her house, but he would like to see her
before a metropolitan audience, to add his mite to her triumph. There
were times when he fully determined to go, when he sat at his desk
with his hand on the telephone, prepared to lay the foundations of
the excursion by some manipulation of business interests. For months,
however, he never went further than the preliminary movement.

But by October he began to delude himself with a real excuse for going,
and this was the knowledge that by a strange chain of circumstance
this woman who so dominated his secret thoughts was connected with
Elizabeth's life through Judson Clark. The discovery, communicated to
him by Walter Wheeler, that Dick was Clark had roused in him a totally
different feeling from Nina's. He saw no glamour of great wealth. On the
contrary, he saw in Clark the author of a great unhappiness to a woman
who had not deserved it. And Nina, judging him with deadly accuracy,
surmised even that.

That he was jealous of Judson Clark, and of his part in the past,
he denied to himself absolutely. But his resentment took the form of
violent protest to the family, against even allowing Elizabeth to have
anything to do with Dick if he turned up.

"He'll buy his freedom, if he isn't dead," he said to Nina, "and he'll
come snivelling back here, with that lost memory bunk, and they're just
fool enough to fall for it."

"I've fallen for it, and I'm at least as intelligent as you are."

Before her appraising eyes his own fell.

"Suppose I did something I shouldn't and turned up here with such a
story, would you believe it?"

"No. When you want to do something you shouldn't you don't appear to
need any excuse."

But, on the whole, they managed to live together comfortably enough.
They each had their reservations, but especially after Jim's death they
tacitly agreed to stop bickering and to make their mutual concessions.
What Nina never suspected was that he corresponded with Beverly
Carlysle. Not that the correspondence amounted to much. He had sent her
flowers the night of the New York opening, with the name of his club on
his card, and she wrote there in acknowledgment. Then, later, twice
he sent her books, one a biography, which was a compromise with his
conscience, and later a volume of exotic love verse, which was not. As
he replied to her notes of thanks a desultory correspondence had sprung
up, letters which the world might have read, and yet which had to him
the sav