Speaking of cards, Jim was like a gambler with a new pack of them and nobody to play with.

He darted hither and yon in his racer, childishly happy in its paces, childishly lonely for somebody to show off before. As he ran along the almost deserted sea road he passed the Noxon home.

He knew that Charity was visiting there. He wondered which of the lighted windows was hers. After much backing and filling he turned in and ran up to the steps. He got out and was about to ring the bell when he heard a piano. He went along the piazza to a window, and, peering in, saw Charity playing. She was alone in the music-room and very sadly beautiful.

He tapped on the window. She was startled, rose to leave the room. He tapped again, remembering an old signal they had had as boy and girl lovers. She paused. He could see her smile tenderly. She came forward to the window and stared out. He stared in. Only a pane of glass parted the tips of their flattened noses. It was a sort of sterilized Eskimo kiss.

The window was a door. Charity opened it and invited Jim in, wondering but strangely comforted. He invited her out. He explained about his gorgeous new car and his loneliness and begged her to take the air.

She put back her hands to indicate her inappropriate costume, a flimsy evening gown of brilliant color.

“Mrs. Noxon has gone out to dinner. I was to go with her, but I begged off. I'm going to New York to-morrow, and I was blue and—”

“And so am I. I've got an extra coat in my car, and the night is mild.”

“No, I'd better not.”

“Aw, come along!”

“No-o—”

“Yes!”

“All right. I'll get a veil for my hair.”

She closed the French window and hurried away. She reappeared at the front door and shut it stealthily after her.

“Nobody saw me go. You must get me back before Mrs. Noxon comes home, or there'll be a scandal.”

“Depend on me!” said Jim.

Muffling their laughter like two runaways, they stole down the steps. Her high-heeled slippers slipped and she toppled against him. She caught him off his balance, and his arms went about her to save her and himself. If he had been Irish, he would have said that he destroyed himself, for she was so unexpectedly warm and silken and lithe that she became instantly something other than the Charity he had adored as a sad, sweet deity.

He realized that she was terribly a woman.

They were no longer boy and girl out on a gay little lark. They were a man unhappily married and a woman unhappily unmarried, setting forth on a wild steed for a wild ride through the reluctant autumn air. The neighboring sea gave out the stored-up warmth of summer, and the moon with the tilted face of a haloed nun yearned over them.

When Jim helped Charity into the car her arm seemed to burn in his palm. He hesitated a moment, and a thought fluttered through his mind that he ought not to hazard the adventure. But another thought chased it away, a thought of the idiocy of being afraid, and another thought of how impossible it was to ask her to get out and go back.

He found the coat, a heavy, short coat, and held it for her, saw her ensconced comfortably, stepped in and closed the door softly. The car went forward as smoothly as a skiff on a swift, smooth water.

Charity was not so solemn as Jim. She was excited and flattered by such an unforeseen diversion breaking in on her doleful solitude.

“It's been so long since a man asked me to go buggy-riding,” she said, “that I've forgotten how to behave. I'm getting to be a regular old maid, Jim.”

“Huh!” was all that Jim could think of.

It was capable of many interpretations—reproof, anger at fate, polite disbelief, deprecation.

Jim tried to run away from his peculiar and most annoying emotions. But Charity went with him. She looked back and said:

“Funny how the moon rides after us in her white limousine.”

“Huh!” said Jim.

“Is that Mexican you're speaking?” she chided.

“I was just thinking,” Jim growled.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing much—except what a ghastly shame it is that so—so—well, I don't know what to call you—but well, a woman like you—that you should be living alone with nothing better to do than run the gantlet of those God-awful submarines and probably get blown up and drowned, or, worse yet, spend your days breaking your heart nursing a lot of poor mangled, groaning Frenchmen that get shot to pieces or poisoned with gas or—Oh, it's rotten! That's all it is: it's rotten!”

“Somebody has to take care of them.”

“Oh, I know; but it oughtn't to be you. If there was any manhood in this country, you'd have Americans to nurse.”

“There are Americans over there, droves of them.”

“Yes, but they're not wearing our uniform. We ought to be over there under our own flag. I ought to be over there.”

“Maybe you will be. I'll go on ahead and be waiting for you.”

There is nothing more pitiful than sorrow that tries to smile, and Jim groaned:

“Oh, Charity Coe! Charity Coe!”

He gripped the wheel to keep from putting his hand out to hers. And they went in silence, thinking in the epic elegy of their time.

Jim drove his car up to the end of Rhode Island and across to Tiverton; then he left the highway for the lonelier roads. The car charged the dark hills and galloped the levels, a black stallion with silent hoofs and dreadful haste. There was so much death, so much death in the world! The youth and strength and genius of all Europe were going over the brink eternally in a Niagara of blood.

And the sea that Charity was about to venture on, the sea whose estuaries lapped this sidelong shore so innocently with such tender luster under the gentle moon, was drawing down every day and every night ships and ships and ships with their treasures of labor and their brave crews till it seemed that the floor of the ocean must be populous with the dead.

Charity felt quite close to death. A very solemn tenderness of farewell endeared the beautiful world and all its doomed creatures. But most dear of all was this big, simple man at her side, the man she ought to have married. It was all her fault that she had not. She owed him a profound eternal apology, and she had not the right to pay the debt—that is, so long as she lived she had not the right. But if they were never to meet again—then she was already dying to him.

It was important that she should not depart this life without making restitution of what she owed. She had owed Jim Dyckman the love he had pleaded for from her and would not get from anyone else.

He had a right to love, and it was to be eternally denied to him. He would go on bitterly grieved and shamed to think that nobody could love him, for Charity had repulsed him, and some day he would learn that Kedzie had deceived him.

Lacking the courage to warn him against his wife, Charity felt that she must have at least the courage to say;

“Good-by, Jim. I have been loving you of late with a great love.”

There would be no injury done to Kedzie thus, for Charity would speak as a ghost, an impalpable departed one. There would be no sin—only a beautiful expiation by confession. She was enfranchised of earthly restraints, enfranchised as the dead are from mortal obligations.

But the moods that are so holy, so pure, and so vast while they are moods resent words. Words are like tin cups to carry the ocean in. It is no longer an ocean when a bit of it is scooped up. It is only a little brackish water, odious to drink and quenching no thirst.

Charity could not devise the first phrase of her huge and oceanic emotion. It would have been only a proffer of brine that Jim could not have relished from her. He understood better her silence. They went blindly on and on, letting the road lead them and the first whim decide which turn to take and which to pass.

And so they were eventually lost in the land as they were lost in their mood.

And after a time of wonderful enthusiasms in their common grief the realities began to claim them back. A loud report like a pistol-shot announced that the poetry of motion had become prose.

Jim stopped the car and became a blacksmith while he went through the tool-box, found a jack for the wheel, laboriously unshipped the demountable rim, replaced it with the extra wheel, and set forth again.

The job had not improved the cleanliness of his hands nor spared the chastity of his shirt-bosom. But the car had four wheels to go on, and they regained a main road at last and found a signboard announcing, “Tiverton, 18 miles.” That meant thirty miles to Newport.

Charity looked at her watch. It brought her back from the timelessness of her meditation to the world where the dock had a great deal to say about what was respectable and what not.

“Good Lord!” she groaned. “Mrs. Noxon is home long ago and scared or shocked to death. We must fly!”

They flew, angry, both of them, at having to hurry back to school and a withering reprimand, as if they were still mere brats. Gradually the car began to refuse the call for haste. Its speed sickened, gasped, died.

Jim swore quite informally, and raged: “I told that infernal hound to fill the tank. He forgot! The gas is gone.”

Charity shrugged her shoulders. “I deserved it,” she said. “I only hope I don't get you into trouble. What will your wife say?”

“What won't she say? But I'm thinking about you.”

“It doesn't matter about me. I've got nobody who cares enough to scold me.”

They were suddenly illumined by the headlights of an approaching car. They shielded their faces from the glare instinctively. They felt honest, but they did not look honest out here together.

The car was checked and a voice called from the blur, “Want any help?”

“No, thanks,” Jim answered from his shadow.

The car rolled on. While Jim made a vain post-mortem examination of the car's machinery Charity looked about for a guide-post. She found a large signboard proclaiming “Viewcrest Inn, 1 mile.” She told Jim.

He said: “I know of it. It has a bad name, but so long as the gasolene is good—I'll go get some. Make yourself at home.” He paused. “I can't leave you alone here in the wilderness at midnight.”

“I'll go along.”

“In those high-heeled shoes?”

“And these low-necked gown,” sighed Charity. “Oh, what a fool, what a stupid fool I've been!”

But she set forth. Jim offered his arm. She declined it at first, but she was glad enough of it later. They made an odd-looking couple, both in evening dress, promenading a country road. All the wealth of both of them was insufficient to purchase them so much as a street-car ride. They were paupers—the slaves, not the captains, of their fate. Charity stumbled and tottered, her ankles wrenched by the ruts, her stilted slippers going to ruin. Jim offered to carry her. She refused indignantly. She would have accepted a lift from any other vehicle now, but none appeared. The only lights were in the sky, where a storm was practising with fireworks.

“Just our luck to get drenched,” said Jim.

It was about the only bad luck they escaped, but the threat of it lent Charity speed. They passed one farm, whose dogs rushed out and bayed at them carnivorously.

“That's the way people will bark when they find out about our innocent little picnic,” said Charity.

“They're not going to find out,” said Jim.

“Trying to keep it secret gives it a guilty look,” said Charity.

“What people don't know won't hurt 'em,” said Jim.

“What they do imagine will hurt us,” said Charity.

At the top of a knoll in a clandestine group of trees they found “Viewcrest Inn.” It was dark but for a dim light in the office. The door of that was locked.

Trade was dull, now that the Newport season was over, and only an occasional couple from Fall River, Providence, or New Bedford tested the diminished hospitality. But to-night there had been a concurrence of visitors. Jim rattled at the door. A waiter appeared, yawning candidly. He limped to the door with a gait that Kedzie would have recognized.

He peered out and shook his head, waving the intruders away. Jim shook the knob and glowered back.

The waiter, who, in the classic phrase, was “none other than” Skip Magruder, unlocked the door.

“Nothin' doin', folks,” said Skip. “Standin' room only. Not a room left.”

“I don't want any of your dirty rooms,” said Jim. “I want some gasolene.”

“Bar's closed,” said Skip, who had a nimble wit.

“I said gasolene!” said Jim, menacingly.

“Sorry, boss, but the last car out took the last drop we had in the pump. We'll have some more to-morrow mornin'.”

“My God!” Jim whispered.

Then the storm broke. A thunder smash like the bolt of an indignant Heaven. It turned on all the faucets above.

“Where's the telephone?” Jim demanded.

“T.D.,” said Skip.

“What's that?”

“Temporary discontinued.” Skip grew confidential. “The boss was a little slow on the pay and they shut him off. We're takin' in a lot of dough to-night, though, and he'll prob'ly get it goin' to-morrow all right.”

To-morrow again! Jim snarled back at the pack of wolfish circumstances closing in on him. He turned to Charity.

“We've got to stay here.”

Charity “went white,” as the saying is. The rain streamed down.

“We 'ain't a room left,” said Skip.

“You've got to have,” said Jim.

“Have to speak to the artshiteck,” said Skip. Then he rubbed his head, trying to get out an idea by massage. “There's the poller. Big lounge there, but not made up. Would you and your wife wish the poller?”

He dragged the “wife” with a tone that nearly got him throttled. But Jim paused. A complicated thought held him. To protest that Charity was not his wife seemed hardly the most reassuring thing to do. He let the word go and ignored Skip's cynical intonation. Jim's knuckles ached to rebuke him, but he had not fought a waiter since his wild young days. And Skip was protected by his infirmity.

Charity was frightened and revolted, abject with remorse for such a disgusting consequence of such a sweet, harmless impulse. She was afraid of Jim's temper. She said:

“Take the parlor by all means.”

“All right,” said Jim.

Skip fumbled about the desk for a big book, and, finding it, opened it and handed Jim a pen.

“Register, please,” said Skip.

“I will not.”

“Rules of the house.”

“What do I care about your rules!”

“Have to wake the boss, then.”

“Give me the pen.”

He started to write his own name; that left Charity's designation in doubt. He glanced at the other names. “Mr. and Mrs. George Washington” were there, “Mr. and Mrs. John Smith” twice, as well as “William Jones and wife.”

Jim wondered if the waiter knew him. So many waiters did. At length, with a flash of angry impulse, he wrote: “James D—,” paused, finished “Dysart,” hesitated again, then put “Mr. and Mrs.” before it. Skip read, and grinned. He did not know who Jim was, but he knew he was no Dysart.

Skip led the way to the parlor up-stairs, lighted the lights, and hastily disappeared, fearing that he might be asked to fetch something to eat or drink. He was so tired and sleepy that even the prospect of a tip did not interest him so much as the prospect of his cot in the attic, where he could dream that he was in New York again.

Jim and Charity looked at each other. Jim munched his own curses, and Charity laughed and cried together. Jim's arms had an instinct for taking her to his heart, but he felt that he must be more respectful than ever since they were in so respectless a plight. She never seemed purer and sadder to him than then.

She noted how haggard and dismal he looked, and said, “Aren't you going to sit down?”

“No—not here,” he said. “You curl up on that plush horror and get some rest.”

“I will not!” said Charity.

“You will, too,” said Jim. “You're a wreck, and I ought to be shot. Get some sleep, for God's sake!”

“What becomes of you?”

“I'll scout round and find a place in the office. I think there is a billiard-room. If worst comes to worst, I'll do what Mrs. Leslie Carter did in a play I saw—sleep on the dining-room table.”

“Not less than a table d'hote will hold you,” Charity smiled, wanly.

“Don't worry about me. You go by-by and pray the Lord to forgive me and help us both.”

He waved his hand to her in a heartbreak of bemocked and benighted tenderness and closed the door. He prowled softly about the office and the adjacent rooms, but found no place to sleep. He was in such a fever of wrath at himself that he walked out in the rain to cool his head. Then he sank into a chair, read an old Boston paper twice, and fell asleep among the advertisements.

He woke at daybreak. The rain had ended and he wandered out in the chill, wet grounds of the shabby inn. The morning light was merciless on the buildings, the leafless trees, and on his own costume. The promised view from the crest was swathed in haze—so was his outlook on the future.

His fury at the situation grew as he pondered it. He was like a tiger in a pit. He raged as much at himself as at the people who would take advantage of him. The ludicrousness of the situation added the ultimate torment. He could not save Charity except by ingenious deceptions which would be a proof of guilt if they did not succeed miraculously.

The dress he was in and the dress she was in were the very habiliments of guilt. Getting back to Newport in evening clothes would be the advertisement of their escapade. His expansive shirt-bosom might as well have been a sandwich-board. His broadcloth trousers and his patent-leather pumps would be worse than rags.

And Charity had no hat. There was an unmistakable dressed-up eveningness about them both.

This struck him as the first evil to remedy. As with an escaped convict, his prime necessity was a change of clothes. There was only one way to manage that. He went back to the hotel and found a startled early-morning waiter sweeping out the office. Jim asked where the nearest telephone was, and learned that it was half a mile away at a farm-house.

Jim turned up his collar, pulled down his motor-cap, and struck out along the muddy road. He startled the farmer's family and their large hands were not wide enough to hide their wider smiles.

On the long hike thither Jim had worked out his stratagem. He called up his house, or, rather, Kedzie's house, in Newport, and after much delay got his yawning valet to the telephone. He never had liked that valet less than now.

“That you, Dallam? My car broke down out in the country,” he explained, every syllable a sugarless quinine pill in his throat. “That is to say, the gasolene gave out. I am in my evening clothes, so is—er—Mrs.—er—the lady I was with. I want you to bring me at once an outfit of day clothes, and a—one of my wife's long motor-coats—a very long one—and one of her small hats. Then get out my wife's limousine and send the suit-case and the coat and hat to me here at the Viewcrest Inn, and tell the chauffeur to bring an extra can of gasolene.”

A voice with an intolerable smile in it came back: “Very good, sir. I presume I'd better not waken Mrs. Dyckman?”

“Naturally not. I don't want to—er—alarm her.”

“She was quite alarmed when you didn't come home, sir, last night.”

“Well, I'll explain when I see her. Do you understand the situation?”

“Perfectly, sir.”

Jim writhed at that. But he had done his best and he would take the worst.

The farmer gave him a ride to the hotel in his milk-wagon. When Jim rode up in a parody of state he saw Charity peeping from the parlor window. The morning light had made the situation plain to her. It did not improve on inspection. It took very little imagination to predict a disastrous event, though Jim explained the felicity of his scheme. He had planned to have Charity ride in in the limousine alone, while he took his own car back with the gasolene that was on the way.

The twain were compelled by their costume to stay in the parlor together. They were ferociously hungry and ordered breakfast at last. It took forever to get it, for guests of that hotel were not ordinarily early risers.

Skip Magruder, dragged from his slumbers to serve the meal, found Charity and Jim in the room where he had left them. He made such vigorous efforts to overlook their appearance in bedraggled dinner clothes at a country breakfast that Jim threatened to break his head. Skip grew surly and was ordered out.

After breakfast Jim and Charity waited and waited, keeping to the parlor lest the other guests see them.

At last the limousine arrived. As soon as he heard it coming Jim hurried to the window to make sure that it was his—or, rather, his wife's.

It was—so much his wife's that she stepped out of it. Also her mother. Also her father. They advanced on the hotel.

Jim and Charity were stupefied. There was a look on Kedzie's face that frightened him.

“She means business,” he groaned.

Charity sighed: “Divorce! And me to be named!”

“She won't do that. She owes you everything.”

“What an ideal chance to pay off the debt!”

“Don't you worry. I'll protect you,” Jim insisted.

“How?” said Charity.

“I'll fight the case to the limit.”

“Are you so eager to keep your wife?” said Charity.

“No. I never did love her. I'll never forgive her for this.”

But he had not the courage to go and meet Kedzie and her mother and her father. They were an unconscionable time coming.

He did not know that Kedzie and Skip Magruder were renewing old acquaintance.

While he waited the full horror of his dilemma came over him. Kedzie would undoubtedly sue him for divorce. If he lost, Charity would be publicly disgraced. If he won, he would be tied to Kedzie for life.