“She did?” Hobart asked. “Not just after you’d told them your head ached?”

“Yes. She said the way to cure a headache was to ‘be gay and forget it.’ ”

“What did you tell her, Mildred?”

“I said I couldn’t and that John couldn’t go either, because he had to be in his office early to-morrow morning. He said no; he didn’t need more than three or four hours’ sleep, and he would be only too glad to escort Julietta, since if I had a headache, I’d probably go to bed, and he’d have nothing to do. At dinner I asked him please not to go; please to stay with me, instead. He said in his kindest way that he’d be glad to, any other night, but it was impossible this evening since he’d ‘promised Julietta,’ and couldn’t possibly break a promise. So he went—and I found I couldn’t stay in the house and think it over any longer. Hobart, you mustn’t go out there and help them pretend to play golf to-morrow.”

“Very well,” he said, gravely. “I’ll do whatever you wish. But isn’t it just possible you’d rather have me with them? If Julietta really is the designing person you believe she is——”

“If!” Mildred cried with sudden loudness. “ ‘If’ she is! You don’t understand, Hobart. This is what happened in the car just before we reached her house to-night;—it happens all the time. She made a gesture—she always talks with gestures—and her hand smashed against the door-frame and broke the crystal of her wrist-watch. She said she was sure the works were broken, too. It was a plain gold watch, old and not very valuable, but she made a great lamentation over it. John took it from her, put it in his pocket, and said that since it was broken in our car it was our place to restore it; she should have a new one as near like it as possible to-morrow;—it would be the ‘greatest privilege’ to obtain it for her! She knew that was just what he’d do, and she broke it on purpose, of course.”

“Mildred, you really believe——”

She stopped him. “You don’t understand. It goes on all the time. And if she does this much under my very eyes, what doesn’t she get out of him when they’re alone together?”

“There might be something reassuring in that,” Hobart suggested. “If she spends her energies getting these trifles from him—because of course that’s all they are to a man in old John’s position—doesn’t that look as if her designs might be limited to——”

“No, it does not,” Mrs. Simms interrupted, promptly.

“But——”

“No,” his wife repeated. “Don’t you see that the very fact of her wanting the trifles would make her want something a great deal more important, and that’s to be in a position where she wouldn’t have to work for them?”

“Well, then,” her husband returned;—“if she expects to reach that position by supplanting Mildred, she has a ridiculous ambition!”

“Is it?” Mildred asked, unhappily. “If John were any other kind of man, it might be ridiculous.” Tears came into her eyes that had been dry until now; but she struggled with herself and kept more from coming. “Isn’t it ironical?” she said. “The very goodness of such a man as John, his simple kindness, his idealizing—the very things I’ve cared for most in him—that they should be his weakness and just what leaves him open to the easy cajoling of a crude trespasser like Julietta Voss! Don’t you understand, Hobart? I know you didn’t understand this afternoon, but don’t you now? You thought I was jealous of him, I know. Perhaps I am; perhaps I do want to keep him for myself; but I’m his wife; why shouldn’t I? And I know I’m better for him than she’d be. Oh, don’t you understand? I want to protect him!”

Hobart came to her and took her hand. “Mildred, old John hasn’t the remotest idea you’re suffering like this. You’ve got to tell him about it.”

“But I can’t,” she cried. “I can’t let him think I’m just a jealous woman, and what else would he think of me if I told him the truth about her? That’s why I don’t want you to go out there with them to-morrow, Hobart.”

“Of course I won’t, since you ask it,” he said, mystified. “Yet I don’t see——”

“You don’t?” his wife asked, sharply; and, in obvious pity for a poor understanding, characteristically manlike, she explained what she had instantly divined—her unhappy sister’s reason for coming to ask him to help her. “Julietta counts on your being with them as the answer to the talk about them. She intends to have a defence against the talk—an answer that will help to keep people on her side—and if you break your engagement without any explanation she’ll wonder what it means, and if we haven’t asked you to do it; and she’ll get John to find out. He’ll ask you why you didn’t come. Then you can tell him you stayed away because you’re troubled about what Mildred may think. It’s all you need say, and he’ll speak to Mildred about it. That will give her a chance to talk to him.”

“Is it what you want, Mildred?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s the only thing I can think of. It gives me a chance to talk to him, that’s all. It may make him despise me, anyhow. I don’t know what he’ll say, but I’ve got to do it;—I can’t go on any longer not saying anything! Perhaps”—her breath caught in her throat, and for a moment she could not speak—“perhaps he’ll ask me for a divorce. Well, if he does, I’ll give it to him!”

“No, no!” her sister cried. “You said you wanted to protect him!”

“If he doesn’t love me any more, I couldn’t,” Mildred sobbed, for her struggle to control herself was lost now, and her weeping became convulsive. “Don’t you see I couldn’t? You can’t protect anybody that’s tired of you. If he’s tired of you, how can you protect him against someone he’s in love with?”

“My dear sister!” Hobart begged her, deeply moved. “Don’t think it. Old John isn’t in love with Julietta Voss any more than I am!”

“How do I know?” she sobbed. “He acts as if he is. What other way is there to tell? How do I know?” And, clinging to his hand, she sank down into the chair beside which she had been standing. “Oh, Hobart, you must help me; you must try your best to help me!”

“Indeed I will,” he promised, with all the earnestness that was in him. “I’ll do anything in the world, Mildred—absolutely anything!”

He meant it indeed; but over the bowed form of the unhappy lady who clung to his hand, entreating him, he looked into the denouncing and skeptical eyes of his wife. She needed no words, nor anything except those implacable eyes of hers, to tell him that his own recent behaviour was in great part responsible for the misery before them, and that he lacked the power to make up to Mildred for what he had done.

He adored his wife, and he took that look of hers as a challenge.

HE WAS far from convinced, however, that Mildred’s necessity was as tragic as she believed. If it was, he would prove to his wife that he was a man of more resources than she thought; but it still seemed to him that old John Tower could be in no danger from the simple wiles of Julietta. For Hobart had accepted the theory that Julietta was wily; he had finally gone that far unconditionally before the unhappy evening was over; and he even wondered why he had hitherto been so blind when he looked at Julietta. But as for steady old John Tower—“No,” he said to himself, as he drove into the city the next morning. “Absolutely impossible!” Yet in this emphasis there was that faint shade of doubt so often present when people buttress their convictions with “absolutely”; so he decided to buttress himself further by means of a diplomatic experimental talk with old John.

Arrived in the heart of the city at the great building that was his own, with all its thirty stories obedient to his five feet three inches, a Giant Jinn enslaved by a little master enchanter, he went, not to his own offices, but to old John’s. “I just dropped in for a morning cigar,” he explained.

His brother-in-law received him heartily.

“My dear Hobart, this is indeed a pleasure. Will you smoke one of my cigars or one of your own? I’m afraid yours are much the better.”

“No, they’re not,” Hobart laughed. “Mine are much the worse. Your taste is a lot better than mine about pretty nearly everything.” As he spoke he took a long cigar from the box that Tower was offering him, and lighted it. “You have better taste in cigars, better taste in furniture——” Here he seated himself in one of the set of seventeenth-century English chairs that helped to make the room the pleasant place it was. “You even have better taste on the golf links,” he concluded, chuckling as if reminiscently.

“How so? You play a better game. You don’t allude to my apparel for it, I imagine.”

“That, too,” Hobart said. “But I was thinking of something else.”

“Of what, my dear Hobart?”

Hobart laughed, gave him a look of friendly raillery, mixed with jocose admiration, and said: “Don’t you think I’m a good deal of a dunderhead? On your word, don’t you, old John?”

Old John, beaming genially and amused by his caller’s question, but puzzled by it, laughed with him. “On my word then, no. I haven’t the slightest conception of what you mean.”

“Just think of it!” Hobart chuckled. “Here we go, afternoon after afternoon, you and I, out to the links; and every single time, when we get there, I go roving round the course virtually all by myself, while you put in the time with Julietta! You and she keep together and play the same ball—and what do I play? It seems to me I play the Lone Fisherman! Honestly, do you think it’s fair?”

“Fair?” Old John had become grave, and the other was surprised and interested to observe that a tinge of red was slowly mounting in his cheeks. “Let me understand you, Hobart,” he said. “You mean that I’ve been monopolizing Julietta?”

“Rather!” Hobart continued his rallying jocosity, though inwardly he was disturbed by the spreading of that tinge of red over his brother-in-law’s face. “Don’t you think it’s about time I had a share of feminine camaraderie in our outdoor sports?”

“You mean, Hobart, that this afternoon you’d prefer to play the same ball with Julietta and have me play against you?”

This was not the question Hobart had desired to evoke; and his jocosity departed from him suddenly. “Well——” he said. Then, as his shrewd eyes took note again of old John’s rosy face and of his gravity—already troubled as by some forthcoming disappointment—the Napoleonic Hobart came to one of those swift and clear resolutions, the capacity for which had made possible his prodigious business career during what was still almost his youth. Old John was indeed in danger, although old John was “too innocent” to know it, himself. And in the very instant of this realization, Hobart decided that he had found the opportunity to take up his wife’s challenge and atone in full for his fault to her sister.

“Why—why, yes,” he said, slowly. “Don’t you think it’s about time? You wouldn’t mind very much, would you?”

Old John’s large and well-favoured face grew redder than ever, though otherwise it was expressive of the most naïvely plain regret. “Ah—I suppose it would be fair,” he said. “Julietta is attractive, as you say. In fact, I believe she is the most attractive girl I have ever known. I value her friendship very highly, Hobart. I came into town to a cabaret with her last night, and neither of us knew anybody in the place. We danced together and had a little supper, and danced some more, and talked—altogether until about two o’clock, I think, Hobart. And in all that time I never had a dull moment—not one! She is a most attractive girl, as you say, and I believe there’s perhaps some justice in your idea that you’re entitled to more of her companionship than you’ve been enjoying—for this afternoon at least. Since you put it as you do, suppose we arrange, then, that you and she play the same ball this afternoon and I play against the two of you.”

“I believe that would be fair,” Hobart said, his eyes sidelong upon old John. “It’s settled then.” He rose to go.

“I suppose so.” Tower’s gravity increased; but he brightened at a thought that came to him as his departing caller reached the door. “I suppose, Hobart, to-morrow—to-morrow——”

“To-morrow what?” Hobart inquired, staring at him.

“Ah—to-morrow——” Old John hesitated, then finished hopefully: “We might return to our former arrangement?”

“To-morrow? Oh, yes, certainly—to-morrow we’ll return to our former arrangement,” Hobart said; and as he passed through the anteroom beyond he murmured the word incredulously to himself, “ ‘To-morrow.’ ” He laughed shortly, and in his imagination continued the dialogue with old John. “Day after to-morrow, too, I suppose? And the day after that? And the next, and the next? Why, yes! Why not?” Then he became serious. “You poor dear old thing, there’s got not to be any ‘to-morrow’!”

He took the affair into his own hands for complete settlement; and at noon he went to a jeweller’s and bought the most expensive wrist-watch in the place—a trifling miracle of platinum intricately glittering with excellent white diamonds. He put the little packet in his coat pocket, and at about five o’clock that afternoon he showed it to Miss Julietta Voss.

Old John Tower, absent-minded and not playing well, had driven his ball into a thicket fifty yards away from where Hobart and Julietta had paused;—he was in the underbrush, solemnly searching, with his caddy.

“Something for you,” Hobart said, tossing the little packet up and down in his hand.

She looked surprised. “For me? From you?”

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“Oh, nothing to speak of,” he replied, airily. “I just happened to hear you broke that gold wrist-watch you usually wear——”

“I did,” she said. “But John found another for me to-day—a new one exactly like it.” She displayed her left forearm for inspection. “Isn’t it lovely of him always to be so dear about all the little thoughtful things?”

“I don’t know,” Hobart said; and he quoted an ancient bit of slang: “There might be others!”

She shook her head. “Not like him!”

“Are you sure, Julietta?” He gave her a quick and serious look that increased her surprise. “You might at least take a glance round you to see.”

“What on earth are you talking about, Hobart Simms?”

At that he gave her another quick glance—a personal glance, as it might have been defined, since to Julietta it seemed to convey an unexpected feeling concerning herself and himself. Then he looked wistfully away, and when he spoke, a moment later, his voice had not the briskness customary in his speech;—it was, on the contrary, perceptibly unsteady. “Julietta, I’ve been—well, don’t you suppose a man might some day get a little tired of being—I mean to say, here I am with you, day after day—yet really not with you. You’re so busy noticing old John all the time, you never take time off to be a little friendly with anybody else.”

She caught her breath, staring at him wonderingly. “But you—you never showed me you wanted me to,” she said, slowly.

“Didn’t I?” He turned to her, smiling, and as he spoke he removed the paper wrappings of the small packet. “Other people might want to do some of the ‘little thoughtful things’ too—if they ever got a chance.”

He put into her hand the green velvet box that had been inside the wrapping, and she opened it curiously;—then suppressed an outcry.

“Good Heaven!” she gasped, and stared at him. “Of course you know I couldn’t accept a thing like this!”

“Why not? You would from John.”

“But——”

“You’re wearing the one he gave you.”

“Yes, but this——”

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Of course, if you don’t like it——”

Sorrowfully he extended his hand to take back the little green velvet box from her; but she retained it and stood staring at him, amazed and also profoundly thoughtful. Like Hobart, she was a person who could make quick decisions.

“I never dreamed of this,” she said. “I thought you only came along with us because you thought it was a good course and because John asked you.”

“And he asked me because you made him,” Hobart added. “And the reason you did was because you wanted me for a chaperon.”

She laughed excitedly. “You don’t seem contented with the rôle, I must say!”

“How could I?”

“I never dreamed!” she said, and she looked at the watch upon her wrist and at that in the green velvet box. “Queer!” she laughed. “Now I have two!”

“Would you mind wearing mine?” Hobart asked, and he laughed with her.

“But he’ll see it!”

Hobart’s laughter became gayer and louder. “What if he does?”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Julietta said, and as she took the magnificent tiny miracle from the box, there began to shine in her eyes an exultation that could be ruthless. “Perhaps I’d better wear yours and keep his in my pocket.”

“Perhaps you’d better,” he agreed, still laughing. “Don’t let him see the joke’s on him till we get back to the clubhouse, though. If he asks you about it, don’t tell him till then;—I want to get away first.”

“Yes,” she assented, thoughtfully. “Perhaps that would be just as well.”

WHEN he got home from the country club, something less than an hour later, his wife told him coldly that he seemed to be in high spirits. “You appear to have the happy faculty of not being depressed by the troubles of people close to you,” she added. “However, your gaiety may be useful this evening, at Mother’s.”

“At your mother’s?” he inquired. “Are we going there?”

She looked at him sternly. “What have you been doing that makes you forget such a thing? It’s Father’s and Mother’s thirty-eighth wedding anniversary.”

“So it is!” he exclaimed. “I’d forgotten all about it.”

“Obviously. You’d better hurry and dress, because the dinner’s to be very early on account of the younger grandchildren;—I sent them half an hour ago.” And, as he did not move, she added, “Please get ready right away.”

He still hesitated, for in his absorption in his plan to atone to his sister-in-law and take up Anne’s challenge he had forgotten more than the anniversary dinner. He had forgotten to consider in what terms he would eventually inform his wife of that plan and what already appeared to be its successful beginnings. The present seemed to be a wise time to say something about it; but he found himself in a difficulty. Face to face with his wife, especially in her present state of mind, which was plainly still critical of him, he was convinced that she would prove unsympathetic. He decided to postpone all explanations, at least until they were on their way to his father-in-law’s house.

But, alone in the car with her, when the postponed moment seemed to have arrived, he found the difficulty no less discouraging. He made an effort, however; but he put it off so long that when he made it they were almost at their destination.

“Oh, about that interview I’m supposed to have with old John, to-morrow morning——”

“Yes,” she said. “When he asks you why you didn’t join him and Julietta at the club this afternoon, you’ll not weaken, I trust.”

“ ‘Weaken’?”

“Oh, you’ll protest now that you won’t, I know,” she said. “But men are sympathetic—with other men, especially in ‘affairs’—and John’s terribly sensitive. I shouldn’t be surprised if you failed to carry it through. I shouldn’t at all!”

“But—but of course I shall,” Hobart said, before he knew what he was saying. It was not what he wished to say; but he found himself apparently without control of his own speech, for the moment; and he realized that it would now be more difficult than ever to make the needed explanation. He attempted it feebly, however. “That is to say——” he began. “I mean—ah—suppose such an interview shouldn’t——”

The car stopped.

“We’re here,” Anne said. “I hope you’ll be as thoughtful as you can of Mildred. And please don’t be too cordial to John. Let him begin to feel what you think about him.”

But Hobart’s determination, as he followed his wife into his father-in-law’s gaily illuminated house, was to be as cordial as possible to old John and to seek the first private opportunity to request him not to mention their game of the afternoon. Unfortunately, the anniversary dinner was already in jovial motion;—Anne and her husband were late; the adults of the party had yielded to the clamours of the children and had just gone out to the dining-room. Hobart found himself between Mildred and Cornelia, across the wide table from his brother-in-law.

Old John was silent, and his sensitive face wore such visible depression that presently his father-in-law began to rally him upon it. “Good gracious, John, this is a party, not the bedside of a sick friend! Why don’t you eat, or laugh, or anyhow say something? You and Mildred both seem to think it’s a horrible thing to be present at a celebration of two people’s having been happily married for thirty-eight years. Is that what makes you feel so miserable?”

“No, not at all,” John replied, gloomily. “I wasn’t thinking of that. My mind was on other matters.” And, being the singular soul he was, and of such a guileless straightforwardness, he looked across the table at his brother-in-law. “I was thinking of our golf game,” he said, to that gentleman’s acute alarm. “I mean the one this afternoon, Hobart.”

Hobart heard from the chair next upon his right the subdued and lamentable exclamation uttered by Mildred; but what fascinated his paling gaze was the expression of his wife, seated beside old John. She looked at her husband for a moment of great intensity;—then she turned to Tower.

“So?” she said, lightly. “Did Hobart play with you and Julietta again to-day?”

“He played with Julietta,” old John explained, and in his noble simplicity he continued, to his brother-in-law’s horror, “I didn’t seem to be needed. I’ve been very fond of Julietta, very fond indeed of Julietta. She broke her watch in our car yesterday, and so I took her a new one this afternoon and gave it to her before we began to play. Hobart brought her one, too; and she took mine off and wore his. The one I brought her was an ordinary little gold one; but his was platinum and diamonds—it must have cost a remarkable sum. It was very generous and kind of Hobart, because Julietta isn’t well off; but the way she took it made me feel peculiarly disappointed in her. She evidently considers only the relative financial value of gifts, and not the spirit. She was quite different in her manner toward me. I cannot say that I value her friendship as I did.”

“You don’t?” Anne said; and she laughed excitedly. “Don’t you mean you’ve decided she values my husband’s friendship more than you thought she did?”

The unhappy Hobart, upon whom the wrong he had done to Julietta thus already began to be avenged, made an effort to speak; but beneath the table he felt a warm hand upon his knee, pressing warningly. It was Mildred’s.

“Wait!” she whispered, rapturously. “I understand. I’ll help you to talk to her later. It will be terribly difficult, but I’ll do what I can for you—you angel!”

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

Some illustrations were moved to facilitate page layout.