This thought always sobered and chilled Mr. Ferriday. He worked none the less for her and himself and he tried in a hundred ways to surprise the little witch into an adoration complete enough to make her forget herself, make her capable of that ultimate altruism to which a woman falls or rises when she stretches herself out on the altar of love.

Ferriday began to think seriously that the only way he could break Kedzie's pride completely would be to make her his wife. He began to wonder if that were not, after all, what she was driving at--or trying to drive him to.

Life will be so much more wholesome when women propose marriage as men do and have a plain, frank talk about it instead of their eternal business of veils and reticences, fugitive impulses real or coquettish, modesties real or faked.

Ferriday could not be sure of Kedzie, and he grew so curious to know that finally he broke out, "In the Lord's name, will you or will you not marry me, d.a.m.n you?"

And Kedzie answered: "Of course not. I wouldn't dream of such a thing."

But that did not prove anything, either. Perhaps she merely wanted to trawl him along.

She had Ferriday almost crazy--at least she had added one more to his manias--when Jim Dyckman wandered into the studio and set up an entirely new series of ambitions and discontents.

CHAPTER XVII

Charity Coe forgot her great moving-picture enterprise for a time in the agony of her discovery that her husband was disloyal and that the Church did not accept that as a cancellation of her own loyalty.

For a long time she was in such misery of uncertainty that she went up to the mountains to recover her strength. She came back at last, made simple and stoical somehow by the contrast of human pettiness with the serenity (as we call it) of those vast ma.s.ses of debris that we poetize and humanize as patient giants.

Her absence had left Cheever entirely to his own devices and to Zada's.

They had made up and fought and made up again dozens of times and settled down at length to that normal alternation of peace and conflict known as domestic life.

With Charity out of the way there was so little interruption to their communion that when she came back Zada forbade Cheever to meet her at the station, and he obeyed.

Charity felt that she had brought with her the weight of the mountains instead of their calm when she detrained in the thronged solitude of the Grand Central Terminal. And the house with its sympathetic family of servants only was as home-like as the Mammoth Cave.

She took up her work with a frenzy. The need of a man to act as her adjutant in the business details was imperative. She thought of Jim Dyckman again, and with a different thought.

When he pleaded to her before she had imagined that she was at least officially a wife. Now she felt divorced and abandoned, a waif on the public mercy.

She wanted to talk to Jim because she felt so disprized and downtrodden that she wanted to see somebody who adored her. She felt wild impulses to throw herself into his keeping. She wanted to be bad just to spite the bad. But she merely convinced herself that she was wicked enough already and deserving of her punishment.

She made the moving-picture scheme a good excuse for asking Jim to grant her a talk--a business talk. To protect herself from him and from herself she made a convenience of Mrs. Neff's home. Jim met her there. She was not looking her best and her mood was one of artificial indirectness that offended him. He never dreamed that it was because she was afraid to show him how glad she was to see him.

He was furious at her--so he said he would do her bidding. She dumped the financial and mechanical ends of the enterprise on his hands and he accepted the burden. He had nothing else pressing for his time.

One of his first duties, Charity told him, was to call at the Hyperfilm Studio and try to engage that Mr. Ferriday for director and learn the ropes.

"While you're there you might inquire about that little girl you pulled out of the pool. I sent her there. They promised her a job. Her name was--I have it at home in my address-book. I'll telephone it to you."

And she did. She had no more acquaintance with the history Kedzie was making in the moving-picture world than she had of the sensational rise of the latest politician in Tibet. Neither had Jim.

He had been traveling about on his mother's yacht and in less correct societies, trying to convince himself that he was cured of Charity. He did not know that the first pictures of Anita Adair were causing lines to gather outside the moving-picture theaters of numberless cities and towns.

When his car halted before the big studio where Ferriday was high priest Jim might have been a traveler entering a temple in La.s.sa, for all he knew of its rites and its powers.

No more did the doorman know the power and place of Jim Dyckman. When Jim said he had an appointment with Mr. Ferriday the doorman thumbed him up the marble stairs. There were many doors, but no signs on them, and Dyckman blundered about. At length he turned down a corridor and found himself in the workshop.

A vast room it was, the floor hidden with low canvas walls and doors marked "Keep out." Overhead were girders of steel from which depended heavy chains supporting hundreds of slanting tubes glowing with green fire.

From somewhere in the inclosures came a voice in distress. It was the first time Dyckman ever heard Ferriday's voice, and it puzzled him as it cried:

"Come on, choke her--choke harder, you fool; you're not a ma.s.seur--you're a murderer. Now drag her across to the edge of the well.

Pause, look back. Come on, Melnotte: yell at him! 'Stop, stop, you dog!'

Turn round, Higgins; draw your knife. Go to it now! Give 'em a real fight. That's all right. Only a little cut. The blood looks good. Get up, Miss Adair; crawl away on hands and knees. Don't forget you've been choked. Now take the knife away, Melnotte. Rise; look triumphant; see the girl. Get to him, Miss Adair. Easy on the embrace: you're a shy little thing. 'My hero! you have saved me!' Now, Melnotte: 'Clarice! it is you! you!' Cut! How many feet, Jones?

"Now we'll take the scene in the vat of sulphuric acid. Is the tank ready? You go lie down and rest, Miss Adair. We won't want you for half an hour."

As Kedzie left the scene she found Dyckman waiting for her. He lifted his hat and spoke down at her:

"Pardon me, but you're Miss Adair, aren't you?"

"Yes," said Kedzie, with as much modesty as a queen could show, incidentally noting that the man who bespoke her so timidly was plainly a real swell. She was getting so now that she could tell the real from the plated.

"I heard them murdering you in there and I--Well, Mrs. Cheever asked me to look you up and see how you were getting along. I see you are."

"Mrs. Cheever!" said Kedzie, searching her memory. Then, with great kindliness, "Oh yes! I remember her."

"You've forgotten me, I suppose. I had the pleasure--the sad pleasure of helping you out of the water at Mrs. Noxon's."

"Oh, Lord, yes," Kedzie cried, forgetting her rank. "You're Jim Dyckman--I mean, Mr. Dyckman."

"So you remember my name," he flushed. "Well, I must say!"

"I didn't remember to thank you," said Kedzie. "I was all damp and mad.

I've often thought of writing to you." And she had.

"I wish you had," said Dyckman. "Well, well!"

He didn't know what to say, and so he laughed and she laughed and they were well acquainted. Then he thought of a good one.

"I pulled you out of the cold water, so it's your turn to pull me out of the hot."

"What hot?" said Kedzie.

"I've been sent up here to learn the trade."

Kedzie had a horrible feeling that he must have lost his money. Wouldn't it be just her luck to meet her first millionaire after he had become an ex-?

But Dyckman said that he had come to try and engage Mr. Ferriday, and that sounded so splendid to Kedzie that she snuggled closer. Ordinarily when a woman cowers under the eaves of a man's shoulder it is taken for a signal for amiabilities to begin.

Dyckman could not imagine that Kedzie was already as bad as all that.

She wasn't. She was just trying to get as close as she could to a million dollars. Her feelings were as innocent and as imbecile as those of the mobs that stand in line for the privilege of pump-handling a politician.

Jim Dyckman kept forgetting that he was so rich. He hated to be reminded of it. He did not suspect Kedzie of such a thought. He stared down at her and thought she was cruelly pretty. He wanted to tell her so, but he found himself saying: