"It's Jim."

Mrs. Thropp struggled to her feet. "He mustn't find me here," she said.

"Don't tell him about us."

But before she could escape Dyckman was in the doorway, almost too tall to walk through it, almost as tall as twenty million dollars.

To Mrs. Thropp he was as majestic as the Colossus of Rhodes would have been. Like the Colossus of Rhodes, he was a gilded giant.

CHAPTER x.x.xV

Kedzie was paralyzed. Mrs. Thropp was inspired. Unity of purpose guided her true. She had told her daughter to ignore Gilfoyle as an unimportant detail. She certainly did not intend to subst.i.tute a couple of crude parents as a new handicap.

No one knew Mrs. Thropp's cheapness of appearance better than she did.

A woman may grow shoddy and careless, but she rarely grows oblivious of her uncomeliness. She will rather cherish it as the final cruelty of circ.u.mstances. Mrs. Thropp was keenly alive to the effect it would have on Dyckman if Kedzie introduced her and Adna as the enc.u.mbrances on her beauty.

Adna, hearing the door-bell and Dyckman's entrance, returned to the living-room from the bathroom, where he had taken refuge. He stood in the hall now behind the puzzled Dyckman.

There was a dreadful silence for a moment. Jim spoke, shyly:

"h.e.l.lo, Anita! How are you?"

"h.e.l.lo, Jim!" Kedzie stammered. "This is--"

"I'm the janitor's wife," said Mrs. Thropp. "My husband had to come up to see about the worter not running in the bathroom, and I came along to see Miss--the young lady. She's been awful good to me. Well, I'll be gettin' along. Good night, miss. Good night, sir."

To save herself, she could not think of Kedzie's screen name. To save her daughter's future, she disowned her. She pushed past Dyckman, and silencing the stupefied Adna with a glare, swept him out through the dining-room into the kitchen.

It amazed Mrs. Thropp to find a kitchen so many flights up-stairs. The ingenuity of the devices, the step-saving cupboard, the dry ice-box with its coils of cold-air pipes, the gas-stove, the electric appliances, were like wonderful new toys to her.

Adna was as comfortable as a cow in a hammock, and she would have sent him away, but his hat was in the hall and she dared not go for it.

Besides, she wanted to wait long enough to learn the outcome of Kedzie's adventure with Dyckman.

As soon as he was alone with Kedzie, Jim had taken her into his arms. She blushed with an unwonted timidity in a new sense of the forbiddenness of her presence there.

Her upward glance showed her that Jim had been in trouble, too. His jaw had a mottled look, and one eyebrow was a trifle mashed.

"What on earth has happened to you?" she gasped.

"Oh, I had a little run-in with a fellow."

"What about?" said Kedzie.

"Nothing much."

"He must have hurt you terribly."

"Think so? Well, you ought to see him."

"What was it all about?"

"Oh, just a bit of an argument."

"Who was he?"

"n.o.body you know."

"You mean it's none of my business?"

"I wouldn't put it that way, honey. I'd just rather not talk about it."

Kedzie felt rebuffed and afraid. He had spent an evening away from her and had reappeared with scars from a battle he would not describe. She would have been still more terrified if she had known that he had fought as the cavalier of Charity Coe Cheever. She would have been somewhat rea.s.sured if she had known that Jim smarted less under the bruises of Cheever's fists than under the rebuke he had had from Charity for his interference in her marital crisis.

Jim was the more in need of Kedzie's devotion for being discarded again by Charity. The warmth in Kedzie's greeting was due to her fear of losing him. But he did not know that. He only knew that she was exceedingly cordial to him, and it was his nature to repay cordiality with usury.

He noted, however, that Kedzie's warmth had an element of anxiety. He asked her what was worrying her, but she would not answer.

At length he made his usual remark. It had become a sort of standing joke for him to say, "When do we marry?"

She always answered, "Give me a little more time." But to-night when he laughed, "Well, just to get the subject out of the way, when do we marry?" Kedzie did not make her regular answer. Her pretty face was suddenly darkened with pain. She moaned: "Never, I guess. Never, I'm afraid."

"What's on your mind, Anita?"

She hesitated, but when he repeated his query she took the plunge and told him the truth.

Her mother had pleaded just a little too well. If Mrs. Thropp had begged Kedzie to do the right thing for the right's sake Kedzie would have felt the natural reaction daughters feel toward motherly advice. But the entreaty to do evil that evil might come of it aroused even more resistance, issuing as it did from maternal lips that traditionally give only holy counsel. It had a more reforming effect on Kedzie's crooked plans than all the exhortations of all the preachers in the world could have had.

Kedzie turned to honesty because it seemed the less horrible of two evils. She a.s.sumed the role of a little penitent, and made Jim Dyckman a father confessor. She told her story as truthfully as she could tell it or feel it. She was too sincere to be just.

She made herself the martyr that she felt herself to be. She wept plentifully and prettily, with irresistible gulps and swallowings of lumps and catches of breath, fetches of sobs, and dartings and gleamings of pearls from her shining eyelids. Her handkerchief was soon a little wad of wet lace, ridiculously pathetic; her lips were blubbered. She wept on and on till she just had to blow her little red nose. She blew it with exquisite candor, and it gave forth the heartbreaking squawk of the first toy trumpet a child breaks of a Christmas morning.

One radical difference between romance and realism is that in romance the heroines weep from the eyelashes out; in realism, some of the tears get into the nostrils. In real life it is reality that moves our hearts, and Dyckman was convinced by Kedzie's realism.

She did not need to tell him of her humble and Western birth. He had recognized her accent from the first, and forgiven it. He knew a little of her history, because Charity Coe had sent him to the studio to look her up, reminding him that she had been the little dancer he pulled out of Mrs. Noxon's pool.

At length Kedzie revealed the horrible fact that her real name was Kedzie Thropp. He laughed aloud. He was so tickled by her babyish remorse that he made her say it again. He told her he loved it twice as well as the stilted, stagy "Anita Adair."

"That's one of the reasons I wanted you to marry me," he said, "so that I could change your horrible name."

"But I changed it myself first," Kedzie howled; and now the truth came ripping. "The day after you pulled me out of the pool at Newport I--I--married a fellow named Tommie Gilfoyle."

Dyckman's smile was swept from his face; his chuckle ended in a groan.

Kedzie's explanation was a little different from the one she gave her parents. Unconsciously she tuned it to her audience. It grew a trifle more literary.

"What could I do? I was alone in the world, without friends or money or position. He happened to be at the railroad station. He saw how frightened I was, and he had loved me for a long time. He begged me to take mercy on him and on myself, and marry him. He offered me his protection; he said I should be his wife in name only until I learned to love him. And I was alone in the world, without friends or money--but I told you that once, didn't I?"

Dyckman was thinking hard, aching hard. He mumbled, "What became of him?"