Their dalliance became the talk of Newport. Everybody believed that what was bad enough at best was even worse than it was. Charity Coe heard the couple discussed everywhere. She was distressed on Jim's account. And now she found herself in just the plight that had tortured Jim when he knew that Peter Cheever was disloyal to Charity and longed to tell her, but felt the duty too odious. So Charity pondered her own obligation.

She was tempted to write Jim an anonymous letter, but had not the cowardice. She was tempted to write to him frankly, but had not the courage. She did at last what Jim had done--nothing.

Jim's mother had heard of Vanderveer's disappearance from Kedzie's entourage and she had improved with hope. When she learned that Strathdene was apparently infatuated she grew worse and telegraphed Jim to ask for a leave of absence. She did not tell Kedzie of her telegram or of Jim's answer.

Pet Bettany flatly accused Kedzie of being guilty, and referred to the Marquess as her paramour. When Kedzie furiously resented her insolence Pet laughed.

"The more fool you, if you carry the scandal and lose the fun."

Kedzie was more afraid of Pet's contempt than of a better woman's. She began to think herself a big fool for not having been a bigger one.

She fell into an altogether dangerous mood and she could no longer save herself. She almost prayed to be led into temptation. The unuttered prayer was speedily answered.

She went motoring with Strathdene late one night in a car he had hired.

When he ventured to plead with her not to go back to her home where her servants provided a kind of chaperonage, she made only a formal protest or two. He stopped at a roadside inn, a secluded place well known for its unquestioning hospitality.

Strathdene, tremulous with victory, led Kedzie to the dining-room for a bit of sup and sip. The landlord escorted them to a nook in a corner and beckoned a waiter. Kedzie was studying the bill of fare with blurred and frightened vision when she heard the footsteps of the waiter plainly audible in the quiet room. They had a curious rhythm. There was a hitch in the step, a skip.

Her heart stopped as if it had run into a tree. The "skip" brought down on her soul a whole five-foot shelf of remembrances of her first New York love-affair with the lame waiter in the bakery. All her good fortune had been set in motion by poor, old, shabby "Skip." She had soared away like some rainbow-hued bubble gently releasing itself from the day pipe that inflated it out of the suds of its origin.

Kedzie had learned to be ashamed of Skip as long ago as when she was a Greek dancer. She had not seen or heard of him since she sent him the insulting answer to his stage-door note. And now he had saved himself up for a ruinous reappearance when she was in the company of a Marquess--and on such an errand!

What on earth was Skip doing so far from the Bronx and in the environs of Newport, of all places? It occurred to Kedzie that Skip might ask her the same question.

CHAPTER II

The terror his footsteps inspired was confirmed by the unforgetable voice that came across her icy shoulder-blades. He slapped the china and silver down with the familiar bravura of a quick-lunch waiter, and her heart sank, remembering that she had once admired his skill.

The Marquess looked up at him with a glare of rebuke as Skip posed himself patiently with one hand, knuckles down, on the table, the other on his hip, and demanded, with misplaced enthusiasm:

"Well, folks, what's it goin' to be?"

The Marquess had been somewhat democratized by his life in the army, and, being a true Briton, he always expected the worst in America. He proceeded to order a light supper that would not take too long. Skip crushed him by saying:

"Ain't the little lady takin' nothin'?"

Kedzie was afraid to speak. She put her finger on the menu at a chafing-dish version of chicken, and the Marquess added it to his order.

Skip shuffled away without recognizing Kedzie. She waited only for his exit to make her own.

It was terrifying enough to realize that the moment Skip caught a glimpse of her he would hail her noisily and tell the Marquess all about her. There still lingered in Kedzie a little more honesty than sn.o.bbery and she felt even less dread of being "bawled out" by a waiter in the presence of a Marquess than of having Skip Magruder know that she was in such a place even with a Marquess. Skip had been good to her and had counseled her to go straight.

She felt no grat.i.tude toward him now, but she could not face his contempt. That would be degradation beneath degradation. She was disgusted with everything and everybody, including herself. The glamour of the escapade was dissipated. The excitement of an illicit amour so delicious in so many farces, so tenderly dramatic in so many novels, had curdled. She saw what an ugly business she was in and she was revolted.

Kedzie waited only to hear the swinging door whiff after Skip's syncopated feet, then she whispered sharply across the table to the Marquess:

"Take me out of this awful place. I don't know what I'm doing here. I won't stay! not a moment!"

"But we've ordered--"

"You stay and eat, then. I won't stop here another minute!"

She rose. She smothered the Marquess's protests about the awkwardness, the ludicrousness of such a flight.

"What will the waiter think?" he asked, being afraid of a waiter, though of no one else.

Kedzie did not care what the waiter thought, so long as he did not know whom he thought it of. Strathdene gave the headwaiter a bill and followed Kedzie out. He was hungry, angry, and puzzled.

Skip Magruder never knew what a chaperon he had been. If Providence managed the affair it chose an odd instrument, and intervened, as usual, at the last moment. Providence would save itself a good deal of work if it came round a little earlier in these cases. Perhaps it does and finds n.o.body awake.

Strathdene demanded explanations. Kedzie told him truth but not all of it.

"It suddenly swept over me," she gasped, "how horrible it was for me to be there."

She wept with shame and when he would have consoled her she kept him aloof. The astonishing result of the outing was that both came home better. It suddenly swept over Strathdene that Kedzie was innocenter than he had dreamed. She was good! By gad! she was good enough to be the wife even of a Strathdene. He told Kedzie that he wished to G.o.d he could marry her. She answered fervently that she wished to G.o.d he could.

He asked her "You don't really love that Dyckman fella, do you?"

"I don't really love anybody but you," said Kedzie. "You are the first man I have really truly loved."

She meant it and it may have been true. She said it with sincerity at least. One usually does. At any rate, it sounded wonderful to Strathdene and he determined to make her his. He would let England muddle along somehow till he made this alliance with the beautiful Missourienne. But Kedzie's plight was again what it had been; she had a husband extra. In some cases the husband is busy enough with his own affairs to let the lover trot alongside, like the third horse which the Greeks called the _pareoros_. But neither Jim nor Strathdene would be content with that sort of team-work, and Kedzie least of all.

She and Strathdene agreed that love would find the way, and Kedzie suggested that Jim would probably be decent enough to arrange the whole matter. He had an awfully clever lawyer, too.

Strathdene had braved nearly every peril in life except marriage. He was determined to take a shy at that. He and Kedzie talked their honeymoon plans with the boyishness and girlishness of nineteen and sixteen.

Then Kedzie remembered Gilfoyle. She had thanked her stars that she told Dyckman the truth about him in time. And now she was confronted with the same situation. Since her life was repeating its patterns, it would be foolish to ignore the lessons. So after some hesitation she told the Marquess that Jim Dyckman was not her first, but her second. She told it very tragically, made quite a good story of it.

But the Marquess had been intrepid enough to laugh when, out of a large woolly cloud a mile aloft, a German flying-machine had suddenly charged him at a hundred miles an hour. He was calm enough now to laugh at the menace of Kedzie's past rushing out of the pink cloud about her.

"The more the merrier," he said. "The third time's the charm."

He sighed when he was alone and thought it rather shabby that Cupid should land him at last with a second-handed, a third-hearted arrow.

But, after all, these were war times and Economy was the universal watchword. The arrow felt very cozy.

CHAPTER III

Unselfishness is an acquired art. Children rarely have it. That is why the Greeks represented love of a certain kind as a boy, selfish, treacherous, ingratiating, blind to appearances, naif, gracefully ruthless.

Kedzie and Strathdene were enamoured of each other. They were both zealots for experience, restless and reckless in their zest of life.

As soon as they were convinced of their love, every restraint became an illegal restraint, illegal because they felt that only the law of love had jurisdiction over them.

When Kedzie received a telegram from Jim that he had secured a leave of absence for thirty days and would be in Newport in four she felt cruelly used. She forgot how she had angled for Jim and hustled him into matrimony.

She was afraid of him now. She thought of him as many women in captured cities once regarded and have recently again regarded the triumphing enemy as one who would count beauty the best part of the booty.