And now having felt sorry for everybody else, Charity began to feel pleasantly sorry for Jim Dyckman. Her own rebuke of him for assaulting Cheever had absolved him. In the retrospect, the attack took on a knightliness of devotion. She recalled his lonely dogging of her footsteps. If he had played the dog, after all, she loved dogs. What was so faithful, trustworthy, and lovable as a dog?

But how was Charity to get word to Jim of her new heart? She could not whistle him back. She could hardly go to him and apologize for having been a good wife to a bad husband. And a married lady simply must not say to a bachelor: “Pardon me a moment, while I divorce my present consort. I'd like to wear your name for a change.”

Charity might have been capable even of such a derring-do if she had known that Jim Dyckman's bachelorhood was threatened with immediate extinction by the Thropps. But she could not know. For, however Jim's soul may have been mumbling, “Help, help!” he made no audible sound. Unwilling brides may shriek for rescue, but unwilling bridegrooms must not complain.

By a coincidence that was not strange Charity selected for her lawyer Travers McNiven, the very man that Jim Dyckman selected. All three had been friends since childhood. McNiven had been taken into the famous partnership of Hamnett, Dawsey, Coggeshall, Thurlow & McNiven.

When Jim Dyckman telephoned him for an appointment he was told to make it the next morning, as another client had pre-empted the afternoon. Jim was glad enough of an excuse to postpone his marriage by a day, never dreaming that Charity was the client who had preempted McNiven.

McNiven wondered at the synchrony, but naturally mentioned neither client to the other. His office was far down-town and far up in the air. Its windows gave an amplitudinous vision of the Harbor which Mr. Ernest Poole has made his own, but which was now a vestibule to the hell of the European war. All the adjoining land was choked far backward with a vast blockade of explosive freight-trains waiting to be unloaded into the unheard-of multitude of munition-ships waiting to run the gantlet of the German submarines.

Charity had run that gantlet and was ready to run it again on another errand of mercy, but first she must make sure that Zada's baby should not enter the world before its mother entered wedlock.

After McNiven had proffered her a chair and she had exclaimed upon the grandeur of the harborscape, she began:

“Sandy, I've come to see you about—”

“One moment!” McNiven broke in. “Before you speak I must as an honest lawyer warn you against the step you contemplate.”

“But you don't know what it is yet.”

“I don't have to. I know that people come to lawyers only to get out of scrapes or to get into scrapes dishonestly or unwisely. Furthermore, every step that any human being contemplates is a dangerous one and bound to lead to trouble.”

“Oh, hush!” said Charity. “Am I supposed to pay you for that sort of advice?”

“Being a friend, and a woman, and very rich, you will doubtless never pay me at all. But let me warn you, Charity, that there is nothing in life more dangerous than taking a step in any possible direction—unless it is staying where you are.”

“Oh, dear,” sighed Charity, “you're worse than dear Doctor Mosely.”

“Ah, you've been to the dear old doctor! And he's refused to help you. When the Church denies a woman her way she comes to the devil. You interest me. It's a divorce, then?”

“Yes.”

McNiven remembered Jim Dyckman's ancient squiredom to Charity and his recent telephony and he said to himself, “Aha!” But he said to Charity, “Go on.”

“Sandy, my husband and I have agreed to disagree.”

“Then for Heaven's sake don't tell me about it!”

“But I've got to.”

“But you mustn't! Say, rather, I have decided to divorce my husband.”

“All right. Consider my first break unmade. Peter has asked me—I mean, Peter has said that he will furnish me with the evidence on one condition: that I shall not mention a certain person with whom he has been living. He offers to provide me with any sort of evidence you lawyers care to cook up.”

McNiven stared at her and spoke with startling rigor. “Are you trying to involve me in your own crimes?”

“Don't be silly. Peter says it is done all the time.”

“Not in this office. Do you think I'd risk and deserve disbarment even to oblige a friend?”

“You mean you won't help me, then?” Charity sighed, rising with a forlorn sense of friendlessness.

McNiven growled: “Sit down! Of course I'll help you, but I don't intend to let you drag me into ruin, and I won't help you get a divorce that would be disallowed at the first peep of light.”

“What can I do then? Peter said it could be managed quickly and quietly.”

“There are ways and ways, Charity Coe. The great curse of divorce is the awful word 'collusion.' It can be avoided as other curses can with a little attention to the language. Remember the old song, 'It's not so much the thing you say, as the nasty way you say it.' That hound of a husband of yours wants to protect that creature he has been flaunting before the world. So he offers to arrange to be caught in a trap with another woman, and make you a present of the evidence. Isn't that so?”

“I believe it is.”

“Now the law says that 'any understanding preceding the act of adultery' is collusion; it involves the committing of a crime. It would be appalling for a nice little body like you to connive at such a thing, wouldn't it?”

Charity turned pale. “I hadn't realized just what it meant.”

“I thought not,” said McNiven.

“He'll have to give me evidence of—of something that has already happened, then, won't he?”

“The law calls that collusion also.”

“Then what am I to do?”

“Couldn't you get evidence somehow without taking it from him?”

Charity was about to shake her head, but she nodded it violently. She remembered the detectives she had engaged and the superabundant evidence they had furnished her. She told McNiven about it and he was delighted till she reminded him that she had promised not to make use of Zada's name.

McNiven told her that she had no other recourse, and advised her to see her husband. She said that it was hopeless and she expressed a bitter opinion of the law. It seemed harsher than the Church, especially harsh to those who did not flout its authority.

While Charity talked McNiven let his pipe-smoke trail out of the window into the infinite where dreams fade from reality and often from memory, and he thought, “If I can help Jim and Charity to get together after all this blundering it will be a good job.”

He was tempted to tell her that Jim was coming to see him, too, but he was afraid that she knew it. If he had told her—but there goes that eternal “if” again!