But if Mrs. Fairboalt had considered it a successful afternoon she would have named it a triumph had she waited two minutes longer. For while she was still a black receding figure a hundred yards down the street, a very good-looking distraught young man turned up the walk to the Piper house. Mrs. Piper answered the door-bell herself, and with a rather dismayed expression led him quickly into the library.
“I had to see you,” he began wildly; “your note played the devil with me. Did Harold frighten you into this?”
She shook her head.
“I’m through, Fred,” she said slowly, and her lips had never looked to him so much like tearings from a rose. “He came home last night sick with it. Jessie Piper’s sense of duty was too much for her, so she went down to his office and told him. He was hurt and—oh, I can’t help seeing it his way, Fred. He says we’ve been club gossip all summer and he didn’t know it, and now he understands snatches of conversation he’s caught and veiled hints people have dropped about me. He’s mighty angry, Fred, and he loves me and I love him—rather.”
Gedney nodded slowly and half closed his eyes.
“Yes,” he said, “yes, my trouble’s like yours. I can see other people’s points of view too plainly.” His gray eyes met her dark ones frankly. “The blessed thing’s over. My God, Evylyn, I’ve been sitting down at the office all day looking at the outside of your letter, and looking at it and looking at it——”
“You’ve got to go, Fred,” she said steadily, and the slight emphasis of hurry in her voice was a new thrust for him. “I gave him my word of honor I wouldn’t see you. I know just how far I can go with Harold, and being here with you this evening is one of the things I can’t do.”
They were still standing, and as she spoke she made a little movement toward the door. Gedney looked at her miserably, trying, here at the end, to treasure up a last picture of her—and then suddenly both of them were stiffened into marble at the sound of steps on the walk outside. Instantly her arm reached out grasping the lapel of his coat—half urged, half swung him through the big door into the dark dining-room.
“I’ll make him go up-stairs,” she whispered close to his ear; “don’t move till you hear him on the stairs. Then go out the front way.”
Then he was alone listening as she greeted her husband in the hall.
Harold Piper was thirty-six, nine years older than his wife. He was handsome—with marginal notes: these being eyes that were too close together, and a certain woodenness when his face was in repose. His attitude toward this Gedney matter was typical of all his attitudes. He had told Evylyn that he considered the subject closed and would never reproach her nor allude to it in any form; and he told himself that this was rather a big way of looking at it—that she was not a little impressed. Yet, like all men who are preoccupied with their own broadness, he was exceptionally narrow.
He greeted Evylyn with emphasized cordiality this evening.
“You’ll have to hurry and dress, Harold,” she said eagerly; “we’re going to the Bronsons’.”
He nodded.
“It doesn’t take me long to dress, dear,” and, his words trailing off, he walked on into the library. Evylyn’s heart clattered loudly.
“Harold—” she began, with a little catch in her voice, and followed him in. He was lighting a cigarette. “You’ll have to hurry, Harold,” she finished, standing in the doorway.
“Why?” he asked, a trifle impatiently; “you’re not dressed yourself yet, Evie.”
He stretched out in a Morris chair and unfolded a newspaper. With a sinking sensation Evylyn saw that this meant at least ten minutes—and Gedney was standing breathless in the next room. Supposing Harold decided that before he went upstairs he wanted a drink from the decanter on the sideboard. Then it occurred to her to forestall this contingency by bringing him the decanter and a glass. She dreaded calling his attention to the dining-room in any way, but she couldn’t risk the other chance.
But at the same moment Harold rose and, throwing his paper down, came toward her.
“Evie, dear,” he said, bending and putting his arms about her, “I hope you’re not thinking about last night—” She moved close to him, trembling. “I know,” he continued, “it was just an imprudent friendship on your part. We all make mistakes.”
Evylyn hardly heard him. She was wondering if by sheer clinging to him she could draw him out and up the stairs. She thought of playing sick, asking to be carried up—unfortunately, she knew he would lay her on the couch and bring her whiskey.
Suddenly her nervous tension moved up a last impossible notch. She had heard a very faint but quite unmistakable creak from the floor of the dining-room. Fred was trying to get out the back way.
Then her heart took a flying leap as a hollow ringing note like a gong echoed and re-echoed through the house. Gedney’s arm had struck the big cut-glass bowl.
“What’s that!” cried Harold. “Who’s there?”
She clung to him but he broke away, and the room seemed to crash about her ears. She heard the pantry-door swing open, a scuffle, the rattle of a tin pan, and in wild despair she rushed into the kitchen and pulled up the gas. Her husband’s arm slowly unwound from Gedney’s neck, and he stood there very still, first in amazement, then with pain dawning in his face.
“My golly!” he said in bewilderment, and then repeated: “My golly!”
He turned as if to jump again at Gedney, stopped, his muscles visibly relaxed, and he gave a bitter little laugh.
“You people—you people—” Evylyn’s arms were around him and her eyes were pleading with him frantically, but he pushed her away and sank dazed into a kitchen chair, his face like porcelain. “You’ve been doing things to me, Evylyn. Why, you little devil! You little devil!”
She had never felt so sorry for him; she had never loved him so much.
“It wasn’t her fault,” said Gedney rather humbly. “I just came.” But Piper shook his head, and his expression when he stared up was as if some physical accident had jarred his mind into a temporary inability to function. His eyes, grown suddenly pitiful, struck a deep, unsounded chord in Evylyn—and simultaneously a furious anger surged in her. She felt her eyelids burning; she stamped her foot violently; her hands scurried nervously over the table as if searching for a weapon, and then she flung herself wildly at Gedney.
“Get out!” she screamed, dark eyes blazing, little fists beating helplessly on his outstretched arm. “You did this! Get out of here—get out—get out! Get out!”
II.
Concerning Mrs. Harold Piper at thirty-five, opinion was divided—women said she was still handsome; men said she was pretty no longer. And this was probably because the qualities in her beauty that women had feared and men had followed had vanished. Her eyes were still as large and as dark and as sad, but the mystery had departed; their sadness was no longer eternal, only human, and she had developed a habit, when she was startled or annoyed, of twitching her brows together and blinking several times. Her mouth also had lost: the red had receded and the faint down-turning of its corners when she smiled, that had added to the sadness of the eyes and been vaguely mocking and beautiful, was quite gone. When she smiled now the corners of her lips turned up. Back in the days when she revelled in her own beauty Evylyn had enjoyed that smile of hers—she had accentuated it. When she stopped accentuating it, it faded out and the last of her mystery with it.
Evylyn had ceased accentuating her smile within a month after the Freddy Gedney affair. Externally things had gone on very much as they had before. But in those few minutes during which