-God help you."

CHAPTER XXIV

IN WHICH THE DEVIL FORMALLY TAKES THE TWO HINDERMOST AND CLOSES AN
ACCOUNT IN HIS LEDGER

Harvey tried sincerely to believe in Tom Van Dorn up to the very day
when it happened. For the town had accepted him gladly and unanimously
as its most distinguished citizen. But when the town read in the
_Times_ one November day after he had come home from his political
campaign through the east for sound money and the open mills--a campaign
in which Harvey had seen him through the tinted glasses of the Harvey
_Daily Times_ as one of the men who had saved the country--when the
town read that cold paragraph beginning: "A decree of divorce was issued
to-day to Judge Thomas Van Dorn, from his wife, Mrs. Laura Nesbit Van
Dorn, upon the ground of incompatibility of temperament by Judge protem
Calvin in the district court," and ending with these words: "Mrs. Van
Dorn declined through her attorney to participate in a division of the
property upon any terms and will live for the present with her daughter,
aged five, at the home of Dr. and Mrs. James Nesbit on Elm Street"--when
the town read that paragraph, Harvey closed its heart upon Thomas Van
Dorn.

Only one other item was needed to steel the heart of Harvey against its
idol, and that item they found upon another page. It read, "Wanted,
pupils for the piano--Mrs. Laura Van Dorn, Quality Hill, Elm Street."

Those items told the whole story of the deed that Thomas Van Dorn had
done. If he had felt bees sting before he got his decree, he should have
felt vipers gnawing at his vitals afterward.

But he was free--the burden of matrimony was lifted. He felt that the
whole world of women was his now for the choosing, and of all that
world, he turned in wanton fancy to the beckoning arms of Margaret Fenn.
But the feeling of freedom, the knowledge that he could speak to any
woman as he chose and no one could gainsay him legally, the
consciousness that he had no ties which the law recognized--and with him
law was the synonym of morality--the exuberant sense of relief from a
bondage that was oppressive to him, overbore all the influence of the
town's spirit of wrath in the air about him.

As for the morality of the town and what he regarded as its prudery--he
scorned it. He believed he could live it down; he said in his heart that
it was merely a matter of a few weeks, a few months, or a few years at
most, before they would have some fresh ox to gore