Peter had arranged to come for us with a motor-car and carry us all off to the Rose Tournament yesterday morning, “for I do want to be sitting right next to that little tike of yours,” he explained, meaning Dinkie, “when he bumps into his first brass band!”

But little Dinkie didn’t hear his brass band, and we didn’t go to the Rose Tournament, although it was almost at our doors and some eighty thousand crowded automobiles foregathered here from the rest of the state to get a glimpse of it. For Peter, who is staying at the Greene here instead of at the Alexandria over in Los Angeles, presented himself before I’d even sat down to breakfast and before lazy old Dinky-Dunk was even out of bed.

Peter, I noticed, had a somewhat hollow look about the eye, but I accepted it as nothing more than the after-effects of his long trip, and blithely commanded him to sit down and partake of my coffee.

Peter, however, wasn’t thinking about coffee.

“I’m afraid,” he began, “that I’m bringing you rather—rather bad news.”

We stood for a moment with our gazes locked. He seemed appraising me, speculating on just what effect this message of his might have on me.

“What is it?” I asked, with that forlorn tug at inner reserves which life teaches us to send over the wire as we grow older.

“I’ve come,” explained Peter, “simply because this thing would have reached you a little later in your morning paper—and I hated the thought of having it spring out at you that way. So you won’t mind, will you? You’ll understand the motive behind the message?”

“But what is it?” I repeated, a little astonished by this obliquity in a man customarily so direct.

“It’s about Lady Newland,” he finally said. And the solemnity of his face rather frightened me.

“She’s not dead?” I asked in a breath.

Peter shook his head from side to side.

“She’s been rather badly hurt,” he said, after several moments of silence. “Her plane was winged yesterday afternoon by a navy flier over San Diego Bay. She didn’t fall, but it was a forced landing and her machine had taken fire before they could get her out of her seat.”

“You mean she was burnt?” I cried, chilled by the horror of it.

And, inapposite as it seemed, my thoughts flashed back to that lithe and buoyant figure, and then to the picture of it charred and scorched and suffering.

“Only her face,” was Peter’s quiet and very deliberate reply.

“Only her face,” I repeated, not quite understanding him.

“The men from the North Bay field had her out a minute or two after she landed. But practically the whole plane was afire. Her heavy flying coat and gauntlets saved her body and hands. But her face was unprotected. She—”

“Do you mean she’ll be disfigured?” I asked, remembering the loveliness of that face with its red and wilful lips and its ever-changing tourmaline eyes.

“I’m afraid so,” was Peter’s answer. “But I’ve been wiring, and you’ll be quite safe in telling your husband that she’s in no actual danger. The Marine Hospital officials have acknowledged that no flame was inhaled, that it’s merely temporary shock, and, of course, the face-burn.”

“But what can they do?” I asked, in little more than a whisper.

“They’re trying the new ambersine treatment, and later on, I suppose, they can rely on skin-grafting and facial surgery,” Peter explained to me.

“Is it that bad?” I asked, sitting down in one of the empty chairs, for the mere effort to vision any such disfigurement had brought a Channel-crossing and Calais-packet feeling to me.

“It’s very sad,” said Peter, more ill-at-ease than I’d ever seen him before, “But there’s positively no danger, remember. It won’t be so bad as your morning paper will try to make it out. They’ve sensationalized it, of course. That’s why I wanted to be here first, and give you the facts. They are distressing enough, God knows, without those yellow reporters working them over for wire consumption.”

I was glad that Peter didn’t offer to stay, didn’t even seem to wish to stay. I wanted quietness and time to think the thing over. Dinky-Dunk, I realized, would have to be told, and told at once. It would, of course, be a shock to him. And it would be something more. It would be a sudden crowding to some final issue of all those possibilities which lay like spring-traps beneath the under-brush of our indifference. I had no way of knowing what it was that had attracted him to Lady Alicia. Beauty of face, of course, must have been a factor in it. And that beauty was now gone. But love, according to the Prophets and the Poets, overcometh all things. And in her very helplessness, it was only too plain to me, his Cousin Allie might appeal to him in a more personal and more perilous way. My Diddums himself, of late, had appealed more to me in his weakness and his unhappiness than in his earlier strength and triumph. There was a time, in fact, when I had almost grown to hate his successes. And yet he was my husband. He was mine. And it was a human enough instinct to fight for what was one’s own. But that wild-bird part of man known as his will could never be caged and chained. If somewhere far off it beheld beauty and nobility it must be free to wing its way where it wished. The only bond that held it was the bond of free-giving and goodness. And if it abjured such things as that, the sooner the flight took place and the colors were shown, the better. If on the home-bough beside him nested neither beauty nor nobility, it was only natural that he should wander a-field for what I had failed to give him. And now, in this final test, I must not altogether fail him. For once in my life, I concluded, I had to be generous.

So I waited until Dinky-Dunk emerged. I waited, deep in thought, while he splashed like a sea-lion in his bath, and called out to Struthers almost gaily for his glass of orange-juice, and shaved, and opened and closed drawers, and finished dressing and came out in his cool-looking suit of cricketer’s flannel, so immaculate and freshly-pressed that one would never dream it had been bought in England and packed in mothballs for four long years.

I heard him asking for the kiddies while I was still out in the patio putting the finishing touches to his breakfast-table, and his grunt that was half a sigh when he learned that they’d been sent off before he’d had a glimpse of them. And I could see him inhale a lungful of the balmy morning air as he stood in the open doorway and stared, not without approval, at me and the new-minted day.

“Why the clouded brow, Lady-Bird?” he demanded as he joined me at the little wicker table.

“I’ve had some rather disturbing news,” I told him, wondering just how to begin.

“The kiddies?” he asked, stopping short.

I stared at him closely as I shook my head in answer to that question. He looked leaner and frailer and less robustious than of old. But in my heart of hearts I liked him that way. It left him the helpless and unprotesting victim of that run-over maternal instinct of mine which took wayward joy in mothering what it couldn’t master. It had brought him a little closer to me. But that contact, I remembered, was perhaps to be only something of the moment.

“Dinky-Dunk,” I told him as quietly as I could, “I want you to go down to San Diego and see Lady Allie.”

It was a less surprised look than a barricaded one that came into his eyes.

“Why?” he asked as he slowly seated himself across the table from me.

“Because I think she needs you,” I found the courage to tell him.

“Why?” he asked still again.

“There has been an accident,” I told him.

“What sort of accident?” he quickly inquired, with one hand arrested as he went to shake out his table-napkin.

“It was an air-ship accident. And Lady Allie’s been hurt.”

“Badly?” he asked, as our glances met.

“Not badly, in one way,” I explained to him. “She’s not in any danger, I mean. But her plane caught fire, and she’s been burned about the face.”

His lips parted slightly, as he sat staring at me. And slowly up into his colorless face crept a blighted look, a look which brought a vague yet vast unhappiness to me as I sat contemplating it.

“Do you mean she’s disfigured,” he asked, “that it’s something she’ll always—”

“I’m afraid so,” I said, when he did not finish his sentence.

He sat looking down at his empty plate for a long time.

“And you want me to go?” he finally said.

“Yes,” I told him.

He was silent for still another ponderable space of time.

“But do you understand—” he began. And for the second time he didn’t finish his sentence.

“I understand,” I told him, doing my best to sit steady under his inquisitorial eye. Then he looked down at the empty plate again.

“All right,” he said at last. He spoke in a quite flat and colorless tone. But it masked a decision which we both must have recognized as being momentous. And I knew, without saying anything further, that he would go.