During the days in which Lindaberry lay weak and shattered, slowly struggling back to strength and a new grip on things, some perverse spirit seemed to actuate Dodo in her attitude toward Massingale. She had remained without seeing him for forty-eight hours after Christmas, refusing to make the advance when he had stayed away. Feeling a need of retaliation, she went to luncheon twice with Harrigan Blood in the short hours in which she absented herself from the sick-room. When finally, the third day, Massingale capitulated and came to see her, she treated him with the greatest indifference, inventing new stories, incredible, but galling to his pride.

"Why didn't you come?" he said, without preliminaries.

"I have other friends and other engagements!" she said, shrugging her shoulders. "Besides, I have resolved to make it easier for you."

"For me?"

"To be just a father confessor!" she said maliciously.

He had no answer that he could phrase, so he waited, staring at his boot in perplexity, aware of the lights that were dancing in her roguish eyes.

"And dinner—Christmas dinner?"

"Engaged, too; my other friends don't leave things to chance!"

"Why do you treat me this way?" he asked, frowning.

"What way? I'm sure I'm very nice to you! I'm not even angry because you've been sulking all this time!"

She stood before him, laughing, her head on one side, her hands on her hips. He made a movement as if to seize her, and she sprang away.

"Don't let's quarrel; I've been quite miserable!"

"Serves you right!" she said, unrelenting, determined to teach him by a bitter lesson what punishment she reserved for rebels.

At this moment his eye perceived the ring that Lindaberry had placed on her finger. At the same instant she caught his glance, and flourished her hand tantalizingly before his eyes.

"Isn't it beautiful?"

"What's that mean?"

"It means I'm engaged!" she said demurely.

"Who lent you that thing?"

"I'm a very mysterious person," she said gravely. "Look out! Some day you'll find me married before you know it!"

He looked at her with his intimidating, magisterial stare.

"Oh, you don't frighten me at all, Your Honor!" she said, making a face.

"I don't believe a word you say! You've borrowed the ring, and you've made ready a fine story; but I'm not going to give you the pleasure. Will you dine with me?"

"Previous engagement!"

"With your fiancÉ, of course?"

"Quite right!"

"That's serious?" he said, rising, and containing his wrath with difficulty.

"Very serious!"

"Good-by, then!"

"Au revoir or good-by?"

"Good-by!" he said dryly and with emphasis.

She accompanied him to the door with a well simulated mask of tragedy, shook hands gravely, and suddenly, with a burst of laughter, called after him:

"To-morrow—here—same hour! If you're not on time you won't find me!"

The next day she told him, very seriously, the story of the ring, and with the true spirit of fiction, assimilating all that came to her ear and turning it into personal experience, she profited by what Winona had told her.

"You are sure you want to know?" she began, with a little alarmed air.

He nodded with a jerky, irritated motion.

"You will be annoyed," she said, hesitating; "you won't like it!"

"Begin!"

"Very well! I've told you often my time is not my own. The truth is that at any moment I may have to go when I am called," she began. Her starts were always rather jerky until the mood had enveloped her. Suddenly she remembered Winona and dashed ahead. "The person who gave me this ring is an old man, sixty-five years of age—very rich. You have often wanted to know how I manage to live. He gives me the money. I have signed a contract to marry him when three years are up. There! Now you know all! That is my fate—if he lives! To-day he is desperately ill."

She went to the window, draping herself in the proper tragic pose, gazing out into the clear frozen twilight, drawing a deep sigh.

"It was all before I knew you—when I first came, when I was desperate, without a friend, without a cent! It was either that or—" She left the window abruptly, overcome by the mood, and returning, sat down, her elbows on her knees, her head in her hands. "He is a gambler, a partner of my father's. He fell in love with me there at Gold Fields—you remember? When my father was killed, he sent me to school; he has always been kind, very kind. Wanted to marry me afterward, but I wouldn't hear of it. I ran away. I wanted to be young, to enjoy life, to live! He is very ugly, very old; his skin is all spotted and loose, and his eyes are watery and faded, and when he touches me I shiver."

She raised her head, staring before her, drawing down the corners of her mouth.

"I didn't see him again until—until I came here, and that was by accident. Everything had gone wrong! The company I had come with had failed; I could get nothing to do! It was very black. There were men, horrible men, offering me—you understand! I sold newspapers, in all kinds of weather, until ten or eleven at night sometimes, to get enough to eat! That's where he found me, under an umbrella on a street corner, in a pouring rain, a bundle of newspapers soaking under my arm. I was crying; I couldn't struggle any more! He took me to his home, a beautiful place just off Washington Square. He wanted me to marry him then. I can remember every word he said:

"'I'm over sixty. I've lived hard. Two strokes—and the next will box me up. At the worst, girl, it'll only be four or five years and then seven hundred thousand coming to you!'

"I don't know what I might have answered, but he put out his hand—wrinkled chalky hand! I can see it now—and touched mine. Ugh! But I made the bargain then and there, signed it in black and white. Three years to do as I please, and then—"

"And the time is up precisely on the tenth of March?" he said, with a grim smile.

"No! I have eight months more," she said, furious that he should not have been convinced by a story which had moved even her. "Who knows? He is very, very ill; it may all be over in a week!"

All at once the true effect flashed into her imagination, she turned, seizing him by the coat violently, clinging to him, crying:

"Oh, Your Honor, forgive me whatever I do these days! I haven't told you the truth. I'm not engaged—I'm married to him! And it's horrible—it is killing me! I don't know what I shall do. I think such wicked thoughts. I hope he'll never recover! Can you ever love me now?"

His answer was effective. He swore a splendid, soul-easing oath, adding:

"Dodo, if ever I'm fool enough to believe you, I deserve all I get!"

She laughed through the tears which had come naturally.

"So that's all you'll tell me!" he said roughly.

"Oh, there's always some truth in what I tell you!" she answered; and she had so entered into the part, so completely dramatized herself, that all that day he could not succeed in drawing her back to plain matter-of-fact.

But, despite all the good humor he put to her caprices, the determination to plague him always returned to her in some animal revulsion on leaving Lindaberry. No sooner had she left this quieter self that she found herself seized by the need of violent reaction, to which Massingale did not always suffice. Consequently she gave more time and more opportunity to Sassoon than she ordinarily would have done in prudence. But Sassoon, as though the lion had clipped his claws, never made the slightest attempt to presume, acting mildness and docility. She even began to consider him as rather a safe person, who could always, in the last test, be found manageable—which was exactly what Albert Edward Sassoon had planned. Next mutually to provoke Judge Massingale and Harrigan Blood, she persuaded them to lunch en trois. The alacrity with which Massingale (who, since the unexplained ring, was suspicious of Blood) agreed where she expected resistance, drove her to too overt a display of interest before Harrigan Blood, with his keen vindictive eyes.

This luncheon, the result of one of those unreflecting impulses which seem so casual at the time, was destined to have the gravest consequences. Harrigan Blood, suddenly enlightened as to the true state of Dodo's interests, perceived that the ruinous quarrel with Sassoon had been to no end, and disillusioned and duped, became a bitter enemy of Massingale's: for Blood, with all his idealism in the domain of ideas, was capable of petty and terrible vindictiveness when his desires were once aroused. This luncheon, in fact, cost Massingale a career.

But Dodo, having thus roused Harrigan Blood to an extent to which she little guessed, turned the tables on Massingale, who, claimed by the afternoon session, was forced to hand her over to the escort of Harrigan Blood and see them depart in the intimacy of a closed automobile.

"Thanks! now I know who is my rival!" said Harrigan Blood immediately.

"You think so?"

"I know!" he said pointblank. Then, with a sudden rage, he turned on her. "Do you know what you have cost me by making one mistake?"

"Yes," she said softly; "Mr. Sassoon told me!"

He swore at this, and went on:

"Look here! I want to understand things; I want the truth! I want some straight answers!"

He was one of those men of force who believe that they can resolve all feminine intrigues by bruskly bringing things to a point. She smiled to herself at this bull rushing toward a fancied light.

"Are you in love with Massingale? If so, I want to know!"

"I haven't made up my mind," she said, looking at him out of the corner of her eye.

"Are you playing a game with me or not?"

"That would be rather natural, wouldn't it?"

"What's that?" he said, amazed.

"We are rather different, aren't we?" she said quietly. "It's very easy for you to make up your mind to put out your hand and take me, as you once expressed it; that's not a very great decision for you. But it's a little different, you see—it takes a little longer—to persuade me that I want to be taken. You are a very poor hand at courting, Mr. Harrigan Blood; you go out to win a woman as you would bowl down a lot of ten-pins. Don't you see?"

"Lord!" he cried, angry at the fretting and time-wasting she had made him endure and would further inflict on him. "Will there ever be a woman who'll have the courage to say, 'I love you as you love me, and let's dispense with all this backing and filling, this fencing, this coquetting and vexing of the spirit!' And why? Afraid that if you give naturally you won't be prized. That's the littleness about you women; you can't conceive anything on a big scale!"

"But I don't know at all that I love you!" she said quietly. His last words had brought to her mind an idea of Estelle Monk's, which she adopted instantly, as she had adopted Winona's story. Even as she began she was laughing inwardly at the effect she knew it would bring. "Win me—make me love you! You have big ideas; so have I!"

He came closer, putting his arm back of her shoulder, taking her hand with impulsive suddenness, excited by this first opportunity she had permitted him.

"Give me a chance, Dodo! Let me see you, like this, but be honest with me!"

"I'll be perfectly honest, Harrigan," she said demurely, smiling to herself at the thrill that went through him at this first use of his name. "You are very much mistaken if you think I am like other girls. I want to be honest, and I am not afraid. We have the same ideas about marriage. I want to be a pioneer, to have the courage to lead the way! I'm not an adventuress. I shall never be ashamed of what I do! I shall never marry, but when I know that I love, I shall go to the man of my choice—openly!"

He placed her hand to his lips enthusiastically.

"And I shall let the world know it!"

"What?"

"And I shall announce it to every one!"

A sudden chill came over his ardor; the hand that had gripped hers so passionately felt all at once limp and discouraged.

"Are you serious?"

"Absolutely! I have made up my mind to this for a long time!"

"It isn't so easy," he said slowly.

"All the better!" she replied enthusiastically. "It'll show we have the courage of our convictions! That's what you believe in, too, isn't it?"

"H'm—yes."

The conversation suddenly dropped. He began to stare out of the window, pulling at his short mustache, while Dodo, shrunk in the corner, was choking with laughter. When they arrived at Miss Pim's, she could no longer contain herself. He looked up suddenly, detecting her laughter, furious.

"What!"

"Oh, Harrigan Blood!" she cried, between spells of laughter. "What a chance you have missed—and you such a clever man!"

"You were making fun of me; you didn't mean it!" he cried angrily.

But Dodo, waving a feeble handkerchief, ran hilariously up the stoop.

She returned from these excursions into her dramatic self to her nest, so to speak, languid and eager for calm. How did it happen that she did not attempt to dramatize herself with Lindaberry? Perhaps she did; but, if so, it was always as something bodiless and mystic, a sort of dipping into a religious exaltation, conceiving of herself as a ministering sister of the poor, sexless and utterly unselfish. But she never, in the long hours when she sat by his bedside, prattling gaily or reading him to sleep, set sail on the gentler seas of romance and passion. For him she had great depth of tenderness and affection, being often deliciously moved, as she was when Betty's childish body lay locked upon her heart.

When he welcomed her coming with a quick hailing motion of his hand, his face radiant with smiles, or when he listened, nodding or grave, fastening his profound eyes on her as if afraid the slightest turn of her head would escape him, he gave her a feeling of long intimacy; yet, when she spoke to him, even when she drew closest, it was always without the feeling of passion, of the realization of contact, which she always felt with Massingale.

Her idea of love was more and more something unreasoning, violent and stirring, something that upset all that had been planned, a flame that consumed the will—something that was perhaps greatest when it hung on the threshold of tragedy, madness in some form or other, sweet and bitter—bitter, in the end, as Tristan and Isolde. At this moment she could not conceive of this serenity that lay between her and Lindaberry as love; and, besides, it made her feel older, as if she were being hurried, as if something fragile and elusive were being stolen from her.

A curious thing—she sometimes had the feeling that she was married to him, that she was a wife, watching and devoted. It rather interested her to project herself thus. The feeling came to her at times strongly, when she rose to shift the pillows under his head, as Clarice had taught her, or, watching his averted eyes, hurried to moderate the glare that smote them from the windows.

Sometimes she thought of it with a sort of regret, wishing that she were not constituted as she was, that marriage were a possibility, that another had not seized on her imagination and awakened in her such fever. Here, alas! everything was too permissible; it lacked the element of danger, of the forbidden which alone could make the perfect Eden. But she felt with him a vast security, and a curious oneness of sympathies. If she were only ten years older—if she were not Dodo—

But one day an interruption from the outer world arrived to cast a stain of the matter-of-fact across the fragile fabric of this dream life. It was the first day that he had received permission to sit up in a chair, and the event had been duly celebrated with much gaiety. Lindaberry, in manly vanity, had insisted on taking ten steps alone without the humiliation of feminine support, but on the return trip had been forced to capitulate weakly. Having installed him again in bed, while Clarice had hurried off for luncheon, Dodo was bending over him, supporting his back with one arm, piling up the pillows, when the door opened and Lindaberry's brother entered, followed by Doctor Lampson.

"Hello, there, old bruiser!" he began, in a rough welcome in which a note of anxiety was trembling. "You're a nice, brotherly person! Why didn't you send me a telegram?"

All at once he stopped, perceiving that Dodo was not in nurse's dress. At the same moment she was seized with a sudden embarrassment. Doctor Lampson, in the background, equally at a loss, waited, rubbing his chin with quick nervous movements. Garry, engrossed in the joy of seeing his brother, did not at once perceive the situation.

"By the Lord Harry, Jock, glad to see you! I'm not all in yet, am I? Sat up—walked—" A little movement of Dodo's, stiffening and withdrawing, caught his eye, and recalled him to the necessity of an explanation. He hesitated only a moment, a little unprepared, but that momentary delay hurt her with a sudden swift pain.

"Jock, I want you to meet a good angel," he said quickly. He stretched out his hand, taking hers, and turned proudly: "This is Miss Baxter—Dodo. We are engaged to be married."

Jock Lindaberry's face at once lost the peculiar undecided stare it had borne. He stepped forward, bending over her hand with a trace of the old-fashioned courtesy that sat so naturally on Garry.

But the slight trace of awkwardness which had attended the explanation, a fugitive sensitive thought that Garry had said what he had to save the situation,—out of noblesse oblige,—had shocked DorÉ in her independent soul. She felt a sudden anger at the invalid, at the doctor who was a spectator, and at the brother who had made such an excuse a social necessity.

"Mr. Lindaberry is quite wrong!" she said hotly. "And his explanation is totally uncalled for, whatever his motives! We are not engaged. I have never promised to marry him, and I do not need any such excuse to account for my being here. Mr. Lindaberry and Doctor Lampson both know what my motives are, and I consider them quite honorable enough to need no apology. Good day!"

Before she could be prevented, deaf to the entreaties of Lindaberry or the expostulations of his brother, she walked out, in a fine temper.

Lindaberry did not understand in the least the motive of her revolt. He rather ascribed it to a refusal on her part to commit herself. The next day, when she came, he stammered out:

"Dodo, look here. You don't understand! I'm not taking things for granted—I meant what I said. You're bound to nothing. What I—"

But she laid her hand across his lips, frowning.

"We won't discuss it!"

The evening came when Garry, still with a touch of weakness in voice and in complexion, was ready to go off for a month in the open with Doctor Lampson—a hunting trip in the clarifying wilds of snow-ridden Canada on the track of moose: a month in which to fight the first battles against old habits, with the strength of a devoted friend at his side, far from old associations, nightmares of interminable electric lights and the battering, nerve-tiring hammer of New York. He had come doggedly out of the shadow, fortified by the inspiration a great love had raised in him. Not that the fight was easy: on the contrary, alone he never would have conquered. He loved, and he felt resurrected. He had no fear of the test. The old manhood, sharp and decisive, returned. Sometimes, when, on a sleepless night, he had gone trudging, in greatcoat and boots, for miles across frozen sleeping blocks, he would return to her home, gazing up at her window with the adoration of the Magi. For him she was the purest spirit that could exist, without evil—without even the power to perceive ugliness.

He had never again referred to their relations since the unfortunate introduction to his brother. He saw her every day, at every hour, but he guarded strictly the retinue of friendship, putting into this self-discipline a fierce pride. The result was that she little divined, under the soldier, how deep a love had been kindled. She believed in his gratitude only; but this, to her independent romantic spirit, raised an impossible barrier.

She went to the station with him, alone in the automobile, her hand in his all the way. He did not say a word. She spoke rapidly, and then by fits and starts, wondering at his silence. The truth was, he dared not permit himself a word, for fear of the torrent which lay pent up in his soul. Perhaps had the outburst come in one wild moment, it would have frightened her, given her a new insight, satisfied her and awakened in her other sides that craved for expression—the sides below the serenity and the tenderness that were so ready.

Doctor Lampson met them at the station, shooting a queer little glance at their quiet faces. The train was ready, the great iron cavern filled with the monster cries of steam animals, bells ringing, crowds frantic, bundles, trunks, children, babies, rushing by in pandemonium. There was nothing else to do but to say good-by.

"Better be getting on—better be moving!" remarked Doctor Lampson, in his nervous rough way. "Good-by, Miss Baxter. You're a trump—the finest of the fine! I'll take care of Garry. He'll come back like a drum-major! Good-by, good-by—God bless you! Come on now, Garry; come on."

"Good-by, Miss Baxter. You're a trump."