Part 62

"Why not take my offer? You know the money is needed. It will save your father years of anxiety and struggle. Go away--travel, for a couple of months, if you're afraid of the six. Write him that you must be alone, to think things over."

The girl turned upon her.

"And leave you a free field to lie and trick?"

The woman, too, had risen. "Do you think he really cares for you? At the moment you interest him. At nineteen every woman is a mystery. When the mood is past--and do you know how long a man's mood lasts, you poor chit? Till he has caught what he is running after, and has tasted it--then he will think not of what he has won, but of what he has lost: of the society from which he has cut himself adrift; of all the old pleasures and pursuits he can no longer enjoy; of the luxuries--necessities to a man of his stamp--that marriage with you has deprived him of. Then your face will be a perpetual reminder to him of what he has paid for it, and he will curse it every time he sees it."

"You don't know him," the girl cried. "You know just a part of him--the part you would know. All the rest of him is a good man, that would rather his self-respect than all the luxuries you mention--you included."

"It seems to resolve itself into what manner of man he is," laughed the woman.

The girl looked at her watch. "He will be here shortly; he shall tell us himself."

"How do you mean?"

"That here, between the two of us, he shall decide--this very night." She showed her white face to the woman. "Do you think I could live through a second day like to this?"

"The scene would be ridiculous."

"There will be none here to enjoy the humour of it."

"He will not understand."

"Oh, yes, he will," the girl laughed. "Come, you have all the advantages; you are rich, you are clever; you belong to his class. If he elects to stop with me, it will be because he is my man--mine. Are you afraid?"

The woman shivered. She wrapped her fur cloak about her closer and sat down again, and Tommy returned to her proofs. It was press-night, and there was much to be done.

He came a little later, though how long the time may have seemed to the two women one cannot say. They heard his footstep on the stair. The woman rose and went forward, so that when he opened the door she was the first he saw. But he made no sign. Possibly he had been schooling himself for this moment, knowing that sooner or later it must come. The woman held out her hand to him with a smile.

"I have not the honour," he said.

The smile died from her face. "I do not understand," she said.

"I have not the honour," he repeated. "I do not know you."

The girl was leaning with her back against the desk in a somewhat mannish attitude. He stood between them. It will always remain Life's chief comic success: the man between two women. The situation has amused the world for so many years. Yet, somehow, he contrived to maintain a certain dignity.

"Maybe," he continued, "you are confounding me with a Dick Danvers who lived in New York up to a few months ago. I knew him well--a worthless scamp you had done better never to have met."

"You bear a wonderful resemblance to him," laughed the woman.

"The poor fool is dead," he answered. "And he left for you, my dear lady, this dying message: that, from the bottom of his soul, he was sorry for the wrong he had done you. He asked you to forgive him--and forget him."

"The year appears to be opening unfortunately for me," said the woman. "First my lover, then my husband."

He had nerved himself to fight the living. This was a blow from the dead. The man had been his friend.

"Dead?"

"He was killed, it appears, in that last expedition in July," answered the woman. "I received the news from the Foreign Office only a fortnight ago."

An ugly look came into his eyes--the look of a cornered creature fighting for its life. "Why have you followed me here? Why do I find you here alone with her? What have you told her?"

The woman shrugged her shoulders. "Only the truth."