Part 38

He looked up quickly.

"I wasn't in Chicago," he promptly protested.

"Then that woman lied, after all," I remarked, with a lump of Scotch granite where my heart ought to have been. For I could see by his face that he knew, without hesitation, the woman I meant.

"Isn't that an unnecessarily harsh word?" he asked, trying, of course, to shield her to the last. And if he had not exactly winced, he had done the next thing to it.

"What would you call it?" I countered. It wouldn't have taken a microphone, I suppose, to discover the hostility in my tone. "And would it be going too far to inquire just where you were?" I continued as I saw he had no intention of answering my first question.

"I was at the Coast," he said, compelling himself to meet my glance.

"I'm sorry that I cut your holiday short," I told him.

"It was scarcely a holiday," he remonstrated.

"What would you call it then?" I asked.

"It was purely a business trip," he retorted.

There had, I remembered, been a great deal of that business during the past few months. And an ice-cold hand squeezed the last hope of hope out of my heart. She had been at the Coast.

"And this belated visit to your wife and children, I presume, is also for business purposes?" I inquired. But he was able to smile at that, for all my iciness.

"Is it belated?" he asked.

"Wouldn't you call it that?" I quietly inquired.

"But I had to clear up that case of the stolen horses," he protested, "that Sing Lo thievery."

"Which naturally comes before one's family," I ironically reminded him.

"But courts are courts, Chaddie," he maintained, with a pretense of patience.

"And consideration is consideration," I rather wearily amended.

"We can't always do what we want to," he next remarked, apparently intent on being genially axiomatic.

"Then to what must the humble family attribute this visit?" I inquired, despising that tone of mockery into which I had fallen yet seeming unable to drag myself out of its muck-bottom depths.

"To announce that I intend to return to them," he asserted, though it didn't seem an easy statement to make.

It rather took my breath away, for a moment. But Reason remained on her throne. It was too much like sticking spurs into a dead horse. There was too much that could not be forgotten. And I calmly reminded Dinky-Dunk that the lightest of heads can sometimes have the longest of memories.

"Then you don't want me back?" he demanded, apparently embarrassed by my lack of hospitality.

"It all depends on what you mean by that word," I answered, speaking as judicially as I was able. "If by coming back you mean coming back to this house, I suppose you have a legal right to do so. But if it means anything more, I'm afraid it can't be done. You see, Dinky-Dunk, I've got rather used to single harness again, and I've learned to think and act for myself, and there's a time when continued unfairness can kill the last little spark of friendliness in any woman's heart. It's not merely that I'm tired of it all. But I'm tired of being tired, if you know what that means. I don't even know what I'm going to do. Just at present, in fact, I don't want to think about it. But I'd much prefer being alone until I am able to straighten things out to my own satisfaction."

"I'm sorry," said Dinky-Dunk, looking so crestfallen that for a moment I in turn felt almost sorry for him.

"Isn't it rather late for that?" I reminded him.

"Yes, I suppose it is," he admitted, with a disturbing new note of humility. Then he looked up at me, almost defiantly. "But you need my help."

It was masterful man, once more asserting himself. It was a trivial misstep, but a fatal one. It betrayed, at a flash, his entire misjudgment of me, of my feelings, of what I was and what I intended to be.