Jim fancied that Kedzie must have taken the train to New York, since she spoke of sending her lawyer to McNiven. It did not occur to him that she could find a New York lawyer in Newport.

He met Charity, and not Kedzie, on the train. That made bad look worse.

But it gave Jim and Charity an opportunity to face the calamity that was impending. Jim tried to rea.s.sure Charity that he would keep her from suffering any public harm. The mere thought of her liability to notoriety, the realization that her long life of decency and devotion were at the mercy of the whim of a woman like Kedzie, drove her frantic.

She begged Jim to leave her to her thoughts and he went away to the purgatory of his own. Reaching New York, he returned to Charity to offer his escort to her home. She broke out, petulantly:

"Don't take me any more places, Jim. I beg you!"

"Forgive me," he mumbled, and relieved her of his compromising chivalry.

They went to their homes in separate taxicabs. Jim made haste to his apartment. Kedzie was not there and had not been heard from.

Late as it was, he set out on a telephone chase for McNiven and dragged him to a conference. It was midnight and Jim was haggard with excitement.

There are two people at least to whom a wise man tells the truth--his doctor and his lawyer. Neither of them has many illusions left, but both usually know fact when they get a chance to face it.

Jim had nothing to conceal from McNiven and his innocence transpired through all his bewilderment. He told just what had happened in its farcical-funeral details. McNiven did not smile. Jim finished with all his energy:

"Sandy, you know that Charity is the whitest woman on earth, a saint if ever there was a saint. She's the one that's got to be protected. Not a breath of her name must come out. If it takes the last cent I've got and dad's got I want you to buy off that wife of mine. You warned me against marrying her, and I wish to G.o.d I'd listened to you. I'm not blaming her for being suspicious, but I can't let her smash Charity. I'll protect Charity if I have to build a wall of solid gold around her."

McNiven tried to quiet him. He saw no reason for alarm. "You don't have to urge me to protect Charity," he said. "She's an angel as well as my client. All you need is a little sleep. Go to bed and don't worry.

Remember, there never was a storm so big that it didn't blow over."

"Yes, but what does it blow over before it blows over?" said Jim.

"You're talking in your sleep already. Good night," said McNiven.

CHAPTER IX

The next morning McNiven found Charity at his office when he arrived.

She had evidently been awake all night.

She told McNiven a story that agreed in the essentials with Jim's except that she made herself out the fool where he had blamed himself. McNiven had no success in trying to quiet her with soothing promises of a tame conclusion. She dreaded Kedzie.

"If it were just an outburst of jealousy," she said, "you might talk to the woman. But she's not jealous of her husband. She was as cool as a cuc.u.mber when she found us together. She was glad of it, because she had got a way to get her Marquess now. She's ambitious and Lady Macbeth couldn't outdo her."

She told McNiven what she had not had the heart to tell Jim about Strathdene. It worried him more than he admitted. While he meditated on a measure to meet this sort of attack, Charity suggested one. It was drastic, but she was desperate. She proposed the threat of a countercharge against Kedzie.

McNiven shook his head and made strange noises in his pipe. He asked for evidence against Kedzie. Charity could only quote the general opinion.

McNiven said: "No. You allege innocence on your part in spite of appearances which you admit are almost conclusive. You can hardly claim that more innocent appearances on her part prove that she is guilty.

Besides, we don't want to stir up any more sediment. We'll do everything on the Q. T. Money talks, and the little lady is not deaf. My legal advice to you is, 'Don't fret,' and my medical advice is, 'Go to bed and stay there till I send you word that it's all over.' Remember one thing, there never was a storm so big that it didn't blow over."

Charity was not in the least quieted. His sedative only annoyed her ragged nerves.

"Keep my name clean," she whispered.

As she rode home in a taxicab that was like a refrigerator she pa.s.sed in the Fifth Avenue melee Zada L'Etoile, now Mrs. Cheever, with the tiny little Cheever like a princelet asleep at her breast, hiding with its pink head the letter "A" that had grown there.

People of cautious respectability spoke to Zada now with amiable respect, and murmured:

"Funny thing! She's made a man of that good-for-nothing Peter Cheever.

They're as happy and as thick as thieves."

Charity had heard this saying, and she dreaded to realize that perhaps in a few days respectable people would be turning from herself, not seeing her, or storing up credit by snubbing her and muttering:

"No wonder poor Cheever couldn't get along with her. He took the blame like a gentleman, and now she's found out. She was a sly one, but you can't fool all the people all the time."

Charity had not been gone from McNiven's office long before a lawyer's clerk arrived bearing the papers for a divorce on statutory grounds in the case of Dyckman versus Dyckman, Mrs. Charity C. Cheever, co-respondent, Anson Beattie counsel for plaintiff.

McNiven went after Beattie at once and proposed a quiet treaty and a settlement out of court. Beattie grinned so odiously that McNiven had to say:

"Oh, I remember you. You used to be an ambulance-chaser. What are you after now--a little dirty advertising?" "What are you after?" said Beattie. "A little collusive juggling with the Seventh Commandment?"

"The one against false witness is the Ninth," said McNiven, "But let's have a conference. This war in Europe might have been avoided by a little heart-to-heart talk beforehand. Let's profit by the lesson."

Beattie consented to this, and promised to arrange it on condition that in the mean while McNiven would accept service for his client. This was done, and Beattie left.

He saw his great publicity campaign being thwarted, and changed his mind. He hankered for fame more than gold. He filed the papers and meditated. He did not know how much or how little Kedzie loved her husband, and she had told him nothing of Strathdene. He feared that a compromise might be patched up and perhaps a reconciliation effected.

He had had women come to him imploring a divorce from their abominable husbands only to see the couple link up again, kiss and make up, and call him an abominable villain for trying to part them.

After some earnest consideration of the right of his own career and his family to the full profit of this windfall, he looked up a reporter and through him a group of reporters and promised them a peep at something interesting.

He had the privilege of calling for the papers from the clerk of the court, so he took them out and permitted the reporters to glance within and make note of the contents.

Late editions of the evening papers gave the Dyckman divorce a fanfare rivaling the evidence that the Germans were about to resume their unrestricted submarine _Schrecklichkeit_.

If the spoken word is impossible to recall, how much more irretrievable the word that is printed in millions of newspapers. The name of Dyckman was a household word. It resounded now in every household throughout the country, and across the sea, where the name had become familiar in all the nations from the big financial dealings of the elder Dyckman as a banker for the Allies.

Reporters played about Jim Dyckman that night as if they were _banderilleros_ and he a raging bull. He fought them with the same success.

They tried to find Charity, but she was in the doctor's care--actually.

The doctor himself dismissed the reporters. He called them "ghouls,"

which did not sweeten their hearts toward his patient.

The next day there was probably not a morning paper in the United States in any language that failed to star the news that Mrs. Dyckman had found her husband's relations with Mrs. Cheever intolerable.

That morning saw the conference in McNiven's office, as promised by Beattie. But Kedzie did not appear; she had vanished to some place where she could not be found by anybody except the man who wrote her highly imaginative affidavits for her and the notary public who attested her signature.

At the conference with Jim, Kedzie was represented by counsel, also by father. Jim called the lawyer Beattie some hard old Anglo-Saxon names, and told him that if he were a little bigger he would give him the beating that was coming to him. Then he turned to Kedzie's father.

"Mr. Thropp," he pleaded, "you and I have always got along all right.

You know I've tried to do the right thing by your daughter. I'm ready to now. She's too decent a girl to have done this thing on her own. This is the work of that rotten skunk of a lawyer--I apologize to the other skunks and the real lawyers. She has done a frightful injustice to the best woman on earth. She can never undo it, but surely she doesn't want to do any more. She's through with me, I suppose, but we ought to be able to clean up this affair respectably and quietly and not in the front show-window of all the d.a.m.ned newspapers in the world.

"Can't you and I make a little quiet gentleman's agreement to withdraw the charge and let the divorce go through decently? I'll make any settlement on your daughter that she wants."