WHEN Katherine Corning married Dick Catherwood people predicted they would not live together five years, and they didn’t. The five years were up and so was the marriage.

Dick was the most charming fellow in the world, when you were not married to him. As a companion for life he was intolerable. He was far handsomer than a Greek god, but when you find your Greek god full of mundane ungodliness you cannot help regretting that so much charm should be wasted on merely outward appearance.

Yet, in spite of her thorough understanding of his character, Katherine could not help going back sentimentally to the time she first met and loved the man from whom she was now separated. He had attracted her with a magnetism no other man had ever inspired. She felt him looking at the back of her head before she had ever seen his face. It was at the opera, and later, when Mrs. Wesley introduced him, she knew instinctively she had met her fate.

His wooing was prompt and picturesque. But possession with him was ennui, and in the most childish fashion he ceased to prize the thing he obtained, and treated it with as much indifference as he had sought it with zeal.

Katherine, finding marriage an irremediable failure, had at length resorted to that haven for the incompatibles—the divorce court.

From a crude Western town, where they had cyclones for breakfast, she had only recently emerged, chastened in spirit and with a very formal red-sealed document in her keeping.

It was what she had waited so patiently for, yet now that it was in her possession she felt like going into mourning. It seemed indecent to act as though nothing had happened. She kept Dick’s old letters and cried over them, and wore a picture of him—taken during their happy engagement—in a heart-shaped locket inside her bodice.

Quite unusual with young and handsome divorcÉes, there was no other man in the case. She had not divorced Dick to marry some one else, but because of their incompatibility, which absolutely prevented their living together in harmony.

But no sooner was she settled in her old home than she began receiving proposals. Her old beaux came flocking around her, in more or less damaged condition, and there seemed a general belief that she had divorced Dick only to try it again with a new candidate for Dick’s shoes.

Her women friends were as bad. They would not permit her to pass into retirement, but insisted upon her accepting invitations. “Now you are free,” they told her, “you must make up for that miserable period of your married life by being as gay as possible.”

They turned a deaf ear to remonstrances.

Katherine could not deny that a wonderful peace was settling over her soul, freed from the wearing grind of Dick’s perpetual bickerings, and she tried to blot out the memory of his faults and to think of him kindly as one does of the dead. But she lived in the dread of meeting him, for she knew he still was in town, where he had remained throughout, gallantly permitting her to secure the decree without a contest. Poor Dick, how like him! For, whatever his faults, he was always a gentleman. She trembled at the thought of meeting him, for, unmarried to him, it was easier to think of his fascinations than of his shortcomings. It had never become possible for her to treat the matter as some of her similarly placed women friends and to joke flippantly about “my former.”

Among the beaux of the past who had promptly presented themselves, on her return from the West, was Willis Shaw. She had come nearer accepting him than any of the others in the old days; and had it not been for Dick and his compelling magnetism, Shaw would have won out. He had shown himself a man of worth, and had made a name for himself, remaining, as some of the others had not done in spite of protestations of hearts broken past mending, a bachelor. He was among the first to send up his card; and Katherine, in her black frock, went down with a sober face to receive him. She expected sympathy, and received—a proposal.

Shaw could not but see the shock in her face.

“Forgive me,” he begged, becoming at once as grave as she; “I have been too precipitate and have hurt you. I do not take back the words—I cannot do that; but keep them in your mind and think them over, and, when you feel ready, give me an answer. Although women parted from their husbands have come to be an everyday occurrence, I cannot help regarding them with pity. They seem so defenseless, so unprotected, and the world is so unsparing in its treatment of unprotected, defenseless things. It pains me to think of you who ought to be so tenderly cherished and shielded occupying in any way an equivocal position. But you must not think that pity is my reason for putting the question to you again. It is the same reason which prompted me five years ago, and which has never altered nor lessened in the years. I wish you could give me a different answer, for I feel that I could make you happy. You deserve happiness, and your failure to secure it makes me the more anxious to mete it out to you in fullest measure.”

He left her a shade graver than he found her, but she only came to appreciate his considerateness when other men pranced in, assumed easy positions, talked jauntily about their blighted state and made more or less rakish proposals. One had even genially suggested that if she were disappointed in him she could easily have recourse to the divorce court again. “It’s always a handy fire escape,” he added, pleasantly.

She took Dick’s picture into her confidence. Of course she had no love for Willis Shaw; she should never indulge in that confiding, girlish thing again; but she respected him, and felt that with him she would at least be safe. Her position certainly was equivocal. There were always people who had been abroad or something, and had not heard of her decree, and who were forever rushing up in public places and asking how her good husband was, and if he were as devoted as ever. It would be embarrassing, of course, to have to explain that another husband was now displaying that devotion, but not nearly so embarrassing as to confess to no husband at all—even in these days of rapid conjugal changes.

Katherine was going through the tortures of the sensitive divorced. One day, returning from her lonely drive, a note was handed her, and she recognized Mrs. “Billy” Wesley’s characteristic hand.

“Mrs. William Wesley requests the pleasure of your company at dinner on Monday, November 16th, at half after seven”; then down in the left-hand corner the words: “Vaccination at ten.”

It was sure to be something out of the ordinary—all of Mrs. Billy’s affairs were—and at first she had no idea of accepting. Then Mrs. Wesley called her up on the telephone and insisted upon her coming, drawing her attention to the fact that several cases of varioloid in the upper part of town had made her hit upon the idea of the vaccination, and that it would not only be a pleasure but a precaution to accept. She also impressed upon Katherine the necessity of a sleeveless bodice for the occasion.

It was not until she had finally yielded that it suddenly occurred to Katherine that Dick would certainly be at the dinner. Mrs. Wesley had retained her friendship for both, and it would be just like her erratic fancy to bring them together. In the women of Mrs. Billy Wesley’s set that sort of thing passed for chic. At first a hot wave of resentment rose in her breast, and she was on the point of calling Mrs. Billy up and, incidentally, of calling her down; then all at once a curious reaction came about. It was no less than a mad desire to see Dick again. The immodesty of the thing appalled her, but the desire remained.

Not even in the rosy days of her engagement had she longed with such eagerness to spend an evening in his society, and as the night drew near she found herself making the foolish preparations of a dÉbutante for her first ball.

She engaged a dressmaker, who turned her out a purely classic costume; and with a pedestal and the limelight upon her, she might have played Galatea with enthusiastic applause from the house. When fully arrayed on the evening of the dinner, she surveyed herself in the glass, and trembled.

Mrs. Billy greeted her effusively. She herself was prepared for the surgical part of the entertainment with an arrangement of pearl chains which attached her bodice to her person across the upper part of the arms.

“A dream, darling!” she cried, in the caressing, coddling tone she used to all. “I vow I could eat you!” and so saying, she dipped down, kissed Katherine with a light peck on each shoulder, then passed her on, to fall on the neck of the next.

Katherine glanced about the room with a beating heart. At first she saw no one whose presence caused her agitation, and her spirits sank. Then all at once a voice fell upon her ear which sent the blood mantling to her cheeks and brought a faintness to her breast. A man had just entered, and was paying his respects to Mrs. Wesley—a man like unto whom there was not another in the room. Such an air! Such grace! Bayard himself, who, historians agree, was an ideal knight in every particular, was possessed of no more graceful bearing, comeliness of person and affability of manner.

Katherine stood up and shivered. She might have been transformed to Galatea then and there, so statuesque her pose. She was totally unconscious that every eye in the room was wandering with prying curiosity from her to Dick.

Then he saw her.

For a moment he hesitated, but a moment only.

He sped to her with as much empressement as he had shown in the most zealous days of the courtship; his expressive eyes and face were aglow with eagerness.

Katherine remained perfectly still, but two little pulses beating visibly in her temples told whether she was indifferent. “You will speak to me!” he cried, in eager entreaty, under his breath. “If you want me to die in an hour, treat me as a stranger!” He was holding out his hand, and, mechanically, and because she was suddenly aware of the scrutiny of the room, hers went out to it. When Dick clasped it, and she felt the familiar contact of his flesh, she thought she was going to faint.

“Take me away,” she gasped, “into the air.”

He drew her arm quickly through his and led her to a seat in a bay window, screened from the rest of the room by curtains.

Dick stood over her, breathing quickly. “I never thought it would be like this,” he said, brokenly. “I fancied I should never see you again, and that in time I would get over it, like other men who have lived down their sorrows. But coming upon you unexpectedly like this takes it out of me. Look up,” he begged; “let me see your eyes, and try if I cannot find there some trace of the old affection. When I see you in the flesh I forget your cruelty, your unkindness—how you have made me suffer. I can only remember the happy days when you were loving and affectionate, and wanted me by your side. Have you forgotten? Tell me that, Katherine, have you? To think that, after all your vows of love, you should have grown tired of me!”

Katherine dared steal a look at him. Reproach met her view.

Yet this was the man who had made life so unbearable that she was forced to appeal to the courts for relief! Strangely enough, she could only remember his faults in the vaguest way, and it did not seem at all incongruous that he should be reproaching her. Never was his fascination more dangerously potent, his charm of person more alluring.

“Forgive me, Dick,” she found herself murmuring.

She held out her hands, and he drew them to his breast.

She did not know what might have followed had not the voice of Billy Wesley’s butler, announcing dinner, fallen upon her ear at the moment.

“After dinner,” whispered Dick, with significance; then offering her his arm, they emerged from their retreat with assumed sang-froid.

“Been kissing and making up?” asked Mrs. Billy, with frank indelicacy; but she was not indelicate enough to place them together at dinner, although her decadent ideas made her quite capable of things of the sort. Instead, she had separated them by the entire length of the table. But over the orchids and the electric bulbs, with the glint of glass and silver between, Katherine could feel Dick’s eyes upon her, and her flesh warmed beneath that gaze as Galatea’s when her sculptor breathed life into her with the passion of his glance. It was when the glass bells were brought in that she caught his eye fully and realized with a thrill that he had not forgotten her relish for champignons under glass.

In return, she flashed him a glance letting him know she had not forgotten his partiality for canvasbacks, and after that the rest of the dinner was a telegraphic communication between the pair of recognized intimacies of their married life.

The dishes sometimes choked her with a too vital remembrance.

“But we can’t sit here all night!” exclaimed Mrs. Billy, suddenly. “There’s Dr. Webb coming to vaccinate us!”

“Madam,” said the butler, “Dr. Webb is in the drawing room.”

The men were permitted to carry their cigars with them, owing to the curtailing of the dinner, and the whole party passed into the drawing room. Dr. Webb had been dining also, and was in evening dress, a messenger having brought his instruments and the virus.

“Let’s see,” said Mrs. Billy, running her eye over her list, which she found in a rose jar, “who’s to submit first? It wouldn’t be polite for me in my own house; won’t you lead the way, Katherine?”

Katherine was just stepping boldly forward when she drew back in alarm. “Oh!” she cried, “it might hurt, and I don’t like being hurt!” and she drew her beautiful bare arm close to her, and stood nursing it.

Immediately Dick pressed forward. “And she shall not be hurt!” he proclaimed, with authority. “It would be a shame to disfigure such an arm, even as a precaution. I must ask you, Mrs. Wesley, not to insist upon Mrs. Catherwood submitting to the operation. Let me be the first victim;” and hastily throwing off his coat, he appeared before the company in his well-made waistcoat and faultless shirt sleeves. The latter he began rolling up coolly, and when the cuff refused his elbow, he drew out his penknife and slit the linen along the seam. “Now, then, doctor, I am ready for you,” he said, unconcernedly.

Everyone looked on with admiration, but particularly one to whom the sight of him in the familiarity of shirt sleeves brought back the past with even more moving and electrifying vividness. How many a time had that same splendid arm been about her, and how often had she pillowed her head in its bend!

“A fine development,” said Dr. Webb, appreciatively. He then took out his point, and with a deft touch injected the virus, while Dick looked on, smoking an Egyptian cigarette.

Emboldened by his example, Katherine insisted upon submitting next, and, reclining on a gilded couch, she bravely held out her lovely left arm. It was clear the doctor was quite as appreciative of its perfection as he had been of the one before it, though he forbore any comment. The scraping produced a faintness, and her eyes sought Dick’s pleadingly. In a flash he was at her side, and supporting her head against his shoulder, where it rested until the doctor had drawn a drop of crimson to the ivory surface. A glass of water was brought, and she quickly recovered.

The guests after that began submitting in turn, with more or less merriment in the matter, until one Mrs. St. Cyr Smith cast discredit upon the party by refusing to be vaccinated on the arm.

Discussion arose on every side, and under cover of it Dick sought Katherine.

“Come,” he begged, not feeling at all interested in the location of Mrs. St. Cyr Smith’s vaccination. “I did not finish what I had to say before dinner;” and, gently shielding her newly scratched arm, he led her back to the curtained recess.

Katherine let him guide her where he would, as completely under his spell as in the first days of his magnetic attraction.

“You were so brave,” she murmured, “and so handsome!”

He drew the curtains before he answered.

“Then you do cherish some little memory of the old days?” he asked, with indescribable persuasion. “You have not forgotten? Yet you tired of me, Katherine; cast me off like a worn glove. Oh, but you were cruel to the man you swore to love and honor!”

She tried to look him in the face, but her eyes fell before the passionate reproach of his.

“Dick,” she managed to gasp, “don’t blame it all on me. You forget how soon you tired of me.”

“I tire of you!” he cried. “Never, Katherine.” He knelt on the window seat, speaking in words that came warm and panting from his lips to her shoulder. “It isn’t possible you ever imagined such a thing? I love you now—to-night—this minute—as I have loved you always, and as it is given to man to love but once in a lifetime. I never so appreciated your beauty, never so longed for the privilege of owning it. Oh, beautifulest”—the name he had given her in the happiest days of the courtship—“I want you, want you, want you! You are the very breath of me, and unless I can have you back, I swear to put an end to myself!”

His arm found her waist as it had in the old days, and before she was aware, he had her close against him and was kissing her.

The never-to-be-forgotten essence of his lips suddenly brought her to a realizing sense of the situation. He had no right to embrace her. It was an impropriety as great as though any stranger in the room beyond had presumed upon such a liberty. In spite of all they had been to each other in the past, he was now no more to her, legally, than any of the others, and there was nothing to warrant such a course of conduct. True, his lips were dearer than anything this side of heaven, but she had thought that once before, and yet had lived to feel those same lips grow cold and passionless, those strong arms deny her protection. This sudden return to his early ardor made her the more mindful of the indifference that had followed. In his impetuosity he was forging the sequence that her mind in its wrought up state had refused to grasp. She tore herself with quickly summoned force from his embrace.

“For God’s sake,” he cried, hoarse as in the old days, when his feelings rent him, “don’t refuse me! Haven’t you made me suffer enough?” “You forget,” she reminded him, a shiver running along her frame and her words coming thinly, “that we are legally separated, and that you have no right to the privileges you have presumed upon. You are not my husband. In the law we are strangers.”

Yet always that magnetic influence which drew her with supernatural force, and which she had to fight with all the strength of a body and a mind which had no inclination to fight; and, even while she remonstrated, she found herself drifting to him slowly, until, without power or volition of her own, she sank into his arms. He spoke mad, wild words in her ear; and she listened, thinking mad, wild things herself.

Inferior people have their place in the world. They save their superiors from grave situations. It was the Wesley butler who again interposed to save Katherine from an impending fate. He came to the curtains, coughing, in the respectful manner reserved for upper servants, to say that her maid had come for her early, as she had requested.

Dick caught her hand. “Let me take you home!” he entreated.

But the presence of Dunn, with his eyes that saw nothing and his mouth that never relaxed, helped Katherine, and she could command herself even with an upholstered lackey for inspiration.

“No,” she said, firmly; “that is out of the question.”

“But you cannot leave me like this,” he persisted, refusing to release her hand; “you will kill me with your cruelty. If you will not let me see you home, let me come to you to-morrow—you surely will not refuse me that!”

“Well,” she yielded, in a hurried undertone, “to-morrow evening at nine.” Then she passed out and made a hasty adieu to Mrs. Billy.

Dick did not stop much longer, and went to his hotel a bit fagged but exultant. He had not lost his old power over Katherine, that was clear, and he desired her with all the craving that non-possession brought him.

Meanwhile Katherine went home and thought—thought till her brows ached, and until she had sounded the very depths of her reasoning powers. The burden of her thoughts was much the same as his—that Dick had not lost his old influence. The next day found her still thinking, yet uncommonly active and busy. Indeed, it was quite the busiest, most breathless day of her life. Time went rushingly, and when nine o’clock chimed from the cathedral clock in the library she was still busy.

Dick was prompt. His eagerness manifested itself in his simultaneous ring at the bell with the chiming of the clock.

Katherine, in a brilliant evening gown, with some long-stemmed roses on her breast, heard the ring and started up with an excited flush.

Dick hurried in, groomed and perfect. He did not stop for conventionalities of greeting, but let all the high pressure under which he was laboring appear in his eloquent eyes. He had brought her violets, but he dropped them from his fingers, and held out his arms with entreaty.

“Soul of my soul,” he cried, “there are to be no more separations! You belong to me, and you cannot live without me any more than I can without you. Last night proved that, and that I have not lost your love. I have come back, and you are never going to be cruel again.” But to his astonishment Katherine did not yield to the arms that begged, did not pale to marble as she had the night before when he had brought the same influence to bear.

Instead, she stood off, without a sign of weakening, and smiled as conventionally as she would to the merest chance visitor.

The sight maddened him, and he sprang forward to take her by force.

But Katherine held off with a strange new imperiousness that was not to be trifled with. “You came for your answer this evening, Dick, and I have it ready for you—the answer that will determine the future for us both beyond a question;” then she held herself a little straighter and spoke distinctly:

“I was married to Willis Shaw at three this afternoon.”