over. But Charity said no! Cowering in seclusion from the eyes of her world, she cherished a dream that when the war broke and the dead began to topple and the wounded to bleed, she might expiate the crime she had not committed, by devoting to her own people her practised mercies. She was afraid to offer them now, or even to make her appearance among the mult.i.tudinous a.s.sociations that sprang up everywhere in a frantic effort to make America ready in two weeks for a war that had been inevitable for two years. Not only a war was to be fought, but a world famine.

Charity was ashamed to show her white face even at the Red Cross. She busied herself with writing checks for the snow-storm of appeals that choked her mail. Otherwise she pined in idleness, refusing more than ever the devotion that Jim offered her now in a longing that increased with denial.

She suffered infinitely, yet mocked her own sufferings as petty trifles.

She contrasted them with what the millions on millions of Europe's men were enduring as they huddled in the snow-drenched, grenade-spattered trenches, or agonized in all their wounds out in the No-Man's Land between the trenches. She told herself that her own heartaches were negligible, despicable against the innumerable anguishes of the women who saw their men, their old men, their young men, their lads, going into the eternal mills of the war, while hunger and loneliness and toil unknown to women before made up their daily portion.

She accused herself for still remaining apart from that continental sisterhood of grief. All America seemed to be playing Hamlet, debating, deferring, letting irresolution inhibit every necessary duty.

Since her country had disowned her and refused her justice or chivalry, she was tempted to disown her country and claim citizenship among those who could fight and could sacrifice and could endure.

It was not easy to persuade a captain to take a woman pa.s.senger aboard his ship, now that the German ambition was to sink a million tons a month, but she resolved again to go if she had to stowaway.

First she would finish her affairs, make her will, and burn her letters.

She had neglected to change the testament she had signed when she became Peter Cheever's wife, and took a pride in making him her sole heir. It would be ridiculous to make him such a post-mortem gift now, now that he had not only money enough, but a wife that satisfied him, and a child.

She wondered whom to leave her money to. Jim Dyckman's name kept recurring to her and she smiled at that, for he had more money than he could use. Besides, the mention of his name in her will would confirm the public belief in their intrigue. She had n.o.body to inflict her inheritance upon but a few relatives, mostly rich enough. She decided to establish a fund for her own orphans, the children of other women whom she had adopted.

Making a will is in sort a preliminary death. Making hers, Charity felt herself already gone, and looked back at life with a finality as from beyond the grave. It was a frightful thing to review her journey from a lofty angel's-eye view.

Her existence looked very petty. Now that her hope and her senses were ended, she felt a grudge against the world that she had got so little out of. She had tried to be a good woman, and her altruism had won her such a bad name that if Dr. Mosely should preach her funeral sermon he would feel that he had revealed a wonderful spirit of forbearance in leaving it unmentioned that she was an abandoned divorcee.

If she had been actually guilty of an intrigue with Jim Dyckman Dr.

Mosely would have forgiven her even more warmly, because it was a woman taken in actual adultery who was forgiven, while Charity had tactlessly fought the charge and demanded vindication instead of winsomely appealing for pity.

By a roundabout road of self-surrender she had come to the same destination that she might have reached by the straight path of self-indulgence. She was perilously near to resolving that she had been a fool not to have taken happiness, physical happiness, first. A grand red pa.s.sion seemed so much more beautiful than a petty blue asceticism.

When she got home from the will-making session with McNiven she began to go over her papers and close the books of her years. She attacked old heaps of bundles of her husband's letters and telegrams, and burned them with difficulty in her fireplace.