“Hullo. Is this Mrs. Morena?”

Betty held the receiver languidly. Her face had grown very thin and her eyes were patient. They were staring now absently through the front window of Woodward Kane’s sitting-room at a day of driving April rain.

“Yes. This is Mrs. Morena.”

The next speech changed her into a flushed and palpitating girl.

“Mr. Gael wishes to know, madam,”—the man-servant recited his lesson automatically,—“if you have seen the exhibition of Foster’s water-colors, Fifty-eighth Street and Fifth Avenue. He wants to know if you will be there this afternoon at five o’clock. No. 88 in the inner room is the picture he would especially like you to notice, madam.”

Betty’s hand and voice were trembling.

“No. I haven’t seen it.” She hesitated, looking at the downpour. “Tell him, please, that I will be there.”

Her voice trailed off doubtfully.

The man at the other end clipped out a “Very well, madam,” and hung up.

Betty was puzzled. Why had Prosper sent her this message, made this appointment by his servant? Perhaps because he was afraid that, in her exaggerated caution, she might refuse to meet him if she could explain to him the reason for her refusal, or gauge the importance of his request. With a servant she could do neither, and the very uncertainty would force her to accept. It was a dreadful day. Nobody would be out, certainly not at the tea-hour, to look at Foster’s pictures—an insignificant exhibition. Betty felt triumphant. At last, this far too acquiescent lover had rebelled against her decree of silence and separation.

At five o’clock she stepped out of her taxicab, made a run for shelter, and found herself in the empty exhibition rooms. She checked her wrap and her umbrella, took a catalogue from the little table, chatted for a moment with the man in charge, then moved about, looking carelessly at the pictures. No. 88 in the inner room! Her heart was beating violently, the hand in her muff was cold. She went slowly toward the inner room and saw at once that, under a small canvas at its far end, Prosper stood waiting for her.

He waited even after he had seen her smile and quickening step, and when he did come forward, it was with obvious reluctance. Betty’s smile faded. His face was haggard and grim, unlike itself; his eyes lack-luster as she had never seen them. This was not the face of an impatient lover. It was—she would not name it, but she was conscious of a feeling of angry sickness.

He took her hand and forced a smile.

“Betty, I thought you disapproved of this kind of thing. I think, myself, it’s rather imprudent to arrange a meeting through your maid.”

Betty jerked away her hand, drew a sharp breath. “What do you mean? I didn’t arrange this meeting. It was you—your man.”

They became simultaneously aware of a trap. It had sprung upon them. With the look of trapped things, they stared at each other, and Betty instinctively looked back over her shoulder. There stood Jasper in the doorway of the room. He looked like the most casual of visitors to an art-gallery, he carried a catalogue in his hand. When he saw that he was seen he smiled easily and came over to them.

“You will have to forgive me,” he murmured pleasantly; “you see, it was necessary to see you both together and Betty is not willing to allow me an interview. I am sorry to have chosen a public place and to have used a trick to get you here, but I could not think of any other plan. This is really private enough. I have arranged this exhibition for Foster and it is closed to the public to-day. We got in by special permit—a fact you probably missed. And, after all, civilized people ought to be able to talk about anything without excitement.”

Betty’s eyes glared at him. “I will not stay! This is insufferable!”

But he put out his hand and something in his gesture compelled her. She sat down on the round, plush seat in the middle of the room and looked up at the two men helplessly. Joan had once leaned in a doorway, silent and unconsulted, while two men, her father and Pierre, settled their property rights in her. Betty was, after all, in no better case. She listened, whiter and whiter, till at the last she slowly raised her muff and pressed it against her twisted mouth.

Morena stood with his hand resting on the high back of the circular seat almost directly above Betty’s head. It seemed to hold her there like a bar. But it was at Prosper he looked, to Prosper he spoke. “My friend,” he began, and the accentuation of the Hebraic quality of his voice had an instantaneous effect upon his two listeners. Both Prosper and Betty knew he was master of some intense agitation. They were conscious of an increasing rapidity of their pulses. “My friend, I thought that I knew you fairly well, as one man knows another, but I find that there have been certain limits to my knowledge. How extraordinary it is! This inner world of our own lives which we keep closely to ourselves! I have a friend, yes, a very good friend, a very dear friend,”—the ironic insistence upon this word gave Prosper the shock of a repeated blow,—“and I fancy, in the ignorance of my conceit, that this friend’s life is sufficiently open to my understanding. I see him leave college, I see him go out on various adventures. I share with him, by letters and confidences, the excitement of these adventures. I know with regret that he suffers from ill-health and goes West, and there, with a great deal of sympathy, I imagine him living, drearily enough, in some small, health-giving Western town, writing his book and later his play which he has so generously allowed me to produce.”

“What the devil are you after, Jasper?”

“But I do my friend an injustice,” went on the manager, undiverted. “His career is infinitely more romantic. He has built himself a little log house amongst the mountains, and he has decorated it and laid in a supply of dainty and exquisite stuffs. I believe that there is even an outing suit, small and narrow—”

“My God!” said Prosper, very low.

There was a silence. Jasper moved slightly, and Prosper started, but the Jew stayed in his former place, only that he bent his head a little, half-closed his eyes, and marked time with the hand that was not buried in the plush above Betty’s head. He recited in a heavy voice, and it was here that Betty raised her muff!

“I am going mad!” said Prosper harshly, and indeed his face had a pinched, half-crazy look.

The Jew waved his hand. “Oh, no, no, no. It is only that you are making a discovery. Letters should be burnt, my friend, not torn and thrown away, but burnt.” He stood up to his stateliest height and he made a curious and rather terrible gesture of breaking something between his two hands. “I have this letter and I hold you and Betty—so!” he said softly—“so!”

Betty spoke. “I might have told you that I loved him, that I have loved him for years, Jasper. If you use this evidence, if you bring this counter-suit, it will bring about the same, the very same, result. Prosper and I—” She broke off choking.

“Of course. Betty and I will be married at once, as soon as she gets her divorce, or you get yours.” But Prosper’s voice was hollow and strained.

“You will be married, Betty,” went on Jasper as calmly as before; “you, branded in the eyes of the world as an unfaithful wife, will be married to a man who has ceased to love you.”

“That is not true,” said Betty.

“Look at his face, my dear. Look at it carefully. Now, watch it closely. Prosper Gael, if I should tell that with a little patience, a little skill, a little unselfishness, you could win a certain woman who once loved you—eh?—a certain Jane West, could you bring yourself to marry this discarded wife of mine?”

Betty sprang up and caught Prosper’s arm in her small hand.

“He is tired of you, Betty. He loves Jane West.” Jasper laughed shortly, looking at the tableau they made: Prosper white, caught in the teeth of honor, his face set to hide its secret, Betty reading his eyes, his soul.

“I am entirely yours, in your hands,” said Prosper Gael.

Betty shook his arm and let it go. “You are lying. You love the woman. Do you think I can’t see?”

“It will be a very strange divorce suit,” went on Jasper. “Your lawyers, Betty, will perhaps prove your case. My lawyers will certainly prove mine, and, when we find ourselves free, our—our lovers will then unite in holy matrimony—rather an original outcome.”

“Will you go, Prosper?” asked Betty. It was a command.

He saw that, at that moment, his presence was intolerable to her.

“Of course. If you wish it. Jasper, you know where to find me, and, Betty,”—he turned to her with a weary tenderness,—“forgive me and make use of me, if you will, as you will.”

He went out quickly, feeling himself a coward to leave her, knowing that he would be a coward to stay to watch the anguish of her broken heart and pride. For an instant he did hesitate and look back. They were standing together, calmly, man and wife. What could he do to help them, he that had broken their lives?

Betty turned to Jasper, still with the muff before her mouth, looking at him above it with her wide, childlike, desperate eyes.

“What do you get out of this, Jasper? I will go to Woodward. I will never come back to you.... Is it revenge?”

“If so,” said Jasper, “it isn’t yet complete. Betty, you have been rash to pit yourself against me. You must have known that I would break you utterly. I will break you, my dear, and I will have you back, and I will be your master instead of your servant, and I will love you—”

“You must be mad. I’m afraid of you. Please let me go.”

“In a moment, when you have learned what home you have to go to. This morning I had an interview with your brother in his office, and he wrote this letter that I have in my pocket and asked me to give it to you.”

Betty laid down her muff, showing at last the pale and twisted mouth. Jasper watched her read her brother’s letter, and his eyes were as patient and observant as the eyes of a skillful doctor who has given a dangerous but necessary draught.

Betty read the small, sharp, careful writing, very familiar to her.

The room turned giddily about Betty. She saw the whole roaring city turn about her, and she knew that there was no home in it for her. She could go to Prosper Gael, but at what horrible sacrifice of pride, and, if Jasper now refused to bring suit, could she ask this man, who no longer loved her, to keep her as his mistress? What could she do? Where could she turn? How could she keep herself alive? For the first time, life, stripped of everything but its hard and ugly bones, faced her. She had always been sheltered, been dependent, been loved. Once before she had lost courage and had failed to venture beyond the familiar shelter of custom and convention. Now, she was again most horribly afraid. Anything was better than this feeling of being lost, alone. She looked at Jasper. At that moment he was nothing but a protector, a means of life, and he knew it.

“Will you come home with me now?” he asked her bitterly.

Betty forced the twisted mouth to speech. “What else is there for me to do?” she said.