rting for this conspirator as there would have been for Mr.
Vandeford's lawful widow, and he administered it with the same
affectionate respect that he would have used to the relict.

"You're a dear, wonderful little woman!" he was saying, when the voice
of the Clyde Trevors was heard calling to them from around the veranda,
and an oath rose in the Violet with such force that she almost allowed
it to explode. Still she felt sure of her ultimate results.

"You can count on me to stand by you and the play forever," she
promised, and the hurried pressure of their lips in the soft, dark,
sea-perfumed air was biologically inevitable.

Mr. Godfrey Vandeford had woven a tangled web when he had let fall the
purple letter on the purple manuscript and gone out recklessly to follow
the hunch their juxtaposition implied.

CHAPTER VII

The first two weeks of September spent in torrid New York were a strange
period of time to have projected itself into the calm life of Miss
Patricia Adair of Adairville, Kentucky. Suddenly she found herself a cog
screwed tight into a rapid-fire piece of machinery that was running at
top speed night and day, by name, "The Purple Slipper."

For long hours she sat in the coolness of that stage-box and held her
breath while she threw her whole self into the building of the play,
which so fascinatingly was and was not hers. And through all those
hours, close at her side, between her and the big dim theater, sat Mr.
Godfrey Vandeford, with his arm across the back of her chair and his
eager face close to hers and tilted at the same angle. Her slightest
murmur or his lowest whisper caught and was answered, and they almost
seemed to be breathing one breath, so absorbed were they in the destiny
of their mutual adventure. Like all women of her kind, Patricia Adair
had known men only through a cloud, which sex traditions had firmly held
between her and them, and Godfrey Vandeford was the first man she had
encountered since she had slipped outside of its deadening density into
a world where men and women endeavored together first, and left their
sentinel undertakings to a fitting secondary time and place. In all
sincerity she accepted him as a co-worker and was as happy working with
him as it was possible for a woman to be. She specially liked being
beside him in the office, and watched him settle the details of the
running the big machine smoothly, from the hiring of the property-man to
the firing o