"Thank you." Nikolai's face lit with a very charming smile. "Yes, I think you can trust me--And in case your scheme were successful, if I should prove to be 'the right man'--what about you?"

"Oh, me? Why, I'd just naturally fade out of the landscape."

"How do you mean?"

"There're lots of ways. A cramp in swimming, or an accident when you're cleaning a gun, or a dose of the wrong medicine--"

Nikolai's brows met sharply. "You mean suicide?"

"Sure! Why not? It's done every day, and done so the insurance companies can't prove a thing, too."

Nikolai rose and stood beside him. "You, who say that you love her," he said sternly, "you who cannot bear that she should suffer even to obtain happiness--you would condemn her to a lifetime of grief and remorse? You might perhaps deceive others. Do you think you could deceive Joan? Happy or not, you know that she cares for you, Blair!"

The other's face softened. "Why, yes, I reckon she does, in a way. Once when I had a bad cold and she was scared for fear it was going to run into pneumonia she was awfully upset. I guess you're right," he mused.

"It wouldn't do for me to do that. Why, her father's death almost killed her, and he was a mighty worthless old scamp, and she knew it, too!

Joan's a deeper feeler than you'd think--Say, I might do something to make her get a divorce?" he suggested, brightening.

"What, for instance?"

"Oh, other women,"--he made a face of distaste. "I'd hate it--a low woman certainly does get my goat! Still--"

Nikolai smiled. "Do you think you could deceive Joan about that, either?

You might succeed in hurting her, perhaps; but she would not admit it.

Joan is proud."

"Lord, don't I know it? Proud as Lucifer! No, I've got to think of something to do that wouldn't be any reflection on her," he mused, "and yet that she wouldn't stand for. Actionable, as the lawyers say--"

Nikolai burst out laughing, and taking Archie by the shoulders shook him to and fro.

"My dear boy, I fear I cannot enter into this nefarious little plot of yours. I am not going to make love to your wife--I should not know how!

Nor yet am I going to lure her from you with poetry and fine words.

But--" he added, sobering, "I think with you that she has not yet found herself. There, perhaps, I can help. I can at least offer her my own recipe for happiness."

"You mean that formula thing?" said Archie doubtfully.

"No formula, Blair. Simply--work."

The other's face fell. "Joan never has been one of those idle society girls you read about," he said, defensively. "Sewing, and housekeeping, and civics, and suffrage, and going around giving advice to the poor--She's tried 'em all, Mr. Nikolai."

"And found them all other people's work, not hers.--But, Blair, I must warn you," he added gravely, "that when she does find her _metier_ you are in far more danger of losing her to it than to--me, for instance."

"No danger of losing what you haven't got," sighed Archie.

CHAPTER L

People who know life only on its surfaces were apt to p.r.o.nounce Joan Blair a rather hard young person. She would herself have admitted to a certain hardness, secretly aware, however, that it was a trait she had deliberately cultivated for protective purposes. Hers was one of the unfortunate natures that are more attuned to the minor than the major chords of life.

Once in her childhood she had confessed to her mother, with a burst of sobbing, that she never expected to be entirely happy because of all the stray dogs running about the world, hungry and lonesome. As she grew older she discovered that it is not only the stray dogs who go hungry and lonesome.

She often wondered impatiently why it was that every one with whom she came into close contact seemed soon or late to develop a marked quality of pathos: her futile father, the struggling Misses Darcy, gruff old devoted Ellen, Effie May, Archie--and now more than all Stefan Nikolai.

Despite his renown, his wide experience, his phenomenal rise in life from so handicapped a beginning, her friend seemed nevertheless to her a rather tragic figure, belonging to n.o.body, product of two countries and native of neither, without even a race to which he could claim complete allegiance. For his mother had been a Christian girl of high birth, outcast by her family because of her marriage with a Jew; who had been in turn rejected by his own people because of her.

Both had been killed in a _pogrom_, one of those appalling man-hunts that still take place in the Russian pale in the name of Christianity; and his father's sister, escaping to a land where there are no _pogroms_, had brought the child Stefan with her. It must have been a forlorn boyhood for a sensitive, gifted, half-alien lad, none too welcome in a poor and growing Jewish family of the slums; working his brilliant way through school and university, only to meet a crushing rebuff in this land of the free and equal at the hands of a girl who was afraid to marry him.

Joan understood why her mother had taken the hurt and lonely youth into her rare friendship. Aside from Nikolai's charm of companionship and her grat.i.tude to him, she felt it an inherited duty to "make it up" to him for the sadness of his past. And where Joan gave, she gave unstintingly....

She did not pursue her headstrong course without receiving faint inklings now and then as to its effect upon the community. The warnings began with Ellen.

"I ain't sayin' he's not a quiet, pleasant-spoken enough gentleman, as free with his money as if he was a Christian--Most _too_ free, if you ast me! What's he want out of it all? After all, a Jew's a Jew."

"Even if he happens to be a Unitarian?" (Nikolai, during his college life, had chanced to adopt that creed.)

"More 'n ever then," muttered Ellen darkly, "because his Jewness is all bottled up in him, ready to burst out on you unexpected, like a Jack-in-the-Box--You needn't laugh, Joie--you kin see it all in that eye of his. The rest of him don't look so Jewy, but if ever I see a Sheenier eye--! I don't hold with an eye that shows all it feels that way, myself. Seems sort of shameless."

"Indecent exposure of the eye," murmured Joan, "does not confine itself to the Semitic race, Nellen. It seems common to all people who do a good deal of thinking. One can't seem to mask the eye. The more that goes on behind it, the more it reflects--As witness my own," she added complacently.

Her next warning came from a higher quarter. Happening to encounter Mrs.

Carmichael in the shops one day, that lady invited her to drive home in her carriage, where she proceeded to catechise her with tongue and lorgnon.

"You are looking very charming, dear child--one wonders at not seeing you about more? I hear your interesting friend is still in town, however. Perhaps it is he who absorbs so much of your time."

Joan admitted the imputation.

"Oh, really? Your husband is very complaisant!--Still, Mr. Blair would naturally be democratic in his point of view."

"Democratic? I think I don't understand."

The older lady shrugged; an Anglo-Saxon shrug, portentous in effect.

"Oh, these writing-people--it's so difficult to tell who they are, isn't it? But Emily tells me you've always been singularly courageous."

"It does not take a great deal of courage," said Joan, flushing, "to continue my mother's friendship with the most brilliant man I know.

There even seem to be people who envy me the opportunity."

(This shot told, Mrs. Carmichael having been one of the first and most eager to entertain the visiting celebrity.)

"Doubtless he is brilliant as a writer," she conceded. "That is his profession. But even as a writer (I know nothing of him, of course, otherwise!) do you consider him quite safe, my dear? Those plays, for instance."

"Have you read them?" asked Joan bluntly.

"Why, not yet. I bought them, of course--one does. But one has so little time for reading. I am told, however, that in one of them a child is born practically on the stage. At least the characters converse about it quite openly."

"Shocking of them," murmured Joan. "Those things should be managed by means of asterisks. But it's so hard to find actors who play asterisks acceptably."

Mrs. Carmichael's lorgnon busied itself. "I should be sorry," remarked its owner, "to think that any friend of my daughter's would care to encourage indelicacy, whether in literature or--or in life."