after the play, the long shelf beneath the mirror crowded with powders, rouge and pencils, a bunch of roses in the corner washstand basin, a wardrobe trunk, and a maid covering with cheese-cloth bags the evening's costumes.
“It went all right, I think, Fred.”
“Yes,” he said absently. “Go on out, Alice. I'll let you come back in a few minutes.”
He waited until the door closed.
“What's the matter?” she asked rather indifferently. “If it's more quarreling in the company I don't want to hear it. I'm tired.” Then she took a full look at him, and sat up.
“Fred! What is it?”
He gave her the truth, brutally and at once.
“I think Judson Clark was in the house to-night.”
“I don't believe it.”
“Neither would I, if somebody told me,” he agreed sullenly. “I saw him. Don't you suppose I know him? And if you don't believe me, call Saunders. I got him out front. He knows.”
“You called Saunders!”
“Why not? I tell you, Bev, I was nearly crazy. I'm nearly crazy now.”
“What did Saunders say?”
“If he didn't know Clark was dead, he'd say it was Clark.”
She was worried by that time, but far more collected than he was. She sat, absently tapping the shelf with a nail file, and reflecting.
“All right,” she said. “Suppose he was? What then? He has been in hiding for ten years. Why shouldn't he continue to hide? What would bring him out now? Unless he needed money. Was he shabby?”
“No,” he said sulkily. “He was with a girl. He was dressed all right.”
“You didn't say anything, except to Saunders?”
“No I'm not crazy.”
“I'd better see Joe,” she reflected. “Go and get him, Fred. And tell Alice she needn't wait.”
She got up and moved about the room, putting things away and finding relief in movement, a still beautiful woman, with rather accentuated features and an easy carriage. Without her make-up the stage illusion of her youth was gone, and she showed past suffering and present strain. Just then she was uneasy and resentful, startled but not particularly alarmed. Her reason told her that Judson Clark, even if he still lived and had been there that night, meant to leave the dead past to care for itself, and wished no more than she to revive it. She was surprised to find, as she moved about, that she was trembling.
Her brother came back, and she turned to meet him. To her surprise he was standing inside the door, white to the lips and staring at her with wild eyes.
“Saunders!” he said chokingly, “Saunders, the damned fool! He's given it away.”
He staggered to a chair, and ran a handkerchief across his shaking lips.
“He told Bassett, of the Times-Republican,” he managed to say. “Do you—do you know what that means? And Bassett got Clark's automobile number. He said so.”
He looked up at her, his face twitching. “They're hound dogs on a scent, Bev. They'll get the story, and blow it wide open.”
“You know I'm prepared for that. I have been for ten years.”
“I know.” He was suddenly emotional. He reached out and took her hand. “Poor old Bev!” he said. “After the way you've come back, too. It's a damned shame.”
She was calmer than he was, less convinced for one thing, and better balanced always. She let him stroke her hand, standing near him with her eyes absent and a little hard.
“I'd better make sure that was Jud first,” he offered, after a time, “and then warn him.”
“Why?”
“Bassett will be after him.”
“No!” she commanded sharply. “No, Fred. You let the thing alone. You've built up an imaginary situation, and you're not thinking straight. Plenty of things might happen. What probably has happened is that this Bassett is at home and in bed.”
She sent him out for a taxi soon after, and they went back to the hotel. But, alone later on in her suite in the Ardmore she did not immediately go to bed. She put on a dressing gown and stood for a long time by her window, looking out. Instead of the city lights, however, she saw a range of snow-capped mountains, and sheltered at their foot the Clark ranch house, built by the old millionaire as a place of occasional refuge from the pressure of his life. There he had raised his fine horses, and trained them for the track. There, when late in life he married, he had taken his wife for their honeymoon and two years later, for the birth of their son. And there, when she died, he had returned with the child, himself broken and prematurely aged, to be killed by one of his own stallions when the boy was fifteen.
Six years his own master, Judson had been twenty-one to her twenty, when she first met him. Going the usual pace, too, and throwing money right and left. He had financed her as a star, ransacking Europe for her stage properties, and then he fell in love with her. She shivered as she remembered it. It had been desperate and terrible, because she had cared for some one else.
Standing by the window, she wondered as she had done over and over again for ten years, what would have happened if, instead of marrying Howard, she had married Judson Clark? Would he have settled down? She had felt sometimes that in his wildest moments he was only playing a game that amused him; that the hard-headed part of him inherited from his father sometimes stood off and watched, with a sort of interested detachment, the follies of the other. That he played his wild game with his tongue in his cheek.
She left the window, turned out the lights and got into her bed. She was depressed and lonely, and she cried a little. After a time she remembered that she had not put any cream on her face. She crawled out again and went through the familiar motions in the dark.
VIII
Dick rose the next morning with a sense of lightness and content that sent him singing into his shower. In the old stable which now housed both Nettie and the little car Mike was washing them both with indiscriminate wavings of the hose nozzle, his old pipe clutched in his teeth. From below there came up the odors of frying sausages and of strong hot coffee.
The world was a good place. A fine old place. It had work and play and love. It had office hours and visits and the golf links, and it had soft feminine eyes and small tender figures to be always cared for and looked after.
She liked him. She did not think he was old. She thought his profession was the finest in the world. She had wondered if he would have time to come and see her, some day. Time! He considered very seriously, as he shaved before the slightly distorted mirror in the bathroom, whether it would be too soon to run in that afternoon, just to see if she was tired, or had caught cold or anything? Perhaps to-morrow would look better. No, hang
