Jim Dyckman had always loved Charity Coe, but he let another man marry her--a handsomer, livelier, more entertaining man with whom Dyckman was afraid to compete. A mingling of laziness and of modesty disarmed him.

As soon as he saw how tempestuously Peter Cheever began his courtship, Dyckman withdrew from Miss Coe's entourage. When she asked him why, he said, frankly:

"Pete Cheever's got me beat. I know when I'm licked."

Pete's courtship was what the politicians call a whirlwind campaign.

Charity was Mrs. Cheever before she knew it. Her friends continued to call her Charity Coe, but she was very much married.

Cheever was a man of shifting ardors. His soul was filled with automatic fire-extinguishers. He flared up quickly, but when his temperature reached a certain degree, sprinklers of cold water opened in his ceiling and doused the blaze, leaving him unharmed and hardly scorched. It had been so with his loves.

After a brief and blissful honeymoon, Peter Cheever's capricious soul kindled at the thought of an exploration of war-filled Europe. His blushing bride was a hurdle-rider, too, and loved a risk-neck venture.

She insisted on going with him.

He accepted the steering-wheel of a motor-ambulance and left his bride to her own devices while he shot along the poplar-plumed roads of France at lightning speed.

Charity drifted into hospital service. Her first soldier, the tortured victim of a gas-attack, was bewailing the fate of his motherless child.

Charity brought a smile to what lips he had by whispering:

"I am rich. I will adopt your little girl."

It was the first time she had ever boasted of being rich. The man died, whispering: "_Merci, Madame! Merci, Madame!_" Another father was writhing in the premature h.e.l.l of leaving a shy little unprotected boy to starve. Charity promised to care for him, too.

At a committee meeting, a week later, she learned of a horde of war orphans and divided them up with Muriel Schuyler, Mrs. Perry Merithew, and other American angels abroad.

When Charity's husband wearied of being what he called "chauffeur to a butcher-wagon," he decided that America was a pretty good country, after all. But Charity could not tear herself away from her privilege of suffering, even to follow her bridegroom home. He had cooled to her also, and he made no protest. He promised to come back for her. He did not come. He cabled often and devotedly, telling her how lonely he was and how busy. She answered that she hoped he was lonely, but she knew he was busy. He would be!

When Cheever first returned, Jim Dyckman saw him at a club. He saw him afterward in a restaurant with one of those astonishing animals which the moving pictures have hardly caricatured as a "vampire." This one would have been impossible if she had not been visible. She was intensely visible.

Jim Dyckman felt that her mere presence in a public restaurant was offensive. To think of her as displacing Charity Coe in Cheever's attentions was maddening. He understood for the first time why people of a sort write anonymous letters. He could not stoop to that degradation, and yet he wondered if, after all, it would be as degrading to play the informer as to be an unprotesting and therefore accessory spectator and confidant.

Gossip began to deal in the name of Cheever. One day at a club the he-old-maid "Prissy" Atterbury cackled:

"I saw Pete Cheever at a cabaret--"

Jim asked, anxiously, "Was he alone?"

"Nearly."

"What do you mean--nearly alone?"

"Well, what he had with him is my idea of next to nothing. I wonder what sinking ship Cheever rescued her from. They tell me she was a cabaret dancer named Zada L'Etoile--that's French for Sadie Starr, I suppose."

Dyckman's obsession escaped him.

"Somebody ought to write his wife about it."

"That would be nice!" cried Prissy. "Oh, very, very nice! It would be better to notify the Board of Health. But it would be still better if his wife would come home and mind her own business. These Americans who hang about the edges of the war, fishing for sensations, make me very tired--oh, very, very tired."

Prissy never knew how near he was to annihilation. Jim had to hold one fist with the other. He was afraid to yield to his impulse to smash Prissy in the droop of his mustache. Prissy was too frail to be slugged.

That was his chief protection in his gossip-mongering career.

Besides, it is a questionable courtesy for a former beau to defend another man's wife's name, and Dyckman proved his devotion to Charity best by leaving her slanderer unrebuked.

It was no anonymous better that brought Charity Coe home. It was the breakdown of her powers of resistance. Even the soldiers had to be granted vacations from the trenches; and so an eminent American surgeon in charge of the hospital she adorned finally drove Mrs. Cheever back to America. He disguised his solicitude with brutality; he told her he did not want her to die on their hands.

When Charity came back, Cheever met her and celebrated her return. She was a new sensation to him again for a week or two, but her need of seclusion and quiet drove him frantic and he grew busy once more. He recalled Miss L'Etoile from the hardships of dancing for her supper.

Unlike Charity, Zada never failed to be exciting. Cheever was never sure what she would do or say or throw next. She was delicious.

When Dyckman learned of Cheever's extra establishment it enraged him.

He had let Cheever push him aside and carry off Charity Coe, and now he must watch Cheever push Charity Coe aside and carry on the next choice of his whims.

To Dyckman, Charity was perfection. To lose her and find her in the ash-barrel with Cheever's other discarded dolls was intolerable. Yet what could Dyckman do about it? He dared not even meet Charity. He hated her husband, and he knew that her husband hated him. Cheever somehow realized the dogged fidelity of Dyckman's love for Charity and resented it--feared it as a menace, perhaps.

Dyckman had two or three narrow escapes from running into Charity, and he finally took to his heels. He lingered in the Canadian wilds till he thought it safe to return. And now she chanced to board the same train.

The problem he had run away from had cornered him.

He had cherished a sneaking hope that she would learn the truth somehow before he met her. He was not sure what she ought to do when she learned it. He was sure that what she would do would be the one right thing.

Yet he realized from her placid manner of parrying his threats at her husband that she still loved the wretch and trusted him. It was up to Jim to tell her what he knew about Cheever. He felt that he ought to.

Yet how could he?

It was hideous that she should sit there smiling tolerantly at a critic of her infernal husband as serenely as a priestess who is patient with an unenlightened skeptic.

It was atrocious that Cheever should be permitted to prosper with this scandal unrebuked, unpunished, actually unsnubbed, accepting the worship of an angel like Charity Coe and repaying it with black treachery! To keep silent was to co-operate in the evil--to pander to it. Dyckman thought it was hideous. The word he thought was "rotten"!

He actually opened his mouth to break the news. His voice mutinied. He could not say a word.

Something throttled him. It was that strange instinct which makes criminals of every degree feel that no crime is so low but that tattling on it is a degree lower.

Dyckman tried to a.s.suage his self-contempt by the excuse that Charity was not in the mood or in the place where such a disclosure should be made. Some day he would tell her and then ask permission to kill the blackguard for her.

The train had scuttered across many a mile while he meditated the answer to the latest riddle. His thoughts were so turbulent that Charity finally intruded.

"What's on your mind, Jim?"

"Oh, I was just thinking."

"What about?"

"Oh, things."

Suddenly he reached out and seized the hand that drooped at her knee like a wilted lily. He wrung her fingers with a vigor that hurt her, then he said, "Got any dogs to show this season?"

She laughed at the violent abruptness of this, and said, "I think I'll give an orphan-show instead."

He shook his head in despairing admiration and leaned back to watch the landscape at the window. So did she. On the windows their own reflections were cast in transparent films of light. Each wraith watched the other, seeming to read the mood and need no speech.

Dyckman's mind kept shuttling over and over the same rails of thought, like a switch-engine eternally shunting cars from one track to another.

His very temples throbbed with the _clickety-click_ of the train. At last he groaned: