She had weary eyes—eyes with the weight of centuries of knowledge upon them—eyes that could no longer open wide with astonishment at anything life might hold. The lashes were so long, so dark and straight that they were like a veil of night shadowing the grayness beneath. Her gaze came through, inviting you to penetrate, urging you by its very weariness to try to read the story those eyes might tell.

A slow smile lifted the corners of her mouth, then let them droop before the smile was really born. Her walk as she trailed from the first line of show girls in her wide-spread bird of paradise costume was as measured as the muse of tragedy.

And yet she was only twenty-six.

That was Naomi Stokes, who counted numberless acquaintances but few friends; who knew many men better than they cared to be known but few as well as she might have cared to know them.

Broadway was a playground to Naomi but she had long since learned that in the game played there, none are winners. Time is the croupier who rakes in the spoils and at Time Naomi had ceased to smile even wearily. He stood with his long arm suspended, ready, it seemed to her, to pounce upon each hour she might hold dear, jealous of all she had crowded into one short life. Man she knew too well to fear but the croupier with whom she had gambled so long, she dared not look in [128] the face. And as one sings in the dark to silence fear, so she had developed a philosophy of life which she held close in those moments when she might be tempted to take measure of things. She could not afford to pause long nor to think much.

Of that glittering section which stretches like some bejeweled recumbent queen of the night from Forty-second to Fiftieth Streets, Naomi was such an integral part that if a night passed without her appearance at one or another of the tightly wedged restaurants, their habituÉs wondered. When she moved between rows of tables with her long-lashed smile sweeping with lazy insolence the whole room, those who did not know asked who she was. Her name—in the theater merely that of another show girl—had for so long swung from lip to lip in the after-theater life of the White Way that soon it would of necessity be relegated to that past which hangs so cruelly over the present.

Naomi knew this. And more than once, alone in her tiny two-room apartment and in spite of her philosophy, she wondered what would come after. A shrug avails little in the midday glare of reality.

It was on a night following such a day—when the dregs of life had tasted particularly bitter—that Naomi and four others went to supper with Marshall Kent.

Kent having more money than he could spend enjoyed spending it on Broadway. Having nothing better to do, he had never looked for anything better. He and Naomi were good pals in their way. He liked to stare through her lashes at the puzzle beneath. Most women were so revealing.

[129]
But to-night she resented his set gaze, the ironic twitch of his thin lip. After her nasty, self-disclosing day she wanted a friend. Some one to whom she could be something more than heavy eyes and auburn-tinted hair, some one with whom she could share thoughts—and fears. But Marshy Kent had never given her friendship. No man had.

All through supper she was silent, with a hard, shell-like silence her companions could not break. Finally she pushed her plate to one side and her glance sifted the smoke-thickened air.

Beyond the table, in a space so small that they might have been squirrels chasing their tails, the crowd jostled and elbowed and glared at one another in an effort to keep time to a stamping, hilarious jazz. In the doorway beyond, another crowd jostled and elbowed and glared at one another and fought for the privilege of slipping crisp greenbacks to supercilious head-waiters. Through the befogged atmosphere the lights with their shades of brilliant yellow and black glimmered faintly. At the tables and on the dance floor jaded New Yorkers and curious out-of-towners pretended to enjoy themselves.

Naomi swept it with a noxious sense of disgust. Suddenly it seemed a ton weight, as if the ceiling like some infernal machine were descending upon her. She lifted her shoulders and her head went back. Oh, for a breath of real fresh air!

“What’s the matter, my dear?” put in Kent. “Off your feed?”

“No.” She brought her eyes toward him, then they drifted back to the crowd at the door. “I was just [130] thinking what a joke they are on themselves, fighting like that to get into a stuffy old hole where they’re going to be held up and fleeced.”

Kent laughed.

“Aren’t you worth the price of admission? You’re one of the exhibits, you know.”

She shrugged.

He looked down at the easy movement of the white shoulders under the narrow beaded straps that were the sole support of her black gown.

“Any one with the eyes and arms of Naomi will always count,” he consoled.

She pulled from his gaze.

“Oh, what’s the use! You know I don’t matter to them any more than to you. You play around with me here because you haven’t any better way to pass your time. And they, poor idiots—”

“By Jove, you are off your feed!”

She turned her back on his low, impudent chuckle.

His tolerant eye traveled over the shoulder turned from him to the hot, wild mass clamoring at the doorway. Suddenly he became alert and a second later was on his feet, without apology pushing his way round the dance floor. Naomi saw him make for a man with a big frame and graying mustache who lingered impotently at the rear of the crowd. Kent reached out, grabbed his hand and with absolute disregard of intervening humanity, wrung it as if he never wanted to let it go. She wondered vaguely what it would be like to have some one as glad to see her. He passed a word to the head-waiter. The red velvet rope dropped as if by magic [131] and, escorted by Kent, the party was led to a table a few paces from where she sat.

The man glanced about with the curiosity, half amused, half critical of the sight-seeing stranger. Back of him came a girl of twenty-one or so with eager gray eyes a thousand years younger than Naomi’s, white teeth showing through parted lips and hair the dense, dusky black of an Indian’s. At her side walked a young man. As he passed Naomi, their glances met. They locked with that odd, unintentional arresting which means that two out of a vast throng have momentarily become individuals. Naomi’s slow gaze followed as he went on and it seemed to her that in the allotting of places, he deliberately chose the one facing her.

Kent hovered over his friend with beaming enthusiasm. The ironic twitch of his thin lips was gone. The somewhat sagging shoulders of the man who keeps flesh down by massage rather than exercise had straightened. He scribbled his address. He took theirs. He admonished the waiter to treat them well, received that gentleman’s reassuring nod, and apologized finally for having to return to his own table.

Naomi watched the younger man’s face as Marshall Kent sat down beside her. No—she had not been mistaken. She who knew so well how to read men’s eyes saw in his dark ones a look of intense, concentrated interest. The girl next to him saw it, too—and following it, thought she had never seen a face more fascinating than the one so smoothly white with its heavy-fringed lids and wave of glinting hair across the forehead. It was artificial, of course, but then you got used to that [132] in New York. Her clear gray eyes went swiftly back to the dark ones that were fastened on Naomi’s.

Kent pulled in his chair and settled back.

“Well, little Marshy’s all het up!” one of the girls prompted. “Who’s your friend?”

He was still beaming.

“Fellow I haven’t seen since college—Alec McConnell. I was chucked. He went through to the finish. Mining engineer—big man in Idaho to-day.”

“And the other two?” queried Naomi casually.

“The one staring at you, my dear, is the son of Bill Dixon of Dixonville, Oregon, big ranch owner, king of the apple country.”

“And the girl?”

“Little friend of his being chaperoned by McConnell and his wife. First visit to the big town. Is that all?”

Once more Naomi’s lazy gaze met the one which had not moved from her and a faint flush surged under her thick pallor. As the lids fell, they covered something of the look of the gamester. It was a calculating look that weighed possibilities, one she was quick to hide.

Kent detected it rather by instinct than otherwise.

“Oh, have a heart, Naomi!” he teased. “He’s so young and tender.”

Naomi turned slowly in his direction. She said nothing for the moment but waited until the others got up to dance.

“Well?” He was intrigued by her silence. “Well, Eve, do we tempt young Adam to eat the apple or do we let him go home in peace and grow them?”

“I think we marry him,” she said quietly.

[133]
Kent gave a start that brought him upright. Then he grinned, that drawling grin tinged with cynicism. The idea of any one marrying Naomi was amusing. She read his thought as plainly as if it had been put into words and her head went up suddenly. Though the lashes did not lift, a flash came through them. It was challenge.

“You think I couldn’t?”

“My dear Naomi—if you’ll pardon my brutality, I should say—not a chance in the world!”

“Why?”

“In the first place I have a hunch that little girl, Nan Crawford, has a pretty firm hold on young Bill. It’s plain to see they’re crazy about each other. Darn sweet kid, too. I suspect she’s here trousseauing. In the second, Bill is probably more sophisticated than you or I imagine. This isn’t his first visit to New York.”

“I’m going to marry him just the same.”

“And go out and live on an Oregon ranch, old dear?”

“Yes.”

He laughed aloud this time.

“You’d look sweet in a sunbonnet and gingham dress.”

“Just what do you mean by that?” she asked, not quite sure what emphasis to put on “sweet.”

“Just this! You belong here as surely as grease-paint belongs in the theater.”

“No woman belongs here,” she flung at him. “There isn’t a woman made who hasn’t the right to a home.”

“Then why does she start here?”

“Because she’s young and a fool—in nine cases out of ten. Because she thinks this is living.”

[134]
Her face went hard as nails; with contempt, with futility, with derisive defiance of herself. And then furtively she pulled a bit of lace from her bag and dabbed at her eyes.

Kent’s mouth opened. It was the first time he had seen Naomi cry, had witnessed a woman’s tears without suspicion. Usually they meant that she wanted something.

“Don’t mind me!” She met his astonishment with a swift effort to pull herself together. “I’ve had a rotten day.”

“How, my dear?”

“Oh, just the realization that to-night it’s this, and in two years it’ll be ham and eggs and a lunch counter—if I’m lucky.”

“Nonsense!”

“Oh, yes! I’ll just drop out and you’ll forget me—like the rest. What’s become of Emy Steward—and Cora Greene—and Ray Granville? You don’t even know and you used to give parties for them like this one.”

He was silent, knowing she spoke the truth. Like comets across a glittering sky those beautiful girls had gleamed and gone. Gone when their beauty had gone, vanished into the night that engulfed them, too proud or too forgotten to accept the humiliation of charity.

“We don’t last long, boy,” she added grimly. “And I’m one of those who can’t keep on fooling herself. I’ve had a beast of a day.”

“Hence the ranch idea in Oregon.”

“Yes.” A queer twist lifted her lips—then dropped [135] them. “Inspiration, I call it. The Limited that will carry me away from the poorhouse!”

“You’ll never put it over.”

“Sporting enough to lay odds on it, Marshy old dear?”

In all justice to Marshall Kent, it must be admitted that under normal conditions he would not have taken her up. But the restaurant happened to be one of the many which prided itself that prohibition meant nothing in its life and the silver flask reposing on Marshy’s hip had been refilled on frequent visits to a side chamber just off the main room. He looked out of the corner of an eye at Naomi stepping in where angels might fear to tread and the flushed, grudging admiration of gamester for gamester darted in the glance.

“You’re on!” he said.

“And you’ll keep off!” she urged, a bit breathless.

“Yes—I’ll give you ground. What stakes?”

“If I lose—”

“Yes?”

“We’ll make it a hundred perfectos, best brand.”

“Nice and impersonal!” observed Marshy, head to one side, now well into the game. “And if you win?”

“The handsomest wedding present in town!”

“I call that odds in your favor.”

With a faint smile she leaned nearer, hand outstretched to clinch it.

“Hold on! What’s the time limit?”

“When he starts west I start with him.”

“It’s a go. Only don’t expect any help from me.”

“I won’t—except an introduction when he stops here on the way out.”

[136]
“What makes you think he’ll stop?”

“I know he will. He’ll find some excuse to.”

And he did, of course. Waveringly, as he drew nearer the magnet of her eyes, he paused and tapped Marshy’s shoulder. The latter sprang up.

“Mr.Kent, we’re such a bunch of rubes—I thought you might recommend the best show in town for to-morrow night.”

Naomi waited as Marshy considered.

“Why don’t you send your friend to ours?” she suggested in a low voice apparently to him alone.

“What one is that?” asked the friend, flashing eagerly into the breach.

Kent introduced him then to the upraised eyes round the table. But he saw only Naomi’s veiled ones. She gave him the name of the musical comedy and the theater—nothing more. And as he bowed and rejoined the older man and the girl with the dusky hair standing in the doorway, Marshall Kent dropped into his chair again.

“Quick work, Naomi,” he murmured, “and Machiavellian method! One more move from you and the apple wouldn’t have looked nearly so inviting.”

[137]
CHAPTER II

My dear Miss Stokes,

This will be the fourth time I’ve seen the show and the third time I’ve asked you to go to supper. If you tell me you can’t again, I’ll think you don’t want to—and quit. No, on the whole, I won’t quit. I’ve never done that in my life. I’ll just hang round and bother you till you come, so better come to-night. I’ll be waiting for you.

Sincerely,
William Dixon.

Naomi lifted the head-dress of paradise that swayed round her face and handed it absently to the dresser, still concentrating on the note which had been delivered at the theater by special messenger.

“Sincerely, William Dixon.” Numberless notes she had received during her show girl career, but never one signed just like that. “Sincerely.” Probably it was a card index of the man.

She laid it down speculatively, the look of Eve through her lashes. Three nights she had put him off. Yes, the apple might safely be held a bit closer to-night—but not too close.

He was waiting just within the stage door, his face eager with anticipation, his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. As she came up the stairs that led from the chorus dressing-rooms under the stage, he stepped forward and both hands came out of the pockets.

She clasped the right one, smiling up at him, and [138] his frank eyes shone. He piloted her to a car at the curb. As the door slammed with the sudden intimacy of shutting out the rest of the world, he leaned forward, the glow of his eyes reflected in his voice.

“Gee, this is great! I was afraid you’d turn me down again.” He did not wait for an answer but crowded into the next few moments all the hours of thought which her refusal of his invitations had lengthened into days. “You must have thought me an awful rube, staring at you the way I did. I’ve been afraid it made you sore at me. Did it?”

“No woman thinks a man’s a rube for staring at her.”

“I couldn’t help it. I just couldn’t take my eyes off you.”

In the shadows of the car she smiled softly.

“Funny, how I walked into that place, cussing the smoke and noise and then saw you. Lord, suppose I hadn’t gone!”

She smiled again.

He went on.

“You’ve seen me every night in the first row at the theater, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I’ve seen you.”

“And I think it’s a punk show,” his teeth flashed in a quick grin. “So now you know why I came.”

She looked at him from under weighty lids. As if he had to tell her!

“One lone show girl can’t be worth a speculator’s ticket four times,” she prompted.

“She’s worth lots more than that. Thank you for coming to-night.”

[139]
His voice turned serious. He tucked the robe into her corner of the seat for no other reason than the magnet of bending over her, of breathing the faint fragrance that wafted from her like an aura. It was the ghost of grease-paint and flowers, of powder and perfume—that strange, exotic pot-pourri of the theater that clings to its women like essence of old Egypt.

She gazed down at the bent head, at the hands that brushed hers with a boyish lingering as they drew the robe closer. How young he seemed! She felt for the moment much as a man of the world feels when within the scope of his worldliness there appears a radiant young girl. There was the same thrill of interest, the same desire to be the one privileged to open up avenues of possibilities. A man on Broadway who had something to learn! It was like finding a canary in a cage of monkeys!

The strange exuberance was with her as they made their way among crowded tables to the one he had reserved. Amber satin clung to her supple body and long jet earrings almost touched her shoulders. She was conscious that in the attention she drew, she was giving him the sense of pride every man feels when the clatter of forks stops momentarily in tribute to the woman with him. But more than that, she had a sudden personal satisfaction in his pride and a curve softer than any her lips had known for years lifted their corners.

His tanned skin and eyes that glowed seemed lifted straight to the sun rising above the mountains. She took a deep breath, as if from him she could get the [140] stimulus of all outdoors. He looked at the slope of her white shoulders, at the droop of her shadowed eyes, as if in her were epitomized the lure of the city.

She leaned across the table just as he did. Their hands almost met. Naomi had long, languid fingers that invited the touch.

“You’re so—different,” he began. “So awfully different. I guess that’s no news to you, though.”

“So are you—different.”

“Me?”

“Yes—from any man I’ve ever known. You’re like fresh air. The others are—stuffy—like a room that’s been shut tight.”

He gave an embarrassed, pleased laugh.

“Tell me about yourself,” she suggested, lifting the lever best calculated to open up the dam of formality where the male of the species is concerned.

“Oh, nothing much to tell about me.”

And he proceeded to tell it while they went through two courses. She got a vivid picture of Bill Dixon, a colt straining always against harness of any kind; a lad loathing routine to such an extent that he had quit college rather than submit to it; a young man, impulsive as the wind, more tied to the picturesqueness of ranch life than to the business of it; an only son worshipped by the man who had paved the way, who was both father and mother to him.

He bent nearer to the white hands. “Now tell me about you.”

“That would take too long. And if you find out all [141] there is to know to-night, you won’t want to see me again.”

“Won’t I, though! Besides—I could never find out all there is to know about you.”

They danced. He was not a good dancer but as his arm went round her and his dark head bent to her glinting one, she felt herself completely encompassed. His bigness, his nearness, gave her a swift sense of helplessness that frankly frightened her. The reins of the future must be held in her cool hands, not in his.

“I’m going to guess your age,” she announced when they were once more at opposite sides of the table, “if you’ll promise not to guess mine.”

“I don’t give a darn how old you are.”

“Oh, I’m not as old as all that. But you—you’re twenty-five.”

“Next month. Bet, at that, I’m older than you.”

“You are,” she lied, without a quiver.

“But you’re the sort of woman who’ll always be young—even when you’re wrinkled and gray. It’s your coloring,” he went on, promptly contradicting himself. “That wonderful white skin—I’ve never seen skin so white—and the sheen of your hair and those eyes that make a fellow sort of—sort of want to jump in.”

The eyes smiled at him with infinite promise.

“I think we’re going to like each other,” she said.

“I know one of us does already,” he grinned.

“You’re a dear,” she vouchsafed.

They saw each other every day after that. He managed to bring it about, either for luncheon or early [142] dinner or after the theater. At least he thought he was the one who brought it about. And as Naomi opened his impetuous notes, or the boxes that held great clusters of flowers ordered with awkward disregard of everything but quantity, the Eve-smile lifted the corners of her mouth and her eyes looked a trifle less tired.

Occasionally they drove out to the country for the day. But the countryside near New York rather amused him.

“It all seems sort of puny,” he would say as she sat with face carefully veiled from a too-revealing sun. “I’m used to snow peaks that touch the sky and trees so high that when you’re on the mountain trails above them, you look down and can’t see where they begin.” He turned from the inadequate hills to the more absorbing scenery of a woman’s face misted by a fluttering veil. “No, sir! When I come east, I don’t want this. I want New York—the excitement, the thrill of it. I want—you.”

It was said softly. His voice held the word like a caress and, looking up, she read in his eyes what she had read in many men’s—except that added to it was the new element of awe.

That new element became infinitely dear to her. She let him keep it. Except when their hands brushed accidentally—or so it seemed to him—they did not touch save for the clasp that helped her into a cab or expressed “good-night.” The warmth of his arms closed round her only in the dance. She met the light of his eyes with her own only across restaurant tables. No debutante could have held herself more aloof—perhaps not [143] quite so much so. But Naomi did not play the ingÉnue. It was her world knowledge—world old—that fascinated him, that made her—as he had said—different.

She amused him with cryptic remarks about the men and women who came and went, with stories of familiar characters on Broadway, with a touch of cynicism, a touch of pessimism, that lack of faith in human nature which comes with disillusionment in self. But this, young Bill Dixon did not know nor count. He merely tossed up his shaggy head with the deep, long laugh that makes the whole body tingle and begged for more.

She managed to fill his days with joy of her when she was with him, with longing for her when she cleverly denied him her companionship. She was the hundred women to one man which her training had taught her to be, knowing that to him she would thus become the one women. She caught hold of his imagination and twisted and played with it as a cat with a ball of twine, tossing it this way and that but always with paw poised to pounce.

And simultaneously there flared into her own soul an eagerness of which Naomi Stokes had long since counted herself incapable. It was as if that brown-eyed, ardent gaze held her with the same absorbing quality of his arms when they danced. She began to look for it—jealously as if it might escape her.

Meanwhile in a hotel room that was just four walls, another pair of gray eyes, not veiled, not mysterious, watched for him more and more anxiously, saw him less and less frequently. The girl from the West whose first visit to New York was to have opened up a fairyland [144] of adventure for her and the boy she loved—the visit they had planned together—found its streets empty caverns at the foot of towering cliffs, saw in hotels and theaters and restaurants to which McConnell and his wife took her night after night in the hope of diverting her, only the possibility, eager yet dreaded, of singling from the crowd the faces of Bill Dixon and the woman who had taken him from her.

She tried to hide her misery from the anxious eyes of her chaperones. But because she was young—a thousand years younger than Naomi—she could not hide it from the one she loved. And her quivering chin, her reproachful reminders of engagements he had overlooked, sent his mind and feet hurrying back to the woman whose red lips and drooping lids thrilled him like the dizzying lights of Broadway, like a draught of wine he had never before tasted.

“Why does a girl think, because you’ve been together all your lives,” he blurted out one night as he and Naomi drove through the jerk and jam of traffic hold-up, “that she has a right to know your comings and goings as if you belonged to her? Good heavens, a fellow can change his mind, can’t he?”

Naomi turned and smiled out of the window at the laughing sparkle of lights. The look, part sphinx, touched her mouth. In the dark he did not see its tinge of satire.

He maintained for a second the silence that is usually accompanied by a bitten cigar or cigarette half-smoked, the silence of irritation. Then he swung about impatiently.

[145]
“You’re not like that, Naomi! You’d never ask silly questions.”

She leaned over, touched the hand that clenched and unclenched against his knee.

“Don’t be angry, Billie-boy,” she whispered. “I like to hear you laugh.”

His other hand closed quickly over the white fingers.

“What is it you’ve done to me? I always thought caring about a woman meant wanting to be with her because she liked the things I do, because we understood each other. That’s the way I felt about—” he broke off. “But you—I want to be with you because you’re so different—because I don’t always understand you. I can’t get enough of it—of looking at you, of listening to you. Naomi, do you care—a little bit?”

She lifted her eyes, lifted her lips, forgetting the game she was playing, forgetting the stakes. Then before he saw the move, she drew back. Not yet! She answered him instead with a shadowy smile and the long silent pressure of the hand held fast between his.

[146]
CHAPTER III

It was an afternoon of late March, grim and forbidding, as if winter had thrown a last shadow across oncoming spring. The steam heat, turned off in the chorus dressing-rooms during a week of balmy weather, suddenly sputtered on and sang through the whole matinÉe performance.

Naomi came out of the stage entrance, fur coat hugged about her, and shivering a bit, made for the curb to hail a taxi. As she glanced up and down the street at the ant-like army of cars, one of them slid toward her and a man stepped down.

“Why, hello, Marshy,”—she reached out a hand—“haven’t seen you in weeks.”

He took it.

“Jump in.”

“Good! Buy me some tea, won’t you? I’m frozen.”

“We’ll have tea at your place. I want to talk to you.”

She turned and stared at him as he slammed the door.

His voice didn’t sound like Marshy Kent’s at all.

“I’ve called on you half a dozen times,” he supplemented. “You’re never home.”

“I’m busy.”

“I know you are. That’s why I sidetracked you.”

He did not speak again until they had mounted the flight of stairs to her apartment in a reconstructed house near the theater. But as she collected the seldom used [147] tea things, he walked impatiently up and down the room.

“Naomi, we’ve always been pretty good friends, haven’t we?” he began.

“Friends?”

“Pals then,” he corrected, not knowing why.

“Well, yes, I suppose so.”

“That’s why I’m going to put something up to you. I want you to listen quietly and then I want you to stand by me. Naomi—I’ve done a lot of things in my young life that I’m not exactly proud of. But the worst that could have been said of me was that I’ve been a waster. I’ve wasted one or two fortunes that the old Kents slaved to pile up—on cards—on the wheel—on the ponies—on women—I’ve never been anything but a waster. But that goes in more senses than one. I’ve never been a cad. Not until a month ago.”

He waited for some response but Naomi merely struck a match and touched it to the wick of the samovar. If a quick question did flash to her lips, she held it back and kept her eyes lowered.

“You know when that was. I was non compos mentis and I egged you into making a bet—”

“In other words, dear Marshy,” she filled in his pause, “you want me to let you off on the plea of—well, the undue influence of liquor. Of course I will.”

He pushed aside her easy acquiescence with a sweep that almost knocked the cup from her hand. “But that’s not all. The bet’s not the thing that’s bothering me. It’s you. You and that boy, Dixon. Naomi, you’ve got to quit. You’ve got to, do you hear me?”

“Quit—what?”

[148]
“Don’t play the innocent! You know what I’m driving at. I’ve made myself your partner in the job of smashing that boy’s life. And I’m telling you—”

“Wait a minute!”

Very slowly she set down her cup. Very slowly she rose and went close to him. At the hard, driving note in his voice, at the sharp arraignment of his eyes, resentment brought her head up and her eyes defiant.

“Marshy, men fall easily into the habit of talking to—to some women pretty much as they please. But in the years I’ve known you, you’ve never said a word to me that—that hurt. Don’t do it now—please.”

“Then let him alone. I’ve been through hell this past week thinking of what I let those two young things in for. McConnell tells me the girl’s on the verge of collapse,—can’t eat, can’t sleep, just sits and waits for the boy to come and he stays away. Why, they grew up together, those kids. They were as good as engaged. And now he’s chucked her—for you.”

He reached out, caught her by both shoulders with hands that shook.

“I must have been crazy to take you up that night and promise not to interfere. If you don’t cry quits, here’s where I do! Young Dixon is a damn fine boy—McConnell says one of the finest—and I’m not going to stand to one side and see you smash his life and break that little girl’s heart. Understand?”

The eyes that traveled up to his were more weary than he had ever seen them.

“What about my life, Marshy? Doesn’t that count—at all? Doesn’t it matter that I’d like a chance? [149] That perhaps if I marry Bill Dixon, he’ll never know—and I can forget? Doesn’t it matter that you’d be helping me away from being a has-been—and all that goes with it? Do you ever think of the hours I spend here in the dark—alone, trying not to see what’s going to happen to me when I count even less than I do now? But no, of course not! Only—if it were the other way round, Marshy, and I was a man and he a girl, you wouldn’t see any harm in it—would you? If it were you, Marshy, and a young girl—”

“That’s different!”

“Why is it different—why? It’s a man standing up for a man where he wouldn’t for a woman—that’s the only difference. It isn’t that you’re any better than I am. It’s only that you think all men are.”

“Look here, Naomi, I know it’s hard on you, my putting it the way I have to. But conditions are conditions. We’ve both faced them too long to try and buck them. You keep away from that boy and you won’t regret it. I’ll guarantee that—any way you like. What’s it worth—?”

“Marshy—you’re not trying to buy me off!”

“Don’t put it so baldly—”

He stopped. For her head had gone back and a laugh startlingly high and sharp cut the sudden stillness.

“So you’re afraid of me, that’s it! It’s gone that far. He’s declared himself for me—and against her. It’s come to a crux, then—and McConnell’s asked you to help. Why, I didn’t dream it! I couldn’t have hoped for so much in such a short time. I wouldn’t have believed it.”

[150]
Even with that high laugh of mockery, her shadowy eyes filled with the vision of the boy fighting—fighting them all doggedly, with hot, flaming defiance—for her—and it was sweeter than the thought of triumph.

Kent’s voice broke in, uncompromising as judgment itself.

“I know a way to stop it—without you. I hesitated to use it before. It didn’t seem cricket. But I’m going to him now with the plain, unvarnished truth—the story Broadway tells when it hears the name, Naomi Stokes,—the story I can add a few chapters to.”

“Marshy!”

“I’ll show him what a blithering fool he is. I’ll prove it the way I can. We’ll see then!”

The vision vanished from Naomi’s eyes. She caught his arm, clutched it with the clinging fingers of a child who in sleep plunges from dreams into nightmare.

“Marshy—you wouldn’t do that! You couldn’t! Why, you called yourself my pal. Could pals stab one another like that? Could I think of harming you that way? Not for anybody! And that boy’s nothing to you. Nothing! Won’t you give me this chance? Just this one. If you knew what it means to me! Marshy, don’t turn away. Listen—please—please!”

But he kept his face turned determinedly from the pleading one streaked with tears, from the eyes he had so often smiled into when their mystery piqued and captivated him in idle moments. And in the rigid line of his jaw there was no yielding. He merely tried to tug away from her clinging fingers and a short phrase answered her.

[151]
“Do you cry quits—or no?”

She steadied her lips. Her arms fell listlessly. But even as she met the question, it came less in the form he put it than in the thought of what Bill Dixon had come to mean to her. Not ease for herself, not insurance against bleak years ahead, not the road that led away from terror; but a boy’s hearty laugh and ardent eyes, the warm clasp of his hand, the strength of his arms, what it would mean to lose them. A light that lifted the weight of centuries shone through her lashes. A smile that trembled caught her lips.

“It isn’t quits, Marshy. No! Either way you win, so we might as well play to the finish.”

When he had gone, she sank on the couch and tears unlike the bitter ones of early dawn and hard noon streamed silently down her cheeks. They were tears of wonder and passionate regret, of gratitude that she, Naomi Stokes, could know this engulfing tenderness. The thing she had never dreamed might come was hers. She loved him. Nothing could take that away. After stumbling through the years, she had found in one brief month the dearest thing in the world. And now Marshy was going to snatch it from her. Was that his man’s right? No! She would fight him—the whole world—to keep that which had suddenly become her reason for being.

Yet she realized that she was not armed to fight, not Marshy, nor the world, nor truth. She, who had never lacked resources, to whom the game of life had been a game of wits, stood helpless now.

She could only wait.