In that period Peter Cheever had traveled a very short distance in a journey he had postponed too long. Cheever had been hardly conscious when they smuggled him at midnight from his club to his own home. He had slept ill and achily. He was ashamed to face the servants, and he wanted to murder his valet for being aware of the master's defeat.

He did not know how ashamed the household retainers were of him and of themselves. The valet and butler had earned good sums on occasions by taking tips from Cheever on prize-fighters and jockeys. But they felt betrayed now, and as disconsolate as the bottle-holders and towel-flappers of a defeated pugilist.

They did not know who had whipped their master till the word came from the Dyckman household that their master had come home glorious from whipping the stuffing out of somebody. It was easy to put one and one together and make two.

One of Cheever's worst embarra.s.sments was the matter of Zada. His battered head suffered tortures before it contrived a proper lie for her. Then he called Zada up from his house and explained that as he was leaving his club to fly to her, his car had skidded into another, with the result that he had been knocked senseless and cut up with flying gla.s.s; otherwise he was in perfect shape. Unfortunately, he had been recognized and taken to his official home instead of to the residence of his heart.

Zada was all for dashing to him at once; but he persuaded her that that would be quite impossible. He was in no real danger in his own house, and he would come back to his heart's one real first, last, only, and onliest darling love just as soon as he could.

She subsided in wails of terror and loneliness. They touched his heart so that he determined to end his effort at amphibian existence, give up his legal establishment and legalize the illegal.

He wrote a note to Charity with much difficulty, since his knuckles were sore and his pride was black and blue. His spoken language was of the same tints. His written language was polite and formal.

It was a silly, tragic situation that led a husband to write his wife a letter requesting an interview. Charity sent back a scrawl--"_Yes, in fifteen minutes_."

Cheever spent a bad quarter of an hour dressing himself. His face was too raw to endure a razor, and the surgeon had put little cross-patches of adhesive tape on one of his cheek-bones and at the edge of his mouth, where his lip had split as the tooth behind it went overboard.

He yowled as he slipped his arms into a long bathrobe, and he struck at the valet when the wretch suggested a little powder for one eye.

Charity had seen Cheever brought in at midnight and had looked to it that he had every care. But now she came into his room with a maidenly timidity. He did not know that she had rebuked Jim Dyckman with uncharacteristic wrath for the attack. She did not tell Cheever this, even though his first words to her demanded some such defense.

In the quarrels of lovers, or of those who have exchanged loves, it makes little difference what the accusation is all about: the thing that hurts is the fact of accusation.

Charity was so shamed at being stormed at by her husband that it was a mere detail that he stormed at her with a charge that she had goaded Jim Dyckman on to attack him.

Cheever had a favor to ask; so he put the charge more mildly now than he had in his first bewildered rage. He accepted Charity's silence as pleading guilty. So he went on:

"The fact that you chose Dyckman for your authorized thug and bravo proves what I have thought for some time, that you love him and he loves you. Now I have no desire to come between two such turtle-doves, especially when one of them is one of those German flying-machine _Taubes_ and goes around dropping dynamite-bombs on me through club roofs.

"I'm not afraid of your little friend, and as soon as I get well I'll get him; but I want it to be purely an exercise in the fistic art, and not a public fluttering of family linen. So since you want Jim Dyckman, take him, by all means, and let me bow myself out of the trio.

"I'll give you a nice, quiet little divorce, and do the fair thing in the alimony line, and then after a proper interval you and little Jimmie can toddle over to the parson and then toddle off to h.e.l.l-and-gone, for all I care. How does that strike you, my dear?"

Charity pondered, and then she said, "And where do you toddle off to?"

"Does that interest you?"

"Anything that concerns your welfare interests me."

"I see. Well, don't worry about me."

"There's no hurry, of course?"

"Not on my part," said Cheever. "But Dyckman must be growing impatient, since he tries to murder me to save the lawyer's fees."

"Well, if you're in no hurry, Peter, I'm not. I'll think it over for a few months. It's bad weather for divorces now, anyway."

Cheever's heart churned in his breast. He knew that Zada could not afford to wait. He should have married her long ago, and there was no time to spare now. Charity's indifference frightened him. He did not dream that through the dictagraph Charity had shared with him Zada's annunciation of her approaching motherhood.

He turned and twisted in flesh and spirit, trying to persuade Charity to proceed immediately for a divorce, but in vain.

Finally she ceased to laugh at him and demanded, sternly, "Why don't you tell me the truth for once?"

He stared at her, and after a crisis of hesitation broke and informed her of what she already knew. Now that he was at her feet, Charity felt only pity for him, and even for Zada. She was sorrier for them than for herself.

So she said: "All right, old man; let's divorce us. Will you or shall I?"

"You'd better, of course; but you must not mention poor Zada."

"Oh, of course not!"

A brief and friendly discussion of ways and means followed, and then Charity turned to go, saying:

"Well, I'll let you know when you're free. Are there any other little ch.o.r.es I can do for you?"

"No, thanks. You're one d.a.m.ned good sport, and I'm infernally sorry I--"

"Let's not begin on sorries. Good night!"

And such was unmarriage _a la mode_.

CHAPTER II

And now having felt sorry for everybody else, Charity began to feel pleasantly sorry for Jim Dyckman. Her own rebuke of him for a.s.saulting Cheever had absolved him. In the retrospect, the attack took on a knightliness of devotion. She recalled his lonely d.o.g.g.i.ng of her footsteps. If he had played the dog, after all, she loved dogs. What was so faithful, trustworthy, and lovable as a dog?

But how was Charity to get word to Jim of her new heart? She could not whistle him back. She could hardly go to him and apologize for having been a good wife to a bad husband. And a married lady simply must not say to a bachelor: "Pardon me a moment, while I divorce my present consort. I'd like to wear your name for a change."

Charity might have been capable even of such a derring-do if she had known that Jim Dyckman's bachelorhood was threatened with immediate extinction by the Thropps. But she could not know. For, however Jim's soul may have been mumbling, "Help, help!" he made no audible sound.

Unwilling brides may shriek for rescue, but unwilling bridegrooms must not complain.

By a coincidence that was not strange Charity selected for her lawyer Travers McNiven, the very man that Jim Dyckman selected. All three had been friends since childhood. McNiven had been taken into the famous partnership of Hamnett, Dawsey, Coggeshall, Thurlow & McNiven.

When Jim Dyckman telephoned him for an appointment he was told to make it the next morning, as another client had pre-empted the afternoon. Jim was glad enough of an excuse to postpone his marriage by a day, never dreaming that Charity was the client who had preempted McNiven.

McNiven wondered at the synchrony, but naturally mentioned neither client to the other. His office was far down-town and far up in the air.

Its windows gave an amplitudinous vision of the Harbor which Mr. Ernest Poole has made his own, but which was now a vestibule to the h.e.l.l of the European war. All the adjoining land was choked far backward with a vast blockade of explosive freight-trains waiting to be unloaded into the unheard-of mult.i.tude of munition-ships waiting to run the gantlet of the German submarines.

Charity had run that gantlet and was ready to run it again on another errand of mercy, but first she must make sure that Zada's baby should not enter the world before its mother entered wedlock.

After McNiven had proffered her a chair and she had exclaimed upon the grandeur of the harborscape, she began:

"Sandy, I've come to see you about--"

"One moment!" McNiven broke in. "Before you speak I must as an honest lawyer warn you against the step you contemplate."

"But you don't know what it is yet."