автордың кітабын онлайн тегін оқу  The Bishop's Jaegers

Thorne Smith

The Bishop's Jaegers

Thorne Smith

PROLOGUE

BEFORE hoisting them over his sturdy, ecclesiastical shanks the Bishop contemplated his drawers with nonsectarian satisfaction. It was not the Bishop's wont thus to dally with his drawers. Far from it. As a rule the Bishop paid scant heed either to his own drawers or to those of his parishioners. He took it for granted they wore them.

And although, during the course of a long and active career devoted to good works, the Bishop had been responsible for despoiling the dusky limbs of innumerable South Sea aristocrats with drawers of surpassing unloveliness, he did not look back on his success in terms of drawers alone. Not at all.

To Bishop Waller drawers were merely the first move in a long, grim contest with the devil, a contest in which long, grim drawers served as the shock troops of righteousness. They were an important but unattractive gesture in the general direction of God—a grotesque but essential step in a complicated ritual of spiritual costuming.

Perhaps it was partly owing to the fact that none of the Bishop's so-called savage converts had ever turned to him and remarked in tones of mild complaint, 'This Adam chap of yours never wore a pair of drawers in his life. Why should I?' that the good Bishop had so far failed to give due consideration to the rights of the vast anti-drawers-wearing element still shamelessly thriving on this and probably other terrestrial globes. For Bishop Waller was above all things a fair man. It simply never occurred to him that a fellow creature could commune either with himself or his Maker with any degree of equanimity unless a great deal of his person was securely done into drawers.

For women the Bishop's programme was a little more elaborate. Women were quite different. It was difficult to decide which half of their bodies needed to be covered first and most. Both halves were dangerous, both to be greatly deplored. Either one of them made virtually impossible a constructive consideration of a life beyond. Repeatedly he had been pained to discover that in the presence of unconverted island girls, men were quite content to risk the somewhat nebulous joys of the life beyond for the assured ones closer at hand.

Therefore it was the Bishop's conviction that all women should be covered at all times. It was safer—far, far wiser. Men found out about such things quickly enough as it was without having them dangled before their eyes. For this reason religion for men began with drawers and for women with shirt and drawers—preferably with the addition of a voluminous Mother Hubbard.

This morning there was a special reason for the Bishop's rapt contemplation of his drawers—new, judiciously selected, upstanding garments. And if they could not be called things of beauty, these brave long jaegers of the Bishop's, they did without question represent the highest expression of the drawers-maker's craftsmanship. Not that the Bishop's jaegers were in any sense crafty. No franker or more uncompromising drawers could have been devised to protect the modesty of man. Once they had been decorously adjusted, they made absolutely no weak concession to the curiously roving eye.

As Bishop Waller, forgetting for the moment his rather shocking condition, held his jaegers extended before him at arm's length, he presented a picture of innocently happy concentration. He was gratified by the chaste austerity of these drawers. They were the ideal drawers for a bishop. There was no monkey business about them. They pretended to be nothing more than what they were—simply and definitely drawers—long ones. Once a man had sought refuge behind or within their rugged embrace there was little likelihood that any woman, no matter how optimistic, would ask him to emerge from his unattractive concealment. The exterior view was far too depressing—too utterly discouraging to light dalliance and abandon. They had a numbing effect on the mind, those jaegers of the Bishop's. They reared themselves like a mighty tower of righteousness in a world of makeshift and evasive garments. No one could imagine their wearer leaping sportively in pursuit of a wanton nymph. The very beasts of the fields would have staggered off in horror to their lairs.

As he proceeded to plunge his vast nakedness into the even vaster reaches of his jaegers, the exact structure of the Bishop's thoughts is, of course, not known. However, it is safe to assume that as he stood appreciatively before his mirror conscientiously adjusting them to the last strategically plotted button—a formality seldom if ever observed by the average run of laymen—Bishop Waller was saying to himself:

'I might have my faults as a bishop, but no one can say a word against my drawers. Not a bishop in all these United States can produce a finer pair than these.'

So much for the Bishop for the time being, now that he has at last got himself into his drawers and girded his loins with righteousness if not with romance.

 

The drawers of Josephine Duval were a different matter entirely. Accurately speaking, they were hardly drawers at all. They were more like a passing thought or an idle moment. Compared with the splendid new jaegers of the Bishop's—if one's chances of salvation will not be eternally damned by such a sacrilege—Jo's drawers were as nothing. Not even a flash in the pan.

One is occasionally perplexed by the great quantity of different-looking dogs one meets in the course of a day or a week. One is given pause by the fact that such totally unrelated objects in appearance should be even loosely classified under the covering name of dog. Yet in spite of this, one seldom or rarely ever stops to consider how many different-looking drawers there are in the world either gracing or disgracing the limbs of humanity. Perhaps this is due to the fact that one gets more opportunity to look at dogs than at drawers, which is, no doubt, just as well for everybody concerned. However, the fact still remains that drawers can be so bewilderingly different and yet come under the general classification or family name of drawers.

Between the Bishop's drawers and Jo's drawers lay all the difference in the world—different aims and aspirations, a different philosophy of life—a gulf, in fact, which could never be bridged except under the most incredible circumstances with which there is no occasion here to deal. No good end can be served by further prolonging this rather questionable comparison.

Looking logically at Jo's drawers—an attitude exceedingly difficult to maintain when they were inhabited as only Jo could inhabit them—one could see no proper reason for their being in existence at all. To say that they were the direct antitheses of the medieval ceinture de chasteté is to state the case mildly. Not that this brief consideration of the young lady's even briefer garments is to be regarded as a plea for the return of the chastity belt. On the contrary. There are too many locks already in this world. As a matter of record the efficacy of the chastity belt has never been clearly established. Love has ever had the last laugh on the locksmith. Furthermore, the belief is now held by several eminent students of the question that the employment of the chastity belt was directly responsible for the rapid rise of a class of gentlemen extremely annoying to absent husbands because of their nimble and industrious fingers. As time passed and experience was passed along with it, respectable husbands found that not only were their women no longer secure but also neither were their treasure boxes and safe deposit vaults. This situation was just too bad. During foreign wars and crusades the activities of these notoriously home-loving pick-locks became so wide-spread, in fact so much in demand, that medieval lock-smiths grew quite inured to the sound of ironical laughter.

But if conditions were loose in those days, they are running wild to day. The time when women selected their nether garments logically has long since passed into oblivion. It is the regrettable tendency of the times for women to regard this item of their apparel not in the light of logic but rather in that of allurement. And men are just low enough to regard this change with approval. Even the name itself has fallen into disrepute, as if it suggested some humorous connotation. Whereas men with the utmost indifference still struggle along quite cheerfully with the old-fashioned and time-honoured name of drawers—drawers plain and unvarnished—women have far out-stripped them. Theirs must be known now by such frivolous and leading appellations as panties, scanties, briefs, fleshies, woollies, step-ins, dansettes, speedies, and other similar evocative terms. Bloomers, which at one time were considered no end daring, are to-day rarely if ever encountered in actual circulation, and then only after the most patient and exhaustive research for which the majority of men are constitutionally disqualified unless very carefully watched.

However, although these new underthings give rise to all sorts of nonsense, it must be admitted they are nice.

Jo's were, at any rate.

This morning, at about the same time the excellent Bishop was contemplating his equally excellent jaegers, Miss Josephine Duval, whose paternal grandmother still sipped her wine in France, rolled a body of the most disconcerting loveliness out of its bed. It was Jo's own body, and she sat with it in lazy companionship on the bed's edge while she permitted several tremendous yawns to escape her recklessly red and rebellious lips. After this she stretched, and the effect was devastating. For a moment even the world must have paused in its revolutions. As the girl's small and not unbecoming feet sought with all their ten useless toes a pair of mules that were a sheer waste of time, her cool white arm automatically reached out and the hand on the end of it affixed itself to one of the garments under discussion. Whether they were briefs, scanties, or step-ins is an open question, but for the sake of this history they might just as well be called step-ins. Bending a dark red head of tousled hair over her trophy, she allowed her brown eyes to consider it none too favourably.

They were far from being the step-ins of her choice. However, many a girl would have thought herself fortunate to have been caught in a gale in such a pair. In a nutshell, which would nearly have accommodated them, they were good, middle-class business-like looking step-ins without a great deal of foolishness about them, yet sufficiently attractive to do justice to their subject. Josephine's French blood cried for fairer step-ins, while her French sense of thrift assured her that for a hard-working secretary who spent most of her time sitting they were altogether adequate.

'If I didn't have to work so darned hard and scrimp so much,' yawned Jo to herself, 'I'd buy me some bang-up underthings, wouldn't I just. Regular knockouts. Black and very, very bad.'

With a supple flexing of her body which should have been prohibited by an act of Congress, she shook off her nightgown and snapped on her step-ins. The movement combined the speed of a fireman with the deftness of a contortionist. Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she regarded her step-ins critically.

'Good enough for day-in-and-day-out service,' she decided, 'but hardly suitable for occasions should they ever arise.'

To what occasions Jo was alluding, it would be better to leave to individual preference. Jo had her own clearly defined ideas about almost everything. For the most part they were uniformly unedifying. However, they enjoyed the advantage of having been dragged out into the open, where they operated in a state of healthy activity, to say the least.

'Pay day to-day,' she gloated as she continued with her dressing. 'A beggarly sum at that—a mere pittance. I'll spend it all on underthings as soon as the office closes, see if I don't. Even though a girl should be good, she doesn't have to feel that way. Funny thing, I always feel at my best when I'm feeling thoroughly depraved. There's no use of a girl trying to tell herself anything different, either. Women are born that way.'

Accordingly her thoughts veered to Mr. Peter Duane Van Dyck, who at that moment was very busy doing things about his own drawers, as were thousands of other New Yorkers of high and low degree.

Peter Van Dyck was of high. He scarcely realized the fact, and whenever it was forced upon him by his relatives he showed a decided lack of appreciation. His respect for the traditions of his ancestors, those early Dutch settlers, had been interred with their bones. He was Josephine's employer—her boss. She was his secretary, and it would not have required much enterprise on his part to make her even more. As it was, he admired the young lady for her efficiency, but was alarmed by her bold eyes, which to his way of thinking had a suspiciously bad look about them. They were not good for the coffee business, whose destiny he guided along well-established lines.

'He's an old stick,' Jo decided as she tightened up her stockings so that they gleamed on her well-turned legs. 'Doesn't seem to know I have these. Not an eye in his stupid head. I'll make him know, doggone it.'

And Jo deftly curbed her abundance within the delicate web of a brazen brassiere.

 

To Peter Duane Van Dyck drawers presented no difficulty. He never considered them at all. They were merely a part of the scheme of things. He disregarded drawers. Automatically he changed them. Not every day, like other nice men of his station, but whenever the idea occurred to him. Sometimes he lost his drawers; that is, misplaced them, forgot where he had seen them last.

This morning he was in this quandary. With exasperated diligence he searched for his drawers, completely blind to the fact that he had lazily left them crumpled in his trousers upon retiring the previous night. It was not a Van Dyck trait, this leaving of his drawers in his trousers. It was a habit characteristic of Peter—one of his little labour-saving devices which would have been revolting to the long line of Van Dycks from which he had sprung without any great show of agility.

Abandoning all hope of ever seeing his drawers again, Peter put on a new pair and dragged on his trousers after them. The fact that the old pair remained untidily wedged in his trousers caused him no discomfort at the moment. He ascribed the slight fullness on the right side—a tendency to bind, as it were—to some inexplicable caprice of his shirt tail. He would deal with his shirt tail later if in the meantime it did not adjust itself of its own accord. Shirt tails usually did in the course of a day, he had found. He hoped this one would, because he hated to trouble himself with such matters. It would have been wiser had he done so.

He did things to his sandy-coloured hair, decided after a quick scrutiny of his vaguely blue eyes that they had a peculiarly harassed appearance, wiped some dried soap off his right ear, and left the room wearing two pairs of drawers and carrying one towel. On the Van Dyck landing he became conscious of the towel still clutched in his hand. Draping it over the bare expanse of a statue of an Aphrodite seemingly seized with qualms or cramps in a near-by niche, Peter Van Dyck permitted his five feet ten inches of body to find its way downstairs unassisted by any mental effort.

He entertained hopes of filling it with coffee and lots of breakfast. Peter was thirty-four. Also, he was hungry.

 

An hour or so later it was Miss Yolanda Bates Wilmont's turn to deal with her drawers. Rightly speaking, Yolanda Bates Wilmont seldom if ever dealt with her drawers in person. She had a maid to deal with them for her. And to continue rightly speaking, what the maid dealt with could not by the wildest stretch of the coarsest imagination be called drawers. They were creations—fragile poems done in gossamer and lace—real lace. In fact everything was real about them except the woman they adorned. She was too good to be true, but she did not realize this. She considered herself a young lady of the highest principles and the most unassailable morals. With the exception of herself and a few chosen members of her social standing she heartily disapproved of any unnecessary display of feminine blandishments. With herself it was quite different. Yolanda Bates Wilmont sincerely believed that she knew as no other woman exactly what she was doing, that she was by the divine right of birth the arbiter of good taste and refinement, that she had limbs whereas the general run of girls merely had legs and far too much of them.

As she gazed at herself in the long pier mirror this morning, she was thinking quite unconsciously that it was a fortunate thing indeed so few girls could afford to wear such lovely step-ins as hers. The average woman could not be trusted in so expensively chic underthings. No telling what one of those lower-class girls might do if she suddenly found herself in possession of such a pair. Certainly she would not keep them to herself. No. The cheap, feminine display complex would get the better of what little scruples she had, if any. The modern girl was permitted to show too much of herself as it was. Take the beaches and the buses and the dance halls—disgusting. Such liberties should be enjoyed only by members of exclusive house parties and by girls who knew how to be careless without being common—girls whose reputation needed no protection. The same held for drinking and all the other amenities of life. Her one regret was that when she should marry Peter Van Dyck, as had been ordained from the beginning of time, she could not have her baby in a different and hitherto unattempted manner. In a fleece-lined capsule, for instance, or a handsomely tailored cowl. The usual way was far too popular.

After the maid had done every possible thing for her except think and breathe, Yolanda allowed herself to be helped into a ravishing negligee. This was negligent to the point of aggressive indecency, but was perfectly all right on Yolanda because she was so utterly different from other women, although, from the various samples of herself she so generously displayed, the untutored eye would have gained the impression that she was made very much in accordance with the usual specifications.

Also the eye—even the untutored one—would have gained the impression that these specifications had been most skilfully carried out. Yolanda was a good-looking girl, well built, attractively coloured, and perfectly finished. There were deep blue eyes, fine golden hair, vivid lips, and a healthy outer layer of pink and white satin-smooth skin.

Yet beneath the outer layer Yolanda was exactly like every other woman who had ever entertained the illusion that she was different from all of her sisters. Nor would Yolanda's highly refined reactions have been especially cordial had any one taken the trouble to supply her with this gratuitous piece of information.

No one ever did.

 

In quite another quarter of the city Aspirin Liz heaved her generous bulk out of bed and wearily dragged a pair of tent-like bloomers over enough body to make two of Yolanda's.

Grunting comfortably as she reached for the kettle sequestered in a dark closet, she proceeded to make herself some coffee. Also she found time to take a couple of aspirins, for which she was well named. These little duties being performed, and a shirt and flowered dressing-gown added to her toilette, she collapsed in a chair and gloomily considered a hole that had but recently appeared in her bloomers. True, they were old bloomers, but still that hole had no right to be where it was. And it was not the first time either.

As Aspirin Liz regarded this new evidence of the bloomers' unworthiness, her heart was filled with bitterness and indignation against the low lives who had made the bloomers as well as the dirty dogs who had tricked her into buying them.

'Never put enough reinforcement into the damn things,' she grumbled to herself, little realizing that hers was a figure that demanded more in the line of reinforcement than either the looms or sewing machines could profitably afford to supply. ' Always busting out in a fresh spot like one of those all-fired Holland dykes.'

Idly her mind drifted back through the years until she saw again a small boy thrusting some part of his body through a hole in a dyke. Just what part of his body it was remained a little vague to Aspirin Liz, but she was reasonably sure it was either an arm or a leg or a foot. It might even have been a finger to begin with, and later on an arm. She knew the little boy had not stuck his head through the hole, because her own common sense, of which she had a lot, convinced her that no little boy could have been as big a damn fool as all that.

She had always liked that story as a child. Game little beggar, that boy. As she had progressed through life, she had kept her eyes peeled for such a youth but had never come across one, although she had met many who had played games, and not very nice games at that. Even then they had cheated.

There was hardly anything Aspirin Liz did not know about men, and even less to their credit. They drank and cursed and treated women like hell and left the place all messed up. The more work you did for a man, the more things he could think up for you to do. If God had only made men more like animals, more like dogs, for instance, without any too much brains, things would be a great deal easier for women. But unfortunately men had brains, mean, bad-acting brains that kept interfering with the business of living. Women could handle their bodies all right, but the devil himself could not deal with a man's brains.

Aspirin Liz picked up last night's newspaper and broodingly considered a salaciously illustrated underwear advertisement.

'Wouldn't have lasted a minute in my day,' she told herself as she studied the delicate lines of a pair of step-ins. 'Yanked 'em clean off you, they would. Nowadays everything's so fancy. Didn't need all that nonsense when I was a girl. God knows nothing could have been more discouraging than those long, dangling, iron-clad, rock-girt flannels I grew up in, yet everybody seemed to do pretty well in spite of 'em. Drawers were drawers in those days. And when you took 'em off you knew you had 'em off. No two ways about it. Now take these makeshift bloomers… '

It does not really matter where Aspirin Liz took her makeshift bloomers. She was always taking them some-where. This morning, as on every morning, she had a bit of a headache. Perhaps a spot of gin would help. She took one. If it did not help her head it did at least make her solitary existence a little more endurable. Another cup of coffee and a fag. Liz yawned and stretched her heavy frame.

Once she had been an artist's model and very much in demand, very much in the front of things. Now… oh, hell, a woman couldn't keep her figure always. Use it while you have it and then forget it. So said Liz.

But she could never quite forget the figure of her hey-day, for what it had once been was still hanging in several New York galleries she occasionally visited when all other comforts failed.

'Got to find a needle and thread,' muttered Aspirin Liz, 'and do something about these bloomers before the whole damn dyke pours through. Game little nipper, that kid was. Must have been his leg.'

 

When Little Arthur exhumed himself from a disorderly pile of bedclothing and stood up, one of New York's most astute pickpockets was once more on his feet. But unlike Mr. Peter Duane Van Dyck, Little Arthur did not have to look for his drawers. He already had them on. Little Arthur had slept in his drawers, as was his invariable rule.

Gentlemen devoted to Little Arthur's profession frequently find it the wisest policy to sleep that way. Even a pickpocket has some qualms about making a surreptitious exit when clad only in nothing. The criminal classes are notoriously more modest, more observant of the little niceties of convention than those who remain smugly within the boundaries of the law. Little Arthur would have willingly faced arrest and long detention rather than to have presented an unadorned rear view to a callously jeering group of pursuing Irish minions of the law.

Yet even though Little Arthur habitually slept in his drawers, he was not altogether unmindful of them. This morning as he moved round his room he was thinking in a dim way about the state and efficacy of the miserably shabby garments he was wearing. They were unpicturesque, to say the least. Little Arthur felt they did not do him justice. The things he had on had never been intended to do any man justice. However, they were amusing, assuming one recovered from the shock of seeing them in action.

Nevertheless those drawers meant everything to their wearer. That is literally the truth. Yet, truthfully speaking, they were not drawers at all. They were a complete costume, a sort of overall arrangement that concealed the facts about Little Arthur from his scraggy neck to his pipe-stem ankles. A visitor from Mars would have found it difficult to believe that the body within was human.

However, the parts of Little Arthur that one was permitted to see were not entirely unprepossessing. He had a brisk little face, hardly any hair to speak of, and a devouringly alert pair of mild blue eyes. Frequently Little Arthur took those eyes to the movies, where they wept copiously over the sad parts and sparkled with pleasure when virtue triumphed and won its own reward.

Little Arthur's thoughts were now toying with the subject of drawers. He was discontented with his present ones. He felt that he deserved a new deal.

'Can't very well snatch a pair of drawers off a customer's legs,' he regretfully observed to himself. 'Funny thing, that. Easier to steal a man's purse than his drawers.'

Second-storey men were lucky. They could steal all the drawers they needed—more drawers, in fact, than a man could reasonably use, although second-storey work probably was exceedingly trying on drawers. Take a pickpocket now. A pickpocket was by the very nature of his calling entirely cut off from drawers as a source of loot. Oh, well, a dip should not expect to have everything. He was better off as he was. Climbing had always made him dizzy even as a boy. A man should stick to the job he was best fitted for instead of drifting from pillar to post. Never establish yourself that way. Little Arthur felt grieved over the fate of rolling stones. If he had a good day to-day, Little Arthur promised his legs a new pair of drawers.

With this promise in mind the weird-looking little man retrieved a last night's edition of the morning's paper from the floor and ran a professional eye over the list of public events.

Chapter 1 AN EMBARRASSING SITUATION

VAN DYCK coffee had been responsible for keeping more generations of New Yorkers awake than had the product of any other importer in lower Manhattan. In the early days of the company's activities the Van Dycks had endeavoured to popularize the beverage among various tribes of the less homicidally inclined Indians. However, finding that these original Americans seemed to prefer gin almost as avidly as Americans do to-day, the cannily hospitable old Dutchmen promptly broke out the square bottles and prospered greatly thereby.

With this phase of the business the current generation of Van Dycks habitually dealt with commendable vagueness. Inasmuch as the Van Dycks had been fairly respectable even before they took up the New World in a big way, it never occurred to their descendants that their present exalted state was established on the hang-overs of a great multitude of red men.

Peter Van Dyck knew far less about coffee than had any of his predecessors. He was somewhat less backward where gin was concerned. Peter found it difficult to break himself of the habit of regarding coffee in the light of a personal indulgence rather than as a commercial asset. Some mornings it tasted better than others. That was about the extent of Peter's knowledge. This morning, he decided, it did not taste so good.

As he left his house in the West Seventies he was wondering vaguely why his eyes had such a harassed expression and his coffee such a comfortless flavour. The season of the year was propitious—late spring with summer lounging among the buds. Business not too bad when compared with that of his competitors. As a matter of fact, the morning paper had announced the untimely end of one of his closest rivals, yet even this gratifying occurrence failed to lend zest to Peter's day. Something was radically wrong with him.

Then, suddenly, a thought rose bleakly from his sub-conscious mind and flopped down heavily on his conscious one, where it lay like a dead weight. This afternoon his Aunt Sophie, his statuesque and painfully modern Aunt Sophie who presided over his household, was giving a cocktail party for Yolanda Bates Wilmont. And at this party the cat which had long since been out of the bag was obligingly going to crawl back into it again to permit itself to be officially released. After to-day he, Peter, would no longer be a free lance in the courts of light dalliance. He would be irrevocably engaged to Yolanda with all her beauty and wealth and firmly rooted convictions. This knowledge somehow failed even more lamentably than had the sudden departure of his business rival to add zest to Peter's day. Yes, there was no doubt about it. Something was radically wrong with him. His responsive faculties seemed to have become strangely atrophied by the thought of life and Yolanda Wilmont.

For a few brief moments Peter's troubled blue eyes dwelt on the lines of a well-formed girl sitting opposite him in the downtown subway express. Little suspecting the highly improper trend of his thoughts, Peter felt that he would like to lie down quietly somewhere with that girl and talk the situation over. He felt the need of a female confessor as well as entertainer. There had been too few women in his life. With a sense of panic he began to realize this as the imminence of his official betrothal confronted him. Quickly he averted his eyes. The girl was chewing gum. This girl, in spite of her lines, was definitely out of the picture. Well, was not life exactly like that? At its most alluring moments it suddenly began to chew gum in one's face. Revolted, Peter shrank slightly and returned to his paper.

It was not until he had reached the seclusion of his private office that the extra pair of drawers he was unconsciously wearing began to manifest themselves. Even then he was not aware of the exact nature of his difficulties. He experienced merely a sense of unwonted fullness—a growing sensation of insecurity. Suddenly, however, as the drawers gathered headway his alarm and discomfort became acute. In his anxiety forgetting that his office though private was not quite impenetrable, Peter allowed his trousers to descend several inches, the better to deal with the perplexing situation.

Miss Josephine Duval, armed with the morning mail, entered the room quietly and closed the door behind her. For a moment she allowed her cool but curious gaze to dwell on the orange and black stripes decorating all that could be seen of the southern exposure of Mr. Peter Van Dyck's shorts.

'Looks like summer awnings,' she observed more to herself than to her employer. 'And to think I never suspected!'

With a low moan of distress Peter's body went into a huddle as only a body can when plunged into such a situation.

'Haven't you got sense enough to get out!' he demanded, twisting a strained but indignant face over his shoulder.

'I have the sense, but not the power,' Miss Duval retorted calmly. 'Your condition has robbed me of that.' 'For God's sake,' the man almost chattered, 'hurry! suppose some one should come in and find you here?'

'I'm all right,' said Miss Duval. 'It's you who would give rise to comment.'

Something was slipping farther and farther down the right leg of Peter's trousers, slipping stealthily but relentlessly to the floor. And the trouble was that Peter, not suspecting the presence of a stowaway, visualized the worst. What a fearful picture he must be presenting from the rear, yet the front view would not improve matters any. How could such a demeaning thing happen to a man in this day and age?

'Won't you please go way?' he asked in an agitated voice. 'What would people think?'

'Well,' replied Jo with dispassionate deliberation, 'from the trouble you seem to be having with your trousers, people might get the impression you'd asked me in here to watch you do tricks with your shorts.'

'What's that!' exclaimed Peter, more upset by the girl's attitude than by her words. 'Oh, you're fired. There's no doubt about that. This time you're through for good.'

'Do you realize that I could play a decidedly dirty trick!' Jo inquired lightly.

'What do you mean!' asked Peter, his fingers furtively fumbling with various buttons.

'If I should scream now—' began Jo, but was interrupted by Peter's heartfelt, 'Oh, my God!'

'If I should begin to shout and rush about,' she continued, as if savouring the idea, 'there's not a jury in the world that wouldn't convict you of at least breach of promise.'

'Swear to God I never knew there was such a woman in the world,' Peter Van Dyck replied in an emotional voice as if appealing to some unseen audience. 'If you'll only go away and let me finish what I'm doing you'll not be fired.'

'How about all this mail?' she demanded.

'Am I in a condition to go into that now?'

'I should say not,' said the girl. 'You don't know how awful you are.'

'Then don't trouble to tell me. I can very well imagine.'

'Before I go,' Josephine continued, placing the letters on the desk, 'would you mind explaining what was in your mind when you got yourself into this terrible condition?'

'I don't know,' Peter answered. ' And I fail to see how it's any of your business.'

'Well, it's a sight a young lady doesn't see every day of her life,' replied Jo. 'Especially in an office building and at this time of day.'

'I don't make a practice of it,' Peter retorted, with an attempt at dignity.

'I wouldn't,' Miss Duval assured him. 'There's an unpleasant suggestion of senility about it. And by the way, if you're looking for an extra pair of drawers you'll find them sticking out of the right leg of your trousers. Although why you want two pairs I can't for the life of me understand. The ones you have on are giddy enough.'

As the door closed quietly on his tormentor, Peter Van Dyck reached down, and, seizing the offending drawers, hurled them furiously in the general direction of the waste basket, upon the edge of which they sprawled unbecomingly.

'Damn my absent mind,' he muttered, 'and damn that woman's impudence. What a decidedly unpleasant occurrence! She actually seemed to enjoy it. These modern girls … '

A few minutes later Jo briskly followed her perfunctory knock into the room and found her employer wearily seated at his desk. He was gloomily scanning a letter.

'Oh,' exclaimed Miss Duval amicably. 'Quite an improvement. All tucked in, I see.'

Before Peter had time to think up a fitting retort, William, the office handy-man, entered the room and cast about for something on which to exercise his talents. Spying the drawers dangling over the waste-paper basket, he held them aloft admiringly.

'Fine pair o' drawers, these,' he observed in a conversational tone of voice. ' A real fancy pair. Begging your pardon, sir, but are they yours, Mr. Peter?'

Mr. Peter preferred not to notice William's polite inquiry. Jo saw fit to bring it to his attention.

'William wants to know,' she said in level tones as she seated herself in a chair with her dictation pad open on her knee, 'William is anxious to find out if those—if that florid object belongs to you.'

'Tell him they don't,' Peter mumbled unhappily.

'It would be more manly if you spoke of such things yourself,' the girl replied. 'However—he says they're not his, William.'

'Well, I'd like to know how they got here, then,' William continued stubbornly. 'All spread out like that. They must be his.'

If William had not emptied many a waste-paper basket for Peter's departed father, the man would have been fired on the spot. As it was, a friendship of many years now stood in serious danger of an open break.

'Is there any reason why you should doubt my word about those drawers?' Peter asked the man coldly. 'Some one might have left them here as a sample.'

At this William shook the drawers playfully and chuckled his incredulity.

'Not these, Mr. Peter,' he declared. 'We're in the coffee business.'

'Well, even coffee merchants are supposed to have some self-respect,' replied Peter.

'Not the coffee merchant who wore these,' asserted William, with a wise shake of his head. 'Couldn't keep much self-respect in them things. They'd suit my Alf to a tee. He'd go crazy about them drawers with their funny little pink dots.'

'I'll damn well go crazy myself if you don't get them out of my sight,' Peter assured his handy-man.

'Yes, William,' put in Jo Duval. 'Why not take them through the office and inquire of the gentlemen if they have lost a pair? We might be able to find a home for them that way.'

'No need to do that,' said Peter hurriedly. ' Take 'em home to Alf with my compliments. Do anything with them you like so long as you let me hear no more upon the subject. I'm completely exhausted by drawers.'

'Thanks, Mr. Peter,' the grateful man replied, giving the garment a possessive flirt as he made his way to the door. ' As neat a little pair o' drawers as ever I laid eyes on. All full of funny pink spots, they are.'

'William is getting old,' observed Peter Van Dyck, to break the pause following the man's departure. 'I'll have to lay him off with a pension one of these days.'

'Wouldn't mind a little bit of that sort of thing myself,' replied Jo, carelessly crossing her legs and fixing her employer with a level gaze. 'Why don't you pension yourself off, for a change? You're not interested in business.'

'What makes you say a thing like that?'

'Well, obviously a man who has such playful ideas in drawers can hardly be expected to keep his mind on work.'

'Is that so?' grumbled Peter. ' You've been with this company altogether too long. Take a couple of letters.'

Jo indulged in a short but ironical laugh.

'What's wrong now?' he asked suspiciously.

'I was only thinking that while you're dictating letters to me,' she replied easily, 'William is probably exhibiting your disinherited drawers to the entire office force.'

'Take a couple of letters, nevertheless,' said Peter Van Dyck, with characteristically Dutch stubbornness. 'Just because an old fool chooses to make a public display of a private affair, I can't leave the coffee business flat.'

'What a man!' remarked Joe in a low, admiring voice.

Once more he regarded her suspiciously.

'How long have you been with us?' he asked.

'Much longer than I expected to remain in a purely professional capacity,' she told him.

'I very much doubt if you could remain long purely in any capacity,' said Peter, feeling a little set up by his unexpected burst of repartee.

'Some girls might take that amiss,' said Jo, 'but I consider it a compliment. I didn't think you knew.'

'Knew what?'

'My attitude—my moral outlook.'

'Oh, I don't know that,' he said hastily. 'And I don't want to find out. You take too many liberties as it is. If you hadn't been here already when I took over the reins, I'd have fired you on sight.'

'And driven the business into a ditch,' Jo replied complacently. ' You haven't the foggiest idea where anything is—not even the most personal of things such as your—'

'Don't let's go into that again,' he interrupted.

'I have no desire to,' she assured him.

But Peter Van Dyck was destined to take up the matter of drawers once more before it was definitely dropped. There was a scrambling noise outside the door, a nervous scraping on the glass partition, then the door flew open and Freddie, the small but aggressive office boy, excitedly waving the erstwhile drawers of his employer, hurried into the room with William close at his heels.

'Beg your pardon, sir,' said Freddie, waving the spotted garment in the indignant William's face, 'but ain't these drawers yours? He says they're his. I saw you with my own eyes—you had 'em on one day when you were in the—'

'Stop! Stop!' cried Peter Van Dyck in a stricken voice. 'And please close the door.'

'Here's a go,' murmured Jo Duval. 'Those drawers seem to have a mind of their own.'

Peter Van Dyck looked hatefully at her, then drummed distractedly on his desk. Once his glance strayed in the direction of the drawers. With an effort he averted his fascinated eyes. Finally he spoke. His voice was low and cultured. In it was a note of despair.

'Freddie,' he said, 'those drawers are the property of William. They are his without let or hindrance—his irrevocably. Do you understand that, Freddie? Then hand those drawers back to William who I hope to God will put them in his pocket and take them home to Alf. If he doesn't I'm going to fire you all, and that includes you.' His eves burned with bitterness as he studied the expression of bland enjoyment on his secretary's face. His voice gathered volume. 'And as for you, Freddie, if you kept your eyes more on your business and less on other people's drawers you might grow up to be a coffee broker yourself some day.' He paused to consider his words. Somehow this rebuke of Freddie seemed to lack in strength what it gained in dignity. Once more his eyes were attracted to the drawers; then his dignity and self-control departed. He rose, spluttering. ' William,' he thundered, 'if you don't take those miserable drawers away I'll drag yours off your baggy-looking legs.'

'No need to get personal,' Jo reminded the aroused man.

'What!' cried Peter. 'I'd like to drag yours off, too.'

'Thanks,' she answered. 'Hadn't you better ask the gentlemen to withdraw first?'

'Oh!' said Peter as if stung to the quick. 'Oh, my God!' He sank back in his chair and held his forehead in his hands. 'That will be all about drawers for this morning,' he said at last. 'Please leave the room quietly with—with them. Don't bring them back.'

When Freddie and William and the drawers had departed, silence reigned in the room. Peter looked wearily out of the window. He was considering whether it would not be simpler to hurl himself through it. The door opened and William thrust in an apologetic head.

'Sorry, Mr. Peter,' he said. ' I kept telling young Freddie that just because he happened to see you yanking 'em up once it didn't mean you were going to wear 'em all the time. He hasn't gumption enough to know that a gentleman changes his—'

'Can't you explain to William?' Peter interrupted, turning appealingly to Josephine. 'He doesn't seem to understand.'

'William,' said the girl quietly, 'Mr. Van Dyck is too upset to hear any more about his drawers to-day.'

'Ever,' put in Peter.

'Yes, William,' Jo continued. ' Don't ever talk to Mr. Peter about his drawers again. Talk about something else—his socks, for instance.'

Peter winced. His eyes were filled with disgust.'

Thank you, miss,' said William. ' I'll try to remember. You said his socks, didn't you?'

'yes,' replied Jo. 'His socks, although from his expression he doesn't seem so fond of those either.'

'The door—the door!' grated Peter. 'Close it on your horrid face, William.' The door was closed.

'Did you want to dictate a couple of letters?' Jo asked imperturbably.

'Yes,' replied Peter. ' Take a couple of letters.' For some time he sat in gloomy concentration, then abandoned the effort. 'Oh, hell,' he said, 'I can't think of one letter, much less two.'

'I'll answer them for you,' Jo assured him soothingly. 'You need a long rest.' She looked him over appraisingly. 'Wonder how Alf's going to look in those—'

A strangling sound from Peter cut short her sentence.

'Go!' he whispered, pointing to the door with a trembling finger. 'Get out! I don't give a damn how Alf looks.'

'You should consult a doctor,' she told him as she prepared to leave the room. 'There's something preying on your mind. Do you drug, perhaps?'

'Do I what!' demanded Peter.

'Do you drug?' she answered simply.

'No,' he replied confronting her, 'but I can still drag, and that's what I'll damn well do to you if you don't get out of here.'

With a glance of deep commiseration Josephine gracefully left the room. The provocative fragrance of her perfume lingered in the air. Peter Van Dyck wondered why he did not discharge the girl. Little did he realize that her perfume was one of the reasons.

Chapter 2 ON A PARK BENCH

SEVERAL hours after these undignified happenings Peter Van Dyck emerged from a restaurant in which he had been lone-wolfing, being able to think of no language fit for decent conversation. In the crowd outside the door Josephine Duval caught sight of his slim and dejected-looking shoulders. Without a moment's hesitation the young lady abandoned her window-shopping and blithely set off to dog the footsteps of her employer. Having snatched a glimpse of the girl out of the tail of his eye, Peter immediately divined her intention. This stalking procedure had occurred more than once. Accordingly he quickened his pace. Emphatically he assured himself he had seen quite enough of his secretary for one day. She was a creature totally lacking in either pride or pity. Several times he glanced back to ascertain if his dodging tactics had succeeded in eluding pursuit. Each time he was disappointed. Josephine was still there—grimly there. A most annoying situation. Disgraceful. Why was she making no effort to cut down the distance? Was it torture? Peter was seized by a nervous impulse to take to his heels and run. However, he checked himself, feeling convinced that Jo would have no compunction in doing likewise. She might even find it amusing to shout his name through the streets. Hang it all, what did the girl want with him, anyway? The street was littered with unattached men. Why did she not confine her attentions to one or more of them? He was an engaged man. Within a few short hours he would be a doubly engaged man. Officially hooked if not spliced. Vaguely he wondered whether he was endeavouring to elude Josephine or the thought of that engagement. He crossed over to Battery Park and sat down on a bench close to the water-front. The fragrance of Jo's perfume still lingered in his nostrils. Presently it grew stronger. He stirred restlessly. She was there.

'You'll be late at the office,' he announced, without turning his head.

'I'll say I was out with you,' said a small voice beside him. 'And I'll say you deliberately followed me through the streets of New York,' he told her.

Would you like the office to know that?' asked Jo.

'No. I would not.'

'Then why not be friendly?'

'I'm quite friendly enough for a person who wants to commit murder. In fact, I'm damned patient. Don't let's talk, then people won't suspect we know each other.'

'Why won't they suspect?'

'They'd never think that a person like me would talk to a girl like you.'

Jo considered this insult judicially while swinging her small feet.

'Oh, I don't know,' she said at last. 'You don't look so awful.'

'What?' exclaimed the man indignantly. 'You entirely misunderstood my meaning.'

'Peter?' In a very small voice.

'Yes.' Grudgingly. 'Mr. Van Dyck to you.'

'Your father called you Peter.'

'Well, you're not my father.'

'But I helped to bring you up in the business. It's been three years now.'

'Seems longer.'

'Does it? Well, it hasn't been long enough to make a coffee man of you.'

'Is that so?'

'Yes, that's so. You're a hell of a coffee man.' Peter looked pained.

'It doesn't speak well for your teaching,' he said.

'You never give me a tumble. Don't even call me Jo. Everybody else in the office calls me Jo.'

'What do I call you?'

'You don't call me anything. It's "Please take a letter," or "How do you feel to-day?" or "Sorry to keep you late." Never any name. To you I'm a nameless woman. Might just as well be a—a—little bastard for all you care.'

This time Peter was profoundly shocked. He actually looked at the girl beside him. His eyes held a mixture of alarm and disapproval.

'Don't use bad language,' he said.

'Why not use bad language?' she retorted. 'You flaunt your drawers in my face.'

'Is that quite fair?' he asked her. 'You stormed into my private office. Didn't stop to knock. And there I was. That's all there is to it.'

Jo laughed tragically.

'So that's all there is to it,' she flung back with a mean sneer. 'I suppose you think I'm going to be satisfied with that—a mere matter of drawers.'

When Peter looked at her this time, alarm had utterly routed disapproval.

'My God!' he managed to get out. 'What do you mean about not being satisfied with that?'

'Exactly what I said,' she replied. 'I want to see all. Everything! It's the whole hog or nothing—that's how I am.'

Peter felt his reason slipping. He could not believe his ears.

Well,' he said at last, 'all I can say is that it's not a very nice way to be. It must be your French blood.'

'I don't care whose blood it is,' she replied stubbornly. ' I want to see all.'

'Let me get this straight,' said Peter. ' Do you mean all of me?'

Josephine looked him over from head to foot. Peter felt a little undressed. Then suddenly she began to laugh. ' You'd look awfully funny,' she said at last, as if actually seeing him that way. ' What a fright! Imagine!'

'Don't trouble yourself,' said Peter acidulously. ' I'm not exactly deformed, you know.'

Jo stopped laughing and regarded him through moist eyes.

'I don't believe it,' she said. ' You're hiding something from me.'

'Do you expect me to walk about my office naked?' he asked.

'After this morning I don't know what to expect.'

Peter Van Dyck shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

'I'd prefer not to continue this conversation,' he remarked coldly. 'No good can come of it.'

'Very well,' replied Jo. 'Let's sit like a couple of bumps on a log.'

'You may sit as you jolly well please,' replied Peter. 'However, I don't see why you are sitting here at all.'

'Why don't you push me off?'

'Nothing would please me more, but I'm too much of a gentleman.'

'You mean, you're afraid,' she taunted.

'Please be quiet.'

'I suppose you're afraid Mr. Morgan or some other international banker might come along and see us talking together?'

I am,' replied Peter.

Well, listen to me, Mr. Peter Duane Van Dyck. If one of those old bozos got an eyeful of me he'd give you money instead of lending it to you.'

'You seem to fancy yourself.'

'I know my own value, and that's more than you do,' she retorted. 'I've a good mind to sell my body to an international banker.'

'I wish to God you'd sell it to an international vivisectionist and have done with it,' Peter asserted brutally.

'Why?' she inquired. 'Does my body bother you?'

'Not at all. It means nothing to me.'

'You mean you can take it or leave it—just as you please?'

'Will you kindly keep quiet? I've a lot of things to think about. If I could take it and leave it somewhere else I'd feel much better.'

Several minutes of silence passed. Josephine's gaze was idly sweeping the harbour. Presently she spoke.

'Peter,' she said.

'Yes,' replied Peter. 'What is it now?'

'Do you see that liner?'

'Can't help seeing that liner. It's blocking up the whole harbour.'

Jo snaked her supple young body close up beside her employer.

'Would you like to be on that liner, Peter?' she asked him.

'Listen,' protested Peter. 'Are you trying to sit on my knees? We're huddled up together on this bench like a couple of lost waifs. It's not a cold day.'

'Sorry, Peter. Wasn't looking where I was going. But you haven't answered my question. Would you like to be on that liner?'

Peter considered the girl briefly; then his gaze returned to the outbound ship now stepping delicately on her way to open water. The bay glinted with sunlight, and its blue was very blue indeed. Like a virgin murmuring indiscreetly in her dreams, the soft air spoke of summer, of summer and secret places remote from the haunts of man. There was a note of promise too in the voice of the old gentleman who owned the long telescope gleaming on its tripod.

'Visit the harbour and its institutions without budging your feet an inch! The Statue of Liberty and Governor's Island—all points of interest like as if you was there in the flesh.'

Moodily Peter watched a customer tentatively approach a self-conscious eye to the telescope and begin his visit to the harbour. Peter followed the movements of the man with some anxiety. He wondered what point of interest the fellow was visiting now. Was he seeing anything at all or just pretending to, as most people did when involved with the end of a telescope? Peter had peered through a telescope once. There had been certain things on the moon—mountains, craters, or warts, for all he had been able to discover. He had lied about that moon. Said he had seen everything. Dwelt on the wonder of it all. Inwardly he had suffered from a sneaking sense of guilt and frustration. This visitor to the harbour was doubtless experiencing similar difficulties. That dusty mop of a dog curled up under the instrument knew perfectly well that the visitor was seeing nothing—less than nothing. They never did. For a moment the dog leered cynically at Peter, then transferred his gaze to a sparrow. He would dearly love to chew on some of that sparrow.

Now the liner was spreading her wake along the channel. Soon she would find the sea. What the hell was wrong with him, anyway? Mooning here on a park bench with an impudent chit of an office girl for a companion. Maybe it was spring fever. Then maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was the thought of that cocktail party. He rather more than suspected it was. After the party he was scheduled to take Yolanda to some stuffy house party in New Jersey over the week-end. Not much comfort in that. Peter objected to house parties. Bridge, booze, and boredom. Gay laughter as false as hell. Feeble wisecracks and smart talk—the smug assurance of one's daily bread whether school kept or not. Golf links, motor cars, tennis courts, and swimming pools —all the paraphernalia of good, clean sport. Healthy bodies and tanned hides. Thoughts and manners cast in the same mould, case-hardened with the same prejudices and polished with the same culture. And here this poor devil, having paid his ten cents, stood all straddled out vainly endeavouring to snatch a moment's enjoyment from the end of a telescope. The subtle invitation of Jo's perfume once more assaulted his nerves. Peter liked that perfume, and the fact that he suspected he also liked its owner a little more than was seemly made him deliberately hostile.

'You haven't answered my question,' she said.

'What question?' asked Peter uneasily.

'About that liner. How would you like to be on her?'

'I'd like it,' said Peter surprisingly.

'You mean us?' put in Jo. 'Just you and I… outward bound… springtime in France… windows on the sea—think of it, Peter. Just you and I. Married, perhaps, or almost the same thing.'

Peter gasped at the immoral conclusion to this lyrical outburst.

'I'd jump off the ship,' he said.

'Oh no, you wouldn't,' the girl replied with every show of confidence. 'If I had you alone for five minutes you'd jump in only one direction, and I'm too much of a lady to mention that.'

'Are you just naturally plain bad through and through?' Peter asked her. He was really interested to know.

'I'm what you've made me,' she answered humbly.

'What!' exclaimed Peter. ' I haven't done a thing to you.'

'I know. That's just the trouble. That's why I'm bad. Don't you realize a body has to be bad before it can plop down and be good?'

'I don't care to discuss bodies. Much rather swim after that ship.'

'Why don't you? I hope you drown.' Then with a sudden change in her voice, 'What's on your mind, Peter? You haven't been so gay lately.'

Her brown eyes studied the features of the man with their suggestion of gauntness. For a moment they rested on his expressive lips, broken by a faintly ironical twist. She moistened hers, then peered inquiringly into his eyes, unremarkable mild blue eyes, rather gentle and easily tired yet strangely capable of conveying a world of hidden meanings. He was not a good-looking man, yet Jo had always found him attractive. Especially his eyes, in which in spite of their apparent weariness he seemed to live most of his life. He was a kind of old young man to Jo, an old young man who had never been really young and who never would grow really old. He belonged to an unclassified type—no three-dimensional hero, Peter, yet very definitely himself. At present his eyes were haunted with all sorts of unexpressed difficulties.

'What's on your mind?' she repeated.

'Nothing definite,' said Peter, allowing his gaze to rest on the girl with a little less disapproval. 'You know. One of these cocktail teas—stupid things.'

Jo did not know. She was deeply interested, as are all daughters of Eve, in social functions in which they are not included.

'To-day?' she asked.

'After office,' said Peter. 'My aunt's doing it for Yolanda Wilmont. We get engaged at it—officially engaged and all that.'

All what?' she inquired suspiciously.

'Oh, just all that.'

'I hope you don't mean what I'm thinking,' said Jo.

'At my lowest moments,' he replied, ' I never could mean what you're thinking.'

'Thanks,' murmured Jo. 'What's she like? Of course, I've seen her pictures in the scandal sheets. They've given me many a good laugh.'

'You're just envious,' retorted Peter, hardly spirited enough to be stung to a defence of his fiancée.

'I might possibly be envious about all that,' she admitted, 'but certainly not about being engaged to you.'

'Neither am I,' replied Peter cryptically.

The girl cast him a swift look—a look of sparrow-like intelligence. She was snatching at crumbs of comfort now, yet at the same time finding room to feel a little bit sorry for Peter.

'So that's why you'd like to swim after that ship,' she observed in a thoughtful voice.

'After any ship,' said Peter.

I understand,' she answered.

'No, you don't,' replied Peter, suddenly getting up from the bench. 'As a matter of fact I'm very happy. I'm a decidedly lucky man.'

Of course you are, Peter,' she assured him.

This time he cast her a swift look.

'An exceptionally lucky man,' he reiterated with quite unnecessary emphasis. 'Getting far more than I deserve, in fact.'

'Now you're talking,' said Jo. 'Much more than you deserve, and you're pretty bad.'

'What do you mean by that?'

'I don't mean anything, Peter. I'm agreeing with you.'

'Well, don't,' he snapped. 'I dislike the way you do it. Anyway, it's time to get back to the office. Can't remember ever spending a more trying luncheon hour.'

'Would you believe it?' said Josephine. 'It's been much longer than that. Time passes so quickly for a young girl when she meets an interesting, middle-aged party'

'Middle-aged hell. How old are you?'

'Swear to God I'm twenty-four, mister.'

'Well, I'm only ten years older.'

'Just the right age, although you do look a wee bit faded.'

'The right age for what?' Peter was unwise enough to want to know.

'For fatherhood,' she told him, looking glowingly up into his face.

Some hidden strain of old Dutch modesty forced Peter to lower his lids.

'Come,' he said. 'We're going back to the office.'

But before they left, their eyes sought the liner nosing far down the Narrows. Jo gave a little sigh, the wistful ghost of a great big wish. In Peter's eyes the harassed look had deepened. It was verging on the desperate now.

Chapter 3 REVELATION OF THE LEGS

THE day was dragging on, and by now that liner must be far out at sea. Peter sat thinking about it. In his thoughts were mingled fleeting visions of Yolanda Wilmont and Josephine Duval. What was it all about, all this uneasy speculation, this sensation of approaching loss and separation? Separation from what, from whom? Obviously, he must be in love with Yolanda Wilmont—had been in love with her for years. That was all settled, one of the established facts of his life. She was beautiful, she was cultured, and she seemed to find nothing especially wrong with him. Of course, she had never allowed either herself nor him to become in any sense intimate on the strength of this engagement of theirs. She was not at all like that. Just the opposite of this Duval woman. That was something to be thankful for—but was it? Peter wondered. On the other hand, he seriously doubted if one man could last long with an oversexed creature like Josephine without calling in outside assistance, which did not make for a happy married life. Josephine was impossible. He failed to know why he was thinking about her at all. What business had that brazen vixen preening herself in his thoughts? She was merely his private secretary, an efficient one, but forward. She, too, had become a fixture in his life. His father had found her amusing, but then, the elder Van Dyck had been a loose liver after office hours. He had found any good-looking wench amusing. Peter was not like that. He had never had the chance. As he sat there thinking, he found himself rather envying his father's disregard of convention. Closer than had any other Van Dyck immortalized in the family record, the old gentleman had approached the open ground of disreputability. He had been keenly alert to every female leg in the office, and he had personally seen to it that every leg in the office was first-rate. Yet every one had been fond of old Peter Van Dyck, including his son. Young Peter had been too greatly occupied fearing the consequences of his father's ambitious but questionable experiments to embark on any of his own. Many a father has lost his morals in saving those of a son, although it is highly problematical that the elder Van Dyck had this idea in mind as he tidily tottered among his vices. His interest in Jo Duval, however, had been restrained to one of fatherly admiration mixed with a little fear and respect, emotions few women had ever inspired in him.

Peter's thoughts were interrupted by the entrance of Josephine Duval. Without so much as favouring him with a glance, she marched up to his desk, smacked down on it an intra-office memorandum, then turned and retraced her steps. At the door she paused and fixed him with a pair of glittering eyes. Peter quailed before their malevolence. In the way she closed the door behind her there was a suggestion of a challenge.

Why was this creature so disturbing? Peter wondered. At times, when it so pleased her mood, she acted exactly as if she were in a play. It wasn't natural. Imagine! This stalking into a man's office, then stalking out again with never a word. And what a look she had left behind—what a downright sinister look! What had she meant by that?

With the least interest in the world in intra-office routine Peter picked up the memorandum and glanced at it. Quite suddenly his bored expression changed to one of consternation. He read :

To PETER VAN DYCK, President:

The moment you consummate your marriage with Yolanda Wilmont (what a name!) I want my resignation to take effect. However, until that moment it's still anybody's game, catch-as-catch-can, and you're It.

Respectfully yours, JOSEPHINE DUVAL. P.S.—A carbon of this memorandum will be found in my files under 'Unfinished Business.'

As if it were scorching his fingers, Peter hastily destroyed the compromising slip of paper. This was going too far. He rang for his secretary.

'Haven't you got any better sense than to start in playing childish games with me?' he demanded.

'The games I intend to play with you will be far from childish,' she assured him.

Peter began to think this over, then decided it would be better to leave it alone.

'Sit down,' he said in a reasonable voice, 'and let's try to get things straight.'

Josephine flopped down and recklessly tossed one silken leg over the other.

'In the first place,' began Peter, 'why have you selected to-day of all days to deport yourself in an especially hellish manner?'

'I'm like this every day, only some days I let go,' she told him.

Peter considered this for a moment.

'Do you mean you're like this with everybody,' he inquired, 'or just with me?'

'Just with you,' she confided. 'If I was like this with everybody I'd have a much nicer time.'

'You don't mean nicer,' said Peter. 'You mean better, perhaps.'

'It's too fine a distinction for me to understand,' she replied. 'But it's the truth just the same. I let go only with you.'

'Why with me, may I ask? Do you regard me in the light of a small office boy—a person to tease?'

'Hardly,' she said. 'I regard you as a weak but adult male.'

'Apparently,' replied Peter. 'But would you mind not letting go with me, or try letting go with some one else, for a change?'

She looked at him thoughtfully.

'I'd rather not,' she said.

'So would I,' replied Peter, not realizing what he was saying.

'You mean you'd care if I let go with some one else?' she asked.

'Certainly not,' replied Peter. 'I don't care if you let go with Mahatma Gandhi, with all due respect to that gentleman.'

'It wouldn't be hard to let go with that one,' Jo observed. 'He has so very little to let go of.'

'That's neither here nor there,' said Peter impatiently. 'You'll have to stop letting go with me or I'll let go with you.'

'I'd like that,' replied the girl quite seriously.

'I mean, I'll have to let you go,' he corrected himself.

'You haven't even got me yet,' she answered.

'And I don't even want you,' said Peter.

'How do you know?' she demanded. 'You don't know anything about me. You don't know I live in New Jersey, that I support a drunken uncle, that I'm an orphan on both sides and sleep on the left. You don't know that I love salted almonds and that I don't earn enough money here to keep myself in nice underthings. You wear pure silk drawers. Don't tell me—I saw them with my own two eyes. What sort of drawers do you think I wear? Answer me that. What sort of drawers do you think I wear? Pure silk? Bah!'

'I'm sure I don't care to know that,' Peter interrupted. 'And please don't keep repeating the question.'

'No,' she sneered, 'you don't care to know. You're too much of a coward. Well, if you must know, I'll tell you. Thev're artificial silk—not all silk like yours—but the lace on 'em is real.'

'Must I know all these things?' asked Peter weakly.

'Certainly you must,' she snapped. 'You're dealing in human souls.'

'I had hoped to deal in coffee,' he replied with a show of bitterness, 'but you don't give me time to sell a bean.'

'I wouldn't be found dead in those things you have on,' she continued. 'Mine are better for less money.'

'No doubt,' Peter said coldly. 'But did it ever occur to you that I have no desire to be found dead in yours?'

'Of course you wouldn't,' she flung back. 'Not dead.'

Here she laughed significantly—suggestively, in fact. Peter Van Dyck was most unpleasantly impressed by the insinuating look that followed. Helplessly he turned his eyes to the window.

'I fail to see where all this is leading to,' he said at length. 'Hadn't you better take a couple of letters?'

'All right,' she retorted. 'Give me a couple of letters. It's better than getting nothing. But while we're on the subject, there's another thing you don't know.'

'I'm off the subject. Most definitely off it.'

'Well, you've got to know this,' she continued. 'One of the last things your father asked me to do was to make a man of you.'

'If you followed his ideas on that subject,' said Peter, you'd make a wreck of me instead of a man, I'm afraid.'

'You're certainly not the man he was,' she admitted with uncomplimentary readiness, 'but I'm going to do my best with the little there is.'

'That's very gracious of you, I'm sure. But let me get this straight. Do you intend to make a man of me or a wreck?'

'I'm going to wreck you,' said the girl, 'and enjoy myself doing it.'

'A nice young girl!' murmured Peter Van Dyck. 'An admirable character all round!'

'And while you're talking of nice young girls,' said Jo, 'you might as well know your father wasn't any too fond of that nice young girl of yours with the name of a fairy princess. And as for an admirable character—pish! I'd rather have a swell shape.'

'Couldn't you strive to develop both?'

'I'm fully developed as it is,' she asserted. 'If anything, a little too much so in places, but you'd never know that.'

'I have no desire to be further enlightened,' Peter hastened to assure her.

'You have no ambition,' said Jo.

'How about a couple of letters?' he asked.

'All right. How about 'em? I'd almost given those letters up.'

'And will you take the carbon of that memorandum out of your files?' he asked her.

'If you don't hurry up with those letters,' Jo replied, 'I'll take it out of the files and tack it on the bulletin board.' This threat so upset Peter that he in turn upset a box of paper clips. As he bent over to pick them up, he came face to face with Josephine Duval's knee. Some artists claim that the knee of a woman is not an object of beauty. No such claim could be made against Josephine Duval's knee. If an artist lived who, upon seeing Josephine's knee, did not want to do something more than paint it, he was not worthy of his brush. And the wonder of it was that Josephine had two knees. Peter Van Dyck was gazing at them both. It was an experience he never forgot—a revelation. For the first time in his life he realized that a woman's knees and legs were capable of expressing personality. And with this realization came the explanation of his distaste for the cocktail party and what it represented. In the course of his life he had seen a lot of Yolanda's legs, but never once during the period of this long association with them had he been moved by a desire to do anything other than look at them, and not so strongly moved at that. As Peter sat half crouching in his chair, it came to him, with a sense of having been cheated, that Yolanda's legs had never meant anything more to him than something to separate her body from the ground, something to move her about on from place to place. They might as well have been a pair of stilts or a couple of wheels. In spite of their gracious proportions they were totally lacking in personality. They exercised no fascination, no irresistible appeal. They were cold but beautiful legs. Josephine's legs were different. The more Peter looked at them the more he wanted to see of them. He frankly admitted this. Not only were they beautiful but also extremely interesting—breath-taking legs, legs seen once in a lifetime. He wondered what had been wrong with him not to have noticed them before. Why had he made this startling discovery at this late date, virtually at the very moment when he was going to become officially engaged to an altogether different pair of legs— to legs he would have to live with for the remainder of his days?

Josephine's voice cut in on his meditations.

'Have you decided to conduct your business in that weird position?' she asked. 'Or have you been seized suddenly by a cramp?'

'I'm not going to be like this long,' he answered, 'nor am I subject to cramp. I am merely thinking.'

'Then I think you're overdoing it,' said the girl. 'First thing you know you'll be having a rush of blood to the head.'

'I have one already,' replied Peter in an odd voice.

Slowly he straightened up, then sank back in his chair. Almost immediately he fell into a brown study, and although he was looking directly at Josephine his gaze seemed to pass through and far beyond her. The girl eyed him curiously. What had come over this man? Little did she suspect that what she had so often wanted to happen actually had happened without her knowledge or contrivance.

In the presence of this startling revelation Peter Van Dyck sat bemused. For the first time in his life he concentrated his mental forces on legs. How, he wondered, had a leg, a mere leg, the power to move a man so profoundly —to revolutionize his entire outlook on such matters? All legs were more or less alike, he argued, so much skin and so much bone. Take his own legs, for example. He had never derived any pleasure or satisfaction in contemplating their hungry contours, if they had any contours to contemplate. He supposed they had, yet he was not in any way moved when he cast his eyes on them unless it was by a feeling of distaste. As a matter of fact, he preferred not to look at his legs at all. He rather avoided them. Yet wherein were they so different from those of Josephine Duval? They were composed of the same elements, served the same purpose and reacted to the same external influences —heat, cold, kicks, and bites. Certainly mosquitoes did not differentiate between legs. About Jo's legs there was something impudent and piquant, a devil-may-care attitude. She had, morally speaking, a wicked pair of legs.

'Take a couple of letters,' he began in a dull, pre-occupied voice.

'That would be amusing for a change,' said Jo sweetly.

'Almost anything would be amusing for a change,' he agreed. 'Get on with it. This is to Mr. Benjamin Clarke. You have his address. Dear Ben.' Peter's eyes strayed downward. 'Dear Ben,' he resumed.

'Dear Ben twice?' asked Jo.

'Once or twice,' replied Peter. 'It doesn't matter. He knows who he is. Dear Ben: Referring to our recent conversation about knees and legs—'

'Pardon me,' smoothly interrupted the girl. 'Did I understand you to say knees and legs?'

'Means and ways,' corrected Peter.

'Were you and Ben discussing means and ways to knees and legs?' she asked him. 'You've got me all mixed up.'

'That doesn't matter either,' said Peter. 'I never discuss such subjects. You should know that.'

'It would do you a world of good,' she assured him. 'Please keep such advice to yourself.'

It was at this moment that Jo became aware of the direction of her employer's intent gaze.

'Are you, by any chance, looking at my legs?' she inquired in a pleased voice.

'Yes,' he answered. 'One can scarcely look at anything else.'

'You mean they're so attractive?'

'No. I mean they're literally all over the place.'

'If I'm not being too bold,' said the girl, 'would you mind giving me a rough idea of what you think of them?'

'I don't think of them,' he answered coldly. 'I look at them the same as I would look at a chair or a desk or —or—the Pyramids.'

'Go on,' she said in a dangerous voice. 'Why bring up the Pyramids?'

'I am trying to explain to you the impersonal attitude I take to your legs.'

Jo sprang from her chair. Her face was flaming, and from her eyes fire flashed through two angry tears.

'And I'd like to explain to you,' she said in a low voice, 'the personal attitude I take to your words. You may criticize my typing as much as you please, but I won't allow you to say a word against my legs. Your Yolanda may be able to afford better stockings, but taking her leg for leg she's a hunchback compared to me.'

'Aren't you getting your anatomy a trifle scrambled?' asked Peter in a collected voice.

'I'd damn well like to scramble yours all over the map,' she retorted. 'Hitting below the belt.'

'Quite,' replied Peter, coolly measuring her figure with his eyes. 'I should say about twelve inches or more.'

'I'm going to get out of this room,' she declared, 'and never come back into it again. If you want to hurl insults at me and talk in a low, lewd manner, you'll have to do it outside where every one can hear what a lecherous creature you are.'

'On your way to your desk,' he called after her pleasantly, 'will you be so good as to ask Miss Bryant to step in?'

'Sure,' she flung over her shoulder. 'I suppose you'll compare hers to Pike's Peak or the Empire State.'

'I'll have to consider them first,' said Peter.

The sound the door made when it closed had in it the quality of a curse.

Chapter 4 RIDING TO A FALL

BETTY BRYANT was not a bad-looking girl. Peter realized this when, a few minutes after Jo's impassioned exit, the young girl entered his office and stood waiting expectantly before his desk. Since the demoralizing revelation of his secretary's knees and legs Peter had begun to feel that he was looking at women through an entirely new and improved pair of eyes. Now, when it was almost too late to take advantage of his clearer vision, he was beginning to regret the opportunities he had missed in the past as well as those he would have to forego in the future. The situation was nothing less than tragic. Life owed him many unclaimed women. The reprehensible blood of the elder Van Dyck throbbed rebelliously in his veins.

'Miss Bryant,' he said, protecting sections of his features behind a letter, 'I wish you would toss on your hat and buy half a dozen pairs of stockings at one of the smarter shops in the district. Would you mind?'

Miss Bryant certainly would not mind. She would be glad to go to even greater lengths for Mr. Peter Van Dyck. She would, however, have been interested to know what clearly impure motives lay behind this unexpected request. From the little she could see of Peter's features she was convinced they did not belong to a thoroughly honest face.

'Have you any particular shade in mind, sir?' she asked him.

'Shade in mind?' repeated Peter. 'Er—oh yes, of course. Naturally.' He laughed for no reason. 'Flesh,' he announced, colouring slightly. 'I mean all shades. You know. All the fashionable shades. Youthful. They're for my Aunt Sophie. She has rather silly ideas—ambitions, one might say.'

'Oh,' said Miss Bryant. 'So they're for your aunt.'

'Yes,' retorted Peter. 'I said they were for my aunt. Why? Is it funny?'

'No. Oh no. Not at all. I was wondering what size stocking your Aunt Sophie wears, that's all.'

'Any size I give her,' replied Peter, striving to maintain a casual note in his voice. 'I should say about the same size as that Josephine Duval or any other girl her size.'

'I think I understand,' said Miss Bryant thoughtfully.

'I was very much afraid you would,' remarked Peter as he handed the young lady several crisp notes. 'And while you're about it, treat your own legs to a pair on the house,' he added. 'Fine feathers make fine birds, you know. Ha, ha! Capital!'

With her employer's false laughter ringing in her ears, Miss Bryant departed, wondering why she had never suspected him before of being mentally unsteady. These old families got that way in spots. Too bad.

When she had successfully fulfilled her mission and delivered the stockings to Peter, he summoned his secretary. Although she had flatly announced her intention of never entering his office again, Josephine Duval appeared almost immediately.

'What improper suggestions have you been making to that Bryant thing?' she demanded. 'She's gone light in the head all of a sudden.'

'I know nothing about that,' said Peter. 'She struck me as being an uncommonly sensible and willing young lady.'

'Willing, no doubt,' snapped Josephine, and laughed disagreeably.

'I particularly dislike the sound of that laugh,' said Peter, 'as well as the coarse implications behind it. Here are half a dozen pairs of stockings—pure silk stockings—all silk stockings, in fact. Yank a couple of them over your legs and let's hear no more on the subject. This has been a fruitless day, and it's not going to get any better.'

Josephine took the extended package and tore off its wrappings. For a moment there was silence in the office as she examined the contents with an experienced and rapidly calculating eye. Presently she turned and looked darkly at Peter Van Dyck.

'And for this,' she said, 'I suppose you expect to own me, body and soul.'

'I'm not interested in your soul,' Peter informed her curtly.

'Oh,' said Josephine, momentarily nonplussed. 'All right. It's a bargain. We'll let it go at a body.'

'I have no idea what you are planning on letting go,' Peter replied uneasily, 'but I strongly advise you to hold everything. And please get it into your head that I have no desire to own either your body or your soul.'

'How about a little loan?' Josephine suggested.

'Will you now go away and stop talking wildly,' said Peter. 'After all, I am your employer. You're supposed to be working here, you know, and not paying me little visits throughout the day.'

Josephine looked at him furiously.

'You're going to own my body,' she said between her teeth, 'if I have to ruin yours in the struggle.'

'An edifying picture,' Peter dryly observed. 'However, I shall keep on the alert.'

'If they weren't pure silk I'd cut these stockings to ribbons.'

'Glad you like them,' said Peter mildly. 'If I were you, I wouldn't carry them about with me in the office. People might talk.'

'I'll stick 'em down here,' she declared, thrusting the six pairs of stockings down the front of her dress, where they produced an interesting, not to say scandalous effect.

'If you go out there in that condition,' observed Peter, 'people will do more than talk. They'll swoon in your face. Even I, in full possession of all the facts, cannot suppress a pang of uneasiness.'

'You're responsible for my condition,' she flung back.

'Granted,' replied Peter reasonably. 'But I'm not responsible for what others might erroneously conclude was your condition.'

'Anyway, here I go,' said Josephine. 'We have a secret between us now.'

'It looks as if we have a great deal more than that,' Peter replied.

'Nobody will notice anything if I go like this,' the girl explained, placing her hands across her stomach.

'Oh no,' agreed Peter. 'They'll merely think I kicked you in a moment of playfulness, that's all. Please hurry. It upsets me to look at you the way you are.'

At the door Jo turned and glanced back at him.

'You can't tell me,' she said, 'you didn't have something else in your mind when you gave me these.'

The door closed behind her, and Peter leaned back in his chair. He was wondering himself exactly what he had in his mind in regard to Jo Duval. Time passed while Peter sat thus steadily accomplishing nothing. He had contributed very little to the success of the Van Dyck coffee business that day. Presently he stirred and reached for his watch. After thoughtfully considering the time of day it announced, he compared it with the clock on his desk.

To make assurance doubly sure, he rose, and, opening the door, glanced at the office clock. As he closed the door he got the impression that Betty Bryant was studying him with new interest. Perhaps there were others, he unhappily decided. Crossing the room to the window, he stood looking down on the narrow street. People were already turning their released expressions homeward. They were looking forward to a few hours of personal living, a few hours of individual freedom. Five p.m. was for them a daily declaration of temporary independence. Not so for him. He had to go home presently and let that damn cat out of the bag. He would much rather wring its neck. Was he not voluntarily thrusting his own neck into a noose for life? It was still not too late. Why not take a ferry-boat to Staten Island and live among the trees somewhere? Why not cross a bridge and lose himself in a swarm of unfamiliar streets? Why not scuttle through a tube and seek oblivion in a water-front speakeasy? There were any number of things he could do. As he stood there by the window, he became uneasily aware of the fog drifting through the street. Figures of men and women were cutting through it, zigzagging past one another, going north, going south, ducking down the side streets. Boys were whistling. Boys always were. Why? Why were they always whistling? From two rivers came the haunting voices of ships—tugs, liners, ferry-boats, yachts going up to pleasant moorings. Foggy as hell somewhere. What sort of mooring was he going up to? An anchorage for life. Maybe something would happen. Lots of things could happen in a fog. He turned from the window, walked slowly to the hat rack, and collected his hat and stick. As he bade his office staff good night, he felt he was saying good-bye. Josephine Duval had already gone.

The subway crowd was familiar, but not friendly. It was composed of individuals, each having tenaciously held ideas about his or her place on the platform. They knew where they wanted to go and how they wanted to go there, and nothing was going to stop them or change them or soften them. Looking slightly pained, Peter Van Dyck, with a delicate but nevertheless protesting arc in his back, allowed himself to be catapulted into a train in which he stood tightly wedged, suffering from a loss of both dignity and breath. He decided he was lucky to lose no more than that in such a frenzied stampede.

'If you don't stop doing that to me,' said a woman's voice somewhere in the neighbourhood of his chest, 'I'll slap you in the face.'

Peter's first reaction was to glance nervously about him to ascertain if the entire car had overheard the woman's intentions. Then he spoke in a low, reassuring voice in which was a note of appeal.

'I'm not doing it,' he whispered.

'Don't tell me that,' said the woman. 'Can't I feel? There you go, doing it again. You're getting a lot for a nickel ride, mister.'

'My God,' thought Peter, striving unsuccessfully to remove himself from the woman, 'what a thing for her to say!' Crouching over, he muttered to the top of a small hat, 'Madam, I can't help it. I'm—'

'Do you mean you've lost control of yourself?' the woman's voice cut in.

'No,' he protested. 'I can't think of what I'm doing.'

'I don't like to think of what you are doing,' the woman continued. 'Lay off, that's all. Do you want me to scream for help?'

Straining his neck down and to the side, Peter succeeded in getting a glimpse of his accuser. It was as he had been suspecting for the past few moments. She was there—Jo.

Peter did not know whether to be relieved by this or alarmed.

'Don't go on like that,' he pleaded.

'Don't you go on like that,' she told him. 'Should be ashamed of yourself. Of all the things to do.'

'But what in God's name am I doing?' he asked in desperation.

'To explain what you're doing would be even more embarrassing than to submit to it,' she told him with elaborate dignity.

'It can't be as bad as all that,' he said.

'I'd hate it to get any worse,' she replied, 'at least with so much public about, I would.'

'It is too close for decency,' agreed Peter.

'You seem to find it so,' she retorted. 'Suppose they knew at the office?'

'Knew what?'

'Never mind about what. You know perfectly well. I hate that sort of thing—that type of man.'

'So do I,' replied Peter earnestly. 'The very idea is revolting to me.'

'Then obviously, you don't believe in letting your left hand know what your right hand is doing,' she retorted. 'Both of my hands are busy,' he declared.

'Don't I know that?' said Jo. 'I'd call them frantic. Only married couples should be allowed to travel in the subway during rush hours.'

'What did you do with the stockings?' he asked her, hoping to change the subject.

'You couldn't get closer to them unless you put them on,' she assured him.

'Then they're still in the same place?'

'Either there or hanging on my backbone.'

'How ghastly!'

'It's your fault if they are,' she replied. 'Do you still intend to go through that mock engagement announcement?'

'Why not?' demanded Peter.

'Shouldn't think you'd have the nerve after this ride.'

'Don't be silly.'

'I'm not being silly when I tell you,' she replied quite seriously, 'that I doubt very much if you get yourself engaged to-day.'

Peter glanced quickly down into her upturned face. In her eyes he read an expression of grim determination. For some reason her portentous threat or warning did not strike the disagreeable note one might have expected. Peter received it almost with a feeling of relief. In fact, he found in her words a fragile straw of salvation. If it would have served to delay the formal betrothal announcement, Peter would have welcomed a localized earthquake. So far as his engagement to Yolanda was concerned, he found himself strictly neutral. He was on the fence. It was not as if he wanted to call the engagement off definitely and for ever. Peter simply did not know. Why had they not gone through with it several years ago, instead of waiting until the idea had grown stale? No. Yolanda had wanted to travel on the Continent unattached. She had wanted to develop her art. She had wanted to enjoy her position as a much sought after debutante. She was one of those young ladies who wanted Life with a capital L, yet who would not know what to do with it should it come to her. She had wanted ever so many things and she had got all of them. And in the background she had also wanted Peter, Peter in a waiting capacity safely packed in ice. She was such a glittering, assured sort of person, so certain to be right, so well versed in all the social amenities. She would be quite a comfort when people called, as they inevitably would call, in droves—dumb, well-dressed, well-nourished, chatty little droves of really nice people. Peter wondered unhappily in his increasing morbidness what they were going to do with all the people who called. Where were they going to put them? How deal with them? The years ahead presented themselves to Peter as pillars in an endless hall lined with nice people who shook hands and chatted delightfully about non-essentials.

And all the while he was puzzling over these things, Jo was looking up into his troubled, rather sensitive face from beneath the heavy lashes of her amused but devoted eyes.

'Hang it all,' he said at last, 'why do you like me, anyway? I should think you'd fall for a truck driver or a professional wrestler or a strong man, or for one of those great big silent chaps who make the maximum amount of empire on the minimum amount of words. The movies are full of them. Look at me—I'm virtually a physical and mental wreck. Might just as well be an idiot. I catch cold almost always, my nose gets red in the winter and even worse in the summer—frost and sunburn vie for honours—I probably snore enormously and, as you know for yourself, I don't even know how many pairs of drawers I'm wearing half the time, whereas during the other half I dare say I'm not wearing any drawers at all. I'm quite impossible any way you look at it.'

'I realize all that,' she said, 'but I bet you know a lot of dirty stories, and I fairly wallow in those.'

Peter groaned spiritually. This creature was beyond belief—literally incredible. And to think that he had been in the same office with her for three whole years, and before that his father had been subjected to the same demoralizing influence. Perhaps that accounted for the old gentleman's perennial bloomings.

'Furthermore,' the girl's voice continued, 'professional wrestlers and strong men and those silent birds you mentioned are notoriously moral. They hold deep-rooted convictions and have exceedingly piggish ways. Now you —you're quite another proposition. Without realizing it you are so morally flexible that you must have been born corrupted. I'd much rather live amid physical ruins than stagnate amid moral perfection.'

'Your sentiments and opinions do us both credit, I'm sure,' observed Peter Van Dyck. 'What sort of life are you planning for me to live with you—one of pillage, rape, and arson?'

'Pillage and arson, perhaps,' she said briefly. 'The other will not be necessary.'

'Aren't you getting off soon?' asked Peter.

'Yes,' she replied as the train lurched into Times Square. 'Right here. Good-bye, for the moment, and don't be surprised at anything that happens. Remember, I'm on your side.'

Peter's gaze followed her through the door of the train and out on to the platform. As she looked back at him Josephine decided she had never seen a more lost and miserable expression in any man's eyes. Being of a primitive nature, she still had room for pity. Her scheme for helping this man and at the same time helping herself crystallized there in her mind as Peter's train drew out. Tossing her shopping expedition to the winds, she boarded the next up-town express.

On her way to 72nd Street she revolved many desperate remedies in her mind. At the same time she found occasion to congratulate herself for having come to a decision while still in the subway, for thus she had saved the price of another fare. Jo was passionate about everything—even thrift.

Chapter 5 LITTLE ARTHUR IN QUEST OF DRAWERS

LITTLE ARTHUR'S aggrieved meditations on the greater advantages enjoyed by second-storey men in providing themselves with the drawers of others had led him far afield. As a result of these meditations he had momentarily yielded to the temptation to stray adventurously a little outside the professional limits of his calling. Having established the fact that Central Park was virtually barren of loot of the smaller species, he found himself this afternoon wandering watchfully through the streets of the West 70's, his disarmingly mild blue eyes constantly on the alert for a convenient house to second-storey. Once he had selected a suitable subject for his nefarious project, he had certain ideas of his own in regard to carrying it to a successful conclusion.

After tentatively weighing the pros and cons of an area-way that impressed his sensitive nature with its unmistakable air of good breeding, Little Arthur proceeded down it until it eventually terminated in Martha, one of the trimmest of the Van Dyck maids. The kitchen being unchaperoned at the moment, Little Arthur with his usual subtleness prevailed upon Martha to invite him in for a cup of tea. He achieved this by convincing the guileless maid that in him she was beholding not merely one of the offshoots but absolutely the very flower itself of depression.

Presently, seated at the kitchen table and made confidential by a cup of tea, the two of them were bending their heads prettily over the tepidly glowing allurements of a spurious ruby ring.

'Wouldn't be a bit surprised,' Little Arthur admitted softly, 'if that gem hasn't belonged in its time to one of them far-Indian potentates.'

'No!' exclaimed young Martha. 'You don't mean ter say? One of them redskins like?'

'How should I know,' put in Little Arthur, 'not ever rightly having seen the colour of this here potentate's skin? May have been red. May have been brown. May have been as white as the back of me hand.'

The back of Little Arthur's hand somewhat spoiled the effect of this ill-chosen comparison.

'That far-Indian potentate wouldn't have been so white, at that,' remarked the maid, Martha, prompted no doubt by that nasty streak which lies ever close to the surface in all members of her sex.

Little Arthur delicately removed his hand from the critical examination of the girl's frankly sceptical eyes.

'It's the hand of an honest man, at any rate,' said he with a note of bitterness.

'Mean ter say this old potentate's hands weren't strictly honest?' Martha's large grey eyes grew larger and a little frightened.

'I keep telling you I never met this here far-Indian potentate,' Little Arthur protested, amazed by the hopeless irrelevance of the feminine mind. 'But you know how them potentates are.'

'No,' the girl admitted quite frankly. 'I don't know much about potentates. How are they, now?'

'Well,' replied Little Arthur, heartily wishing he had never brought up the subject, 'you can't quite say how they are. They sort of take things when they fancy 'em—like women and gold and jewels.'

'Maybe this jewel belonged to one of this potentate's women,' said Martha in an awed voice. 'Think of it! This jewel being on the hand of one of his favourite slaves! Guess she didn't need to wear much more than that.'

Little Arthur embodied his disapproval of the trend of the girl's remarks in a slightly offended cough.

'I hope,' he replied, 'that the lady who wore that ring was a step above a harem hussy.'

'What's a harem really like, mister?' Martha asked him wistfully. 'I've often wanted ter know.'

A gentle pink was finding its way into Little Arthur's ears. The conversation was becoming increasingly more difficult to maintain. Once more he endeavoured to signify his disapproval through the medium of an especially refined cough.

'Shouldn't think you'd want to fill your head with a lot of truck like that,' he observed with some severity.

'But I do, mister,' pleaded the maid. 'Go on and tell me. The movies make 'em fine.'

Fearing lest refusal might endanger the outcome of his enterprise, Little Arthur compromised with his scruples as have many an artist before him. He made a brave attempt.

'Well,' he began, 'a harem, properly speaking, is sort of like a nursery only for grown-ups, yer understand. It's a place where you sort of have fun in and lark about.'

'I knew you had fun,' admitted Martha innocently, 'but I'd never heard about that nursery part before. Sounds kinda dull.'

From beneath eyebrows arched in pain, Little Arthur distastefully regarded the girl.

It's like that,' he said shortly. 'Dull. Now about this here jewel. I—'

'Always thought I'd like to join one of them harem places,' Martha interrupted dreamily. 'Dancing all dayand resting on piles of pillars… eating fruit and drinking wine and telling great big naked slaves to get a move on with them fans. Flies tickle something fierce when you ain't dressed for 'em.'

Little Arthur's eyes were almost bulging from his head.

'Just a minute,' he put in hastily to prevent further disgraceful admissions on the part of his alarming companion. 'Let's get back to this here potentate's jewel.'

He had no intention of allowing the situation to develop any further along its present lines. He had insinuated himself into the good graces of this girl with a definite object in view. He had staked his professional reputation to procure what he firmly believed to be the most personal article of a gentleman's attire. It was far beyond the scope of his operations to jeopardize the integrity of his own in so doing. To victimize the maid was one thing. To become her victim was quite another. He would leave that sort of conduct to his betters.

'All right, mister,' said the girl. 'What about that jewel?'

'Now you're talking,' replied the little man, allowing a note of approval to rob his voice of its former austerity. 'I'll let this jewel go for less than nothing because of the tea and all.'

'And how much is that in money?' the girl inquired nervously.

'About two dollars,' he confided. 'And I should be shot for doing it.'

Not for a moment suspecting how thoroughly the artful little man deserved to be shot, Martha rose from the table.

'All right, mister,' she announced. 'I'll run upstairs and get my purse.'

'Where's that?' he demanded.

'Servants' quarters,' she told him. 'Top floor.' This suited Arthur's plans to perfection.

'Don't be long,' he warned her as she turned to the service stairway.

The moment the sound of her tripping feet had died away in the upper regions of the house, Little Arthur deposited the ring on the table and silently hastened up the stairs. Attaining the second floor with a thrill of elation, he crept up to the nearest door and listened. Then, like a half-starved shadow, he faded noiselessly into the room. It was a large, pleasant room—a man's room, he was quick to note—and heavy portieres were hanging from the windows. Crossing swiftly to one of these, he looked out to ascertain the easiest means of exit. There was no easiest means of exit. It was a sheer drop to the street from every window. At that moment he heard the knob of the door turning. Little Arthur could not recall ever having listened to a more unwanted sound. Ducking round a table laden with bottles and a syphon, he secreted his small person with the deftness of desperation behind one of the portieres. To have been released from his present predicament, not only would he have willingly sacrificed his prospects of ever obtaining the drawers of others but also tossed his own into the bargain as a gesture of goodwill.

Peter Van Dyck, ruffled by the world in general and the subway in particular, slowly entered the room. Little Arthur, catching a furtive glimpse of his expression, decided that here indeed was a man who would regard none too favourably any slight familiarity from a member of the criminal class. Why had he, Little Arthur, not been satisfied with the drawers that had served him so long and well? Why had he allowed shallow frivolity to cloud and confound his discretion? All the drawers in all the world were not worth the anxiety he was experiencing there behind that curtain.

Suddenly the small, unhappy man caught his breath. Good God! What next? The owner of the room was actually undressing. Could he be going to bed at this hour? What a glutton for sleep! But some men were like that, only they seldom stopped to undress. It was shoes and all with them. Suppose this chap took it into his head to sit up and read? He himself was given to that small relaxation after a difficult day. He might be forced to remain concealed until he fainted from sheer exhaustion. Little Arthur was becoming panic-stricken.

While this scene was working up to its inevitable climax, Josephine Duval was resolutely ascending the front step of the Van Dyck residence. Just what she intended to do when she got inside, she had not the slightest idea. However, Jo was one of the world's most successful opportunists. Something would be sure to turn up. Something always did. But what turned up at first was not any too reassuring. This was no less a personage than Sanders, the Van Dyck butler.

'Would you mind telling your mistress,' said Jo, neatly slipping past the great man, 'that there's a lady calling on her who is in an interesting condition?'

Now this form of announcing herself, especially in view of the fact that it was entirely misleading if not worse, might strike some as being particularly ill-advised. However, Jo found herself in the position of one suddenly called upon to speak when there is absolutely nothing to say, and so she very wisely decided that it really did not matter much what she said so long as she said something —anything. Furthermore, it cannot be denied that her opening speech was not without an element of surprise. Even the impeccable Sanders found the information difficult to take in his stately stride.

'Thank you, madam,' he replied, his suavity jarred a note off key. 'Has my mistress any special reason to be interested in your interesting condition, may I ask?'

'No,' snapped Jo, 'but her nephew has. And while we're on the subject you might as well know that I'm not a madam yet. I'm still a miss, if in name only. And you'd better carry on with a click. My condition grows more interesting by leaps and bounds. Soon it may become engrossing.'

Sanders had encountered many extraordinary young women in the course of a long and inactive career, but never one quite so buoyantly extraordinary as Josephine. She impressed the astonished butler as being actually exuberant over a situation which any properly constituted girl would have considered, if not desperate, at least disturbing.

'I quite understand, miss,' he replied soothingly. 'If you'll pardon me a moment I'll withdraw to consult—'

'And if I'm not here when you get back,' Jo broke in, 'you can look for my body in the nearest river—which one is that?'

'The Hudson, miss,' said Sanders hopefully. 'About three blocks over to your left as you go out.'

'You're almost too eagerly explicit,' Josephine observed as the butler turned a dignified back and departed.

As soon as he had gone, Josephine looked quickly about her. From a room opening off the hall about ten feet away came the hum of conversation. Also the sound of clinking glasses. The cocktail tea-party was already getting under way. Josephine was greatly interested. She yearned to see everything—how these people lived and what they intended to do to Peter, who by now had become in her illogical mind irrevocably her man. Regardless of the laws of decency and self-respect, she must prevent this engagement. The door to what appeared to be a clothes closet presented itself as the most obvious means to this end. As she slipped into this closet and closed the door behind her, she was still assuring herself that something would turn up to delay the formal announcement of Peter's betrothal to that snake-hipped Yolanda Wilmont. The closet was fairly commodious, but without light. Innumerable unseen coats were hanging on all sides of the girl—fur coats, storm coats, top coats, motor robes, and dusters. Thinking how grandly the rich lived, she disappeared behind the coats and temporarily withdrew from active participation in the destiny of the Van Dycks.

Above stairs, in his room, Peter was wondering if the shower-bath he fully intended to take was going to improve matters any. Did condemned men take showers before they faced the firing squad or marched to the chair? The only condemned man he knew anything about was himself, and what little he knew about him was hardly interesting enough to be told. However, things might be worse. He was not actually getting married to-day. There was always poison as a last resort. He wondered whether he should take it himself or give it to Yolanda.

And while these speculations were passing through Peter's mind, equally perplexing ones were engaging the mind of Sanders as he stood in the hall below and looked round for signs of the vanished Jo. Presently he shrugged his shoulders as if to dismiss the incident. Evidently the young lady had decided in favour of the river. Under the circumstances that was probably the most tactful arrangement for all concerned. In spite of her bold manner the young woman must have had some sense of the fitness of things. Had he said the river was three or four blocks over? He did not quite recall. Too many things to think about. By now she should be quite definitely drowned if she had not changed her mind. She had seemed like a determined character, if a little callous. There were other things to be done. Cocktails to serve. Sanders moved away, leaving the hall deserted.

Several times while undressing, Peter had approached dangerously close to the curtain behind which Little Arthur stood concealed. Altogether too close for the peace of mind of that small pickpocket. Now that his uninvited host was completely naked, there was the possibility he might be prompted by modesty to draw the curtains entirely. That was what Little Arthur would have done had he been in the same condition. Maybe the rich were different. Maybe they did not care. If he could only create some diversion, thought the man behind the curtain, some little distraction sufficient to occupy the other's attention long enough to enable one to get out of that fateful room.

What could he do? Peter had turned and was looking intently at the portiere. Had he noticed anything, any slight, betraying movement? Little Arthur broke out into a gentle sweat. Those eyes—those probing eyes. As soon as Peter looked away, the pickpocket's arm slid from behind the portiere and withdrew with the syphon. Little Arthur had not the vaguest idea what he intended to do with the bottle, but at least it was better than having nothing at all, better than facing with bare hands an infuriated and naked property owner. Once more Peter's eyes strayed towards the portieres. Why did he look at that one portiere always instead of some other? Surely he suspected something. Yes. He did suspect something. He actually knew something. Once more he was approaching the portiere. He was half way across the room, and naked as a primitive man. Little Arthur was as much unnerved by what he saw as by what he feared. His grip tightened on the object in his hand. Two-thirds across the room Peter stopped and, turning his bare back, reached down and meditatively scratched his leg as men will. This was a trick, Little Arthur decided. No man, unless fired by some sinister determination, would permit himself to appear in such an unfavourable light. Furthermore, the rich, if they took advantage of their opportunities, should have no occasion thus to scratch themselves. Little Arthur was not to be deceived. This was a trick. If Peter Van Dyck had been hoping to rattle the small criminal, he had virtually succeeded. To witness these preparations was even worse than facing the attack itself.

It was at this moment that Little Arthur was seized by a mad impulse, an uncontrollable desire to squirt the contents of the syphon on the exposed back of the busily scratching man. It was an impulse not difficult to understand. Virtually every one is visited by it at least once in the course of his life. Some persons never outgrow it. To them a syphon and a naked back mean only one thing —immediate contact. At the moment Little Arthur had not sufficient mental stamina to resist any impulse. He raised the syphon, drew an accurate bead on the exposed surface, then pressed the lever. The liquid missile splashed smartly against Peter Van Dyck's back and broke into little cascades along the ridges of his spine. The effect was instantaneous. Peter snapped erect and looked wildly about him. Astonishment, shock, and indignation fought for ascendancy in his eyes. But his gaze encountered nothing enlightening. For a moment he feared for his reason. Was it possible that in his spiritual turmoil he had imagined himself under the shower? The water trickling down his flanks annoyed but reassured him. Then anger mounted within his breast. A Van Dyck would stand for no nonsense, especially a nude Van Dyck. The perpetrator of this outrage against his privacy and person must be concealed somewhere within the room. Probably behind one of those portieres. Almost slithering with excitement, Peter warily advanced upon one of the hangings. That he had selected the wrong one did not rob his activities of interest. Little Arthur was interested and also a bit relieved. As a matter of fact he was even faintly amused. The idea of a naked man stalking an empty portiere had its lighter side.

As Peter, quivering with purpose, sprang upon his portiere, Little Arthur, quivering with no less purpose, sprang from behind his and sprinted to the door. Reaching this before Peter had time to turn, the flying pickpocket dashed out into the hall and slammed the door behind him. The sound of the door brought Peter back to action. Passionately cursing the portiere, he sped across the room and threw open the door. The intruder was gone, obviously having succeeded in putting the front flight of stairs between himself and pursuit. This time Peter was right. Little Arthur, tossing discretion to the winds, had nipped down the first flight of stairs that offered itself to his frantic feet. For a brief moment Peter hesitated in the doorway, then, adding decency to discretion, he tossed them both to the winds and took up the chase.

On the landing he ran into Martha.

'Gord, Mr. Peter!' She gasped 'Whacha doing?'

'Running,' said Peter briefly. He had no time for explanations

'I should say,' murmured the maid after his bare back. 'Running wild like Adam hisself.'

Chapter 6 THE LOQUACIOUS CLOSET

PETER'S descent into the front hall fortunately went unnoticed. More guests had arrived, and more guests were due to arrive. It was this latter possibility that brought Peter to a full and blinding realization of his position. For the first time he saw himself as indubitably he would appear in the eyes of others. He saw himself not as an innocent man seeking justice, but simply as a stark naked coffee importer, dazzlingly greeting his guests at the doors of his ancestral home. The picture was somewhat too vivid for his nerves. He delivered the soul of his craven attacker into the arms of divine retribution and flung himself into the clothes closet a split second before Sanders appeared to answer the summons of the doorbell.

Reaching out in the darkness, Peter's hand groped horrifyingly over a face. Now this is a decidedly disagreeable experience, perhaps one of the most disagreeable in the world. It is especially so when one is under the impression that there are no faces about. Even married people, after long years of propinquity, are frequently revolted when in the still hours of the night they inadvertently extend a hand and find themselves fumbling drowsily with the face of a mate. The same holds true even of one's mistress. One receives quite an unpleasant shock. With other parts of the body it is not so bad, but with the face, yes. It was certainly so with Peter. Had it not been for his nakedness, he would have emitted scream upon scream. Little Arthur, too, was far from well.

'Who are you?' demanded Peter, his voice hoarse with consternation.

'I'm Little Arthur,' chattered a voice in the darkness. 'You know, mister, the guy you was chasing.'

If it had not been for the fact that every instinct in Peter's being cried out against further association with any part of Little Arthur, the man would have been strangled there and then in the blackness of the closet.

'Sorry I squirted the water on you, mister,' the little dip began in mollifying accents.

'It doesn't matter really,' said Peter with false politeness. 'I was going to take a shower, anyway. May I ask, though, what you were doing in my room?'

'I'm a burglar,' replied Little Arthur, too depressed to be other than truthful. 'But I wasn't looking for anything valuable. Only a pair of drawers.'

'If only I had a pair myself!' muttered Peter. 'And to think that just this morning I had more drawers than I needed—more than I could comfortably wear. What are you doing in here, Little Arthur?'

'The same thing as you, sir. Keeping out of the public eye.'

A moment's silence, then Peter's voice, nervously: 'You seem to be in front of me, and yet I distinctly feel you breathing heavily on my back. How do you manage that?'

'I'm not doing it, mister,' said Little Arthur. 'I ain't got strength enough left to do any breathing at all.'

'No?' replied Peter, turning. 'That's funny. Oh, my God! I'm surrounded.'

He had thrust one of his fingers into Josephine's mouth, and she had instinctively bitten it for lack of anything better to do.

'Remove your finger from my mouth this instant,' she gabbled furiously.

Peter's hand was quicker than the eye.

'What are you doing in here with Little Arthur?' he demanded, nursing his damaged finger.

'I hadn't thought of doing anything with Little Arthur,' Jo retorted. 'Don't even know what to do with myself, much less with any one else. He must have come in here after me.'

'The dirty little crook!' said Peter. 'I'll strangle him with these two bare hands right here in cold blood.'

Little Arthur closed his eyes, yet still saw two bare hands floating through the darkness.

'Go on and do it,' urged Josephine. 'There are too many of us in this closet already.'

'I don't want to be in here alone with you,' Peter told her. 'And the dead body of a criminal, perhaps.'

'It won't make any difference so long as the body is good and dead,' Jo explained.

'Oh, what a terrible woman!' Little Arthur chattered from his corner. 'Where did she come from?'

'Don't know why you followed her in the first place,' said Peter.

'I won't ever again,' vowed the little man. 'Didn't even know she was here.'

'He's a nasty little liar,' whispered Josephine. 'He deliberately came in after me.'

'Don't you believe her, mister,' Little Arthur pleaded. 'She's trying to turn you against me just as we were getting along, like. I know her game.'

'Shut up, you rat!' the girl flung at him. 'I'll claw your wicked tongue out.'

'Don't let her at me, please, mister,' Little Arthur put in. 'She wants to get us both in trouble.'

'We are in trouble,' Peter reminded him. 'Terrible trouble. Suppose some one should come barging into this closet?'

'I'll swear I was lured in,' said Jo.

'On what pretext?' Peter demanded.

'A fur coat,' she answered readily.

'Wouldn't speak well for your morals,' he snapped.

'Nor any better for yours,' she replied. 'But if you don't like that, I'll say that the two of you dragged me in.'

'Wouldn't put it past her, mister,' warned Little Arthur. 'She's a bad one, she is. Glad I can't see her.'

'You horrid little crook!' shrilled Jo. 'Where do you get off?'

I'll have to ask you both to shut up,' said Peter. 'You'll be having the whole damn house in.'

'Oh, dear,' murmured Jo. 'Here I am cooped up in a closet with a naked man and a thief. I don't know which way to turn.'

'Well, don't turn this way,' said Peter. 'And how do you know I'm naked? Oh, for God's own sake, is that your hand? I've been thinking it was mine all the time. I'm so upset. No wonder you know how I am.'

In the darkness Jo laughed evilly.

'I saw your impassioned entrance,' she gloated.

'If you don't keep your hands off, you'll see my impassioned exit,' he retorted.

'All women seem ter be loose,' muttered Little Arthur moodily, his thoughts reverting to Martha and the harem. 'Weren't like that when I was a boy.'

'You're no bigger than a nipper now,' retorted Jo.

'Perhaps not,' said the pickpocket, 'but I got more sense. Why don't you keep your bold hands off the gentleman? He don't understand your common ways.'

'I'll make them unmistakable,' said the girl.

'What are we going ter do, mister?' Little Arthur asked hopelessly. 'There ain't no good in her.'

'Why don't you do something?' demanded Peter. 'You got me into this.'

'No, I didn't,' the pickpocket protested. 'I was trying to get away and you insisted on following me.'

'Naturally,' replied Peter.

'Must have wanted me mighty bad,' observed Little Arthur, 'to have followed me in your condition.'

'I wanted to kill you,' admitted Peter, 'and I'm not at all sure I won't.'

'Don't think about it any more,' said Little Arthur soothingly.

'My, you're thin,' said Jo in a surprised voice.

'Take your hand from my ribs,' Peter commanded. 'Haven't you any shame?'

'No,' answered Jo promptly. 'Not since you started in. This morning in the office you try to take off your drawers. On the way home you practically assaulted me in the subway. And now to cap the damn climax you follow me nakedly into a dark closet. How do you expect a girl to have any shame left when you act like that?'

'Is that right, lady?' asked Little Arthur, thinking that indeed he had got himself into bad company. 'Did he do all them things, taking off his drawers and all?'

'Sure, I'm right,' said Jo. 'It was just his drawers this morning. That seemed to satisfy him. Now it's all or nothing. Don't know what he'll think of doing next.'

'Hope he stops thinking altogether if he's going ter carry on like that,' said Little Arthur, making no attempt to disguise his disappointment in Peter.

'Some one will have to do some inspired brainwork to think us out of this place,' Peter announced to his unseen companions.

'Does your spine begin there?' Josephine suddenly asked in an interested voice.

'No,' replied Peter passionately. 'That's where it ends.'

'Oh,' said the girl rather hurriedly. 'I'm sorry.'

'Then why don't you keep your hands to yourself?' demanded Peter.

'Thank Gord it's dark in here,' murmured Little Arthur. 'I wouldn't know where to look if it wasn't.'

'Throw the little beggar out on his ear,' urged Jo.

'Think I'll get out myself, naked as I am,' declared Peter. 'It's better than staying in here and being explored like a map.'

For some minutes Sanders had been evincing an unusual interest in the closet. Aunt Sophie, sailing from the drawing-room with a group of guests at her elbows, chief among whom was Yolanda, actually saw the man with his ear almost if not quite pressed to the door.

'What on earth are you doing there, Sanders?' she inquired fussily. 'You look as if you had seen a ghost.'

Sanders nodded his sleek head wisely.

'I believe I'm hearing them, madam,' he vouchsafed in a low voice. 'This closet suddenly seems to be endowed with the gift of speech.'

'Nonsense!' the splendid lady tossed out. 'You're running down, Sanders. Closets don't talk.'

'This one does,' Sanders assured her. 'It carries on a three-cornered conversation in as many different voices, madam. One sounds strangely like a woman's.'

'What?' exclaimed Aunt Sophie. 'A woman in that closet? That is queer.'

'Perhaps Sanders had better look,' Yolanda Wilmon suggested. 'Sneak thieves, you know.'

'Sneak thieves are not given to holding animated conversations in closets,' objected Mr. Prescott Gates, who, because of his remote connection with a law firm, felt that his knowledge of sneak thieves was more extensive than the others.

'We're not acquainted with the habits of sneak thieves,' Yolanda contributed coldly. 'However, I do believe that closet should be investigated. There are several valuable furs inside.'

'By all means,' agreed Miss Sophie Van Dyck. 'Open the door immediately, Sanders.'

But the door, when Sanders endeavoured to carry out this order, seemed inclined to argue the point. For several moments it quivered elastically like a thing of life and purpose in the hands of the butler; then, with a groan of utter despair which sounded hollowly in the hall, it flew partly open. Sanders recoiled as if from the pit of hell itself. Instantly the door closed of its own volition with a bang of remonstrance. Inarticulate sounds issued from the closet, sounds of whining protest.

'What on earth is it, Sanders?' Aunt Sophie demanded in a strained voice. 'Sounds like an animal.'

'Must I say, Miss Van Dyck?' asked Sanders in a cornered voice.

'Certainly you must,' she retorted. 'What would Mr. Peter think if he came home and found his closet full of strangers? He dislikes things like that.'

Wondering in a dazed sort of way what things could be even remotely like the things he had momentarily glimpsed, Sanders looked speculatively at the door.

'Hurry, Sanders. What's inside?' Yolanda Wilmot asked insistently.

'Well, madam,' said Sanders reluctantly, 'there seems to be more in there than valuable furs at the moment. Looked like quite a gathering to me.'

'Tell them to come out this instant,' Miss Van Dyck commanded.

'I'd hardly suggest that, madam,' said Sanders in a shocked voice.

'Here, Sanders,' put in Prescott Gates. 'I'll handle this situation. I'll jolly well make them come out, whoever they are.'

I strongly advise against it, sir,' said Sanders. 'Not with the ladies present, if I may say so.'

'What on earth, Sanders?' exclaimed a young and rather swagger-looking maiden whose eyes gave the impression of having seen about all there was to be seen in life. 'Just for that I'll never leave until that closet has given up its dead.'

'Why not tell us, Sanders,' remarked a stout lady in cascades of lace, 'exactly what you saw, and then let us decide?'

'Yes,' agreed Aunt Sophie. 'We're growing decidedly impatient with all this beating about the bush. Speak up, man!'

'Well,' began the butler in a voice of academic detachment, 'you see, there seems to be an entirely naked gentleman in that closet—'

Impossible!' exclaimed Miss Van Dyck.

'I very much wish it were, madam,' Sanders continued piously. 'But that's not all. This gentleman has either been undressed by a lady or, having undressed himself, is about to undress her.'

'Need you be so graphic?' inquired Yolanda.

'The picture was remarkably vivid,' explained the butler.

'I wonder where they think they are?' Aunt Sophie wondered aloud.

'Certainly not at a private reception,' observed the lacy lady, regarding the door with thoughtful eyes. 'That is, not at a nice reception.'

'What can they be doing in that closet?' Aunt Sophie continued, bemused.

'Practically anything by now,' said the girl with the worldly eyes. 'Especially if the gentleman has succeeded in carrying out his intentions.'

'You mean in that closet?' Yolanda demanded incredulously.

'What's wrong with the closet?' demanded the other girl philosophically. 'Many have managed with less.'

'What a shocking situation!' murmured the lace-bedecked lady. 'Shouldn't something be done? Can't you speak to them, Sanders—admonish them?'

'Certainly, madam,' replied Sanders, his suavity re-gained. 'How would you suggest wording it?'

'Why, tell them to stop, of course,' Aunt Sophie snapped irritably.

'Stop what, madam,' the butler inquired.

'You can be most exasperating at times for a man of your age, Sanders,' Miss Van Dyck complained. 'Tell them to stop whatever they're doing.'

'But, madam,' the butler patiently explained, 'we're not sure just what they are doing. It would be pure speculation.'

'Not so pure at that,' put in the girl, 'but it does seem logical, doesn't it, Sanders?'

'I must confess, Miss Sedgwick,' said Sanders, with becoming modesty, 'I have never been in the same situation.'

'No more have I,' the girl retorted, 'but I can use my imagination.'

'I wish you wouldn't,' Yolanda remarked frigidly.

Mr. Prescott Gates now felt called upon once more to display his greater knowledge of the seamy side of life.

'If they are professional sneak thieves,' he advanced weightily, 'I hardly think they'd endanger their chances by that sort of nonsense.'

'What sort of nonsense?' Miss Sedgwick inquired with disarming innocence. 'And what makes you call it nonsense?'

'Don't answer her, Prescott,' said Yolanda.

'And all this time we're talking here,' Aunt Sophie burst forth in a tragic voice, 'God only knows what is going on inside that closet.'

'Perhaps only God should know,' replied the stout lady, with the resignation of a true believer.

'I have an idea,' Miss Sedgwick offered. 'Perhaps a man and wife wandered into that closet and not being able to find their way out became so exhausted—you know, so discouraged about it all—they just decided to go to bed.'

'Don't be childish, Madge Sedgwick,' Aunt Sophie scolded.

'Well, at least, I've got 'em married,' said the girl. 'That's more than any of you have done.'

'You said a "gentleman," Sanders,' Aunt Sophie went on in a worried voice to the butler. 'Are you sure he was a gentleman?'

'That's difficult to tell, madam,' said Sanders. 'He didn't have a stitch on.'

'I can well understand that,' Madge Sedgwick agreed sympathetically. 'Without any clothes on there's not a scrap of difference between a sneak thief and a gentleman.'

'I should think all naked men would look a little sneaky,' the lady in lace unhelpfully contributed.

"There should be some distinction,' Miss Van Dyck protested indignantly.

'Yes. It would be convenient on occasions to be able to tell at a glance,' Madge Sedgwick remarked as if to herself.

'What did he look like, Sanders?' Yolanda Wilmont demanded. 'Did you recognize his face?'

'I didn't see his face, Miss Yolanda,' the butler explained. 'What did you see?' asked Madge with lively interest.

'His back, miss,' said Sanders. 'He turned it rather briskly, I thought.'

'At least he had the instincts of a gentleman,' remarked the stout lady.

'Oh, I don't know,' Madge Sedgwick countered. 'Even a sneak thief might have his little qualms.'

'Did you recognize the woman?' Prescott Gates inquired.

'I got the impression I'd seen her before, sir,' admitted the butler. 'Looked very much like a young woman who was here a little earlier announcing she was in an interesting condition.'

'Sanders, you keep the most extraordinary things to yourself,' Aunt Sophie said with severity. 'Do you mean to say you put this person in that closet to bear her child?'

'No, madam,' Sanders smoothly replied. 'I rather concluded she'd left to commit suicide. She was inquiring about the rivers. I gave her adequate directions.'

'Maybe she came back to find out which was the deepest,' Madge Sedgwick suggested.

'Heavens on earth!' exclaimed Aunt Sophie distractedly. 'What are we going to do? Here we have a naked man in the closet and a woman going to have a baby or commit suicide or something even worse. Prescott, you're a man. Why don't you suggest something?'

'I'm going for a policeman,' Mr. Gates replied with surprising decision as he hurried to the door.

'Should think a preacher or a doctor would do better according to the circumstances,' Madge flung after him, but Mr. Gates was already gone.

'That tears it,' whispered Peter Van Dyck to his companions in the closet. 'That unweaned ass has gone to get a cop.'

'Gord!' breathed Little Arthur. 'There ain't a pair of drawers made that's worth a pinch.'

'Ah,' came the voice of Josephine, 'how about mine, Little Arthur?'

'Make her stop talking like that, mister,' the small thief asked in an injured voice. 'We're in a very bad spot.'

'Don't tell me,' said Peter. 'I know it already, and I'm going to get out of my section at once.'

'Don't mean ter say you're going out there in front of all them people the way you are?' the man inquired in an awed voice.

'Almost,' Peter told him. 'With the addition of this coat.'

Fumbling in the darkness, he seized the first coat his hands encountered and squeezed himself into it. Fortunately for Peter's self-assurance he was unable to see how he looked. He was wearing a fur coat belonging to his Aunt Sophie. It was short but luckily full.

'Wait a second,' said Josephine. 'You're not going to leave me alone in here with that dip. I'm going to disguise myself, too.'

'No fear,' shot back Little Arthur. 'I don't associate with the likes of you.'

'Oh!' cried Josephine, enraged. 'I'll strip him to the buff.'

'What's that?' asked Arthur anxiously.

'I don't know,' the girl replied, 'but it must be awful.'

'Will you two please stop bickering?' cut in Peter. 'Or wait until I've gone.'

'I'm ready,' said Jo. 'Go right ahead. I defy recognition.'

'What have you got on?' Peter was interested enough to inquire.

'Goggles and a long duster,' the girl said briefly.

'Let's change?' Peter suggested.

'Too late now,' she told him. 'We've got to hurry right along.'

'Don't leave me here alone,' Little Arthur pleaded.

'I'd like to leave you lifeless,' Jo informed him.

'Almost wish you would,' bleakly Arthur replied.

The policeman, followed importantly by Prescott Gates, arrived just in time to witness the emergence of Peter Van Dyck. What struck the officer as being especially remarkable about this odd affair was the length and bareness of Peter's legs. In real life Peter's legs were not really so bad. Though long and slim they were at least not distorted. They were just ordinary male legs, which are never much to get excited about. Now, however, protruding as they were from a woman's fur coat, they fairly screamed for attention. The officer's eyes responded. He could not recall ever having seen such peculiar-looking legs on either man or beast. In spite of this they seemed to carry their owner along busily enough as he made for the front staircase. Behind him trailed a strange object which at first glance did not appear to be entirely human. Josephine in goggles and duster hurried to the front door, where she was stopped by the officer, who told her, 'Oh, no, you don't!' in what can only be described as a nasty voice. Little Arthur, apparently preferring arrest to being left alone with his thoughts, brought up a shrinking rear. Walking nervously on tiptoe, he started to follow Peter. Aunt Sophie's voice stopped him. Aunt Sophie's voice stopped every one, in fact.

'Peter!' she cried. 'Peter!'

'Yes, Aunt Sophie,' Peter replied in a natural tone which contrasted strangely with his attire and which almost stupefied the policeman, who had expected something entirely different from such an object. 'Yes, Aunt Sophie. Were you calling me?'

'Peter,' continued the outraged lady, 'what in the world have you been up to?'

'Nothing at all, Auntie,' he assured her, growing more uncomfortably aware of a sea of upturned faces. 'Merely getting ready, you know. Making little arrangements.'

'Is that person following you?' Miss Van Dyck demanded, pointing a quivering finger at Little Arthur, shaking as unobtrusively as possible on the stairs.

Peter stared visibly. He found himself extremely nervous.

'What person?' he gasped; then, glancing back and encountering the mute appeal in the miserable little creature's eyes, his heart melted. 'Oh, that person,' he said hastily. 'Yes. He's following me—how do you do, everybody.' Here Peter thought it best to bow carelessly to those below him. 'Yes, Aunt Sophie,' he hurried on. 'He's following me. I asked him to. He's helping me to get ready. My new valet. Do you like him?'

'Decidedly not!' exploded Aunt Sophie. 'He has the face of a born criminal.'

'Say,' put in the policeman, 'how many more of you are there in that closet?'

'What, officer?' said Peter. 'How many more of me are there in that closet? No more at all. I'm the only one.'

'Does your nephew happen to be nuts, lady?' the policeman asked Miss Van Dyck.

'No,' Yolanda answered for the stunned woman, 'but I fear he's suffering a little from overwork.'

'Thank you, Yolanda,' called Peter, with a fearful smile.' But if you want to know, I'm suffering hideously from over-exposure.'

'The coat! The coat!' shouted Madge. 'It's slipping, Peter. Look out!'

Peter snatched at the coat in the nick of time, then waved lightly to the girl, who of all the group had not averted her eyes.

'Thanks, Madge,' he called. 'Wouldn't want that to happen.'

'I wasn't anxious about it for myself,' she replied. 'I was thinking of your aunt and Yolanda.'

'Thanks,' Yolanda told her. 'We are quite able to think for ourselves.'

'Oh, very well,' said Miss Sedgwick. 'I don't care if he takes it off altogether and dances like a savage.'

'No doubt,' said the other sweetly.

'If it's all the same to you ladies,' called Peter, 'I'd prefer to keep it on. And I don't feel like dancing.'

'My stockings! My stockings! They're gone!' burst suddenly from the object behind the goggles, making a frantic dash for the closet, only to be brought up in mid-flight at the end of the officer's arm.

'None of that,' he said rudely. 'You're staying here.'

'Oh, am I?' Jo replied, dealing him a clever Gallic kick. 'I want my stockings.'

'Ah-ha,' observed Madge Sedgwick triumphantly. 'Then he did undress her.'

Probably because they assumed it to be a part of a policeman's duty, no one seemed to pay the slightest attention to the officer doubled up in anguish. That is, no one save Little Arthur, who, for the moment forgetting his own troubles in the presence of those of the law, was laughing weakly upon the stairs.

'Did it hurt much?' solicitously asked Peter, who from his Olympian heights had witnessed the incident.

'Hurt?' gasped the policeman, stung by the inadequacy of the word. 'It's ruined I am to the grave.'

'See what you've done to our police force,' said Peter, looking down on Josephine clawing in the closet.

'Can't help that,' she answered. 'No low cop can come between me and my stockings.'

'Oh, this is too disgraceful,' Sophie Van Dyck informed all present. 'Too disgraceful for words.'

'Not disgraceful enough for my words,' muttered Josephine. 'Ah! Here they are—my stockings!'

As the girl rose with a wad of stockings in her hand, Sophie Van Dyck directed on her the full force of her attack.

'Young woman,' she demanded, 'did you tell my butler you were going to have a baby?'

'After being cooped up in that closet with your naked nephew,' Jo replied indignantly as she stuffed the stockings back in their tender concealment, allowing one of them to dangle untidily down the front of the duster, 'after being in there like that, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if I had a male quartet. Would you?'

Miss Van Dyck saw no good in being dragged into this discussion.

'May I ask if you have anything on beneath that duster?' she asked.

'What do you think?' replied Josephine. 'What has he got on beneath that fur coat?'

As she pointed to the odd figure on the stairs, every one looked up and decided it did not have much. Before the direct fire of so many calculating glances Peter shrank a little. By this time the injured officer had discovered he could stand erect.

'What are you laughing at?' he demanded reproachfully of Little Arthur.

'At them,' said Little Arthur, pointing to the legs above him.

'What!' cried Peter, turning fiercely upon the pick-pocket. 'You lying little—'

Don't say it, mister,' Arthur pleaded. 'I wasn't laughing at all.'

'You'll be hysterical when I get you up before the boys,' the assaulted policeman promised him.

'Aunt Sophie,' Yolanda said in a low voice, 'there can be no announcement to-day. This has spoiled everything.'

'I agree with that,' Aunt Sophie replied. 'But just the same we'll carry on as if nothing had occurred. Take our dear guests back to the reception room.'

'Hurrah!' cried Jo, tossing up her arms, the hands of which lay concealed well down in the sleeves of the duster. 'You're saved, Peter. You're saved.'

'Saved for what?' he asked her. 'Another day?'

'For us, of course,' she replied. 'For me!'

'A living death,' he answered.

'Gord spare you, sir, from that one,' put in Little Arthur piously. 'No matter what you've done.'

The bell rang, and Sanders, as if arising from a long illness, admitted several guests. With startled eyes they regarded the group on the stairs, then transferred their gaze to the enigmatic figure lurking within the voluminous folds of the duster. It was peering at them like a strange bird from behind a pair of goggles.

'What's that?' asked a tall gentleman, his face growing pale beneath a fresh massage.

'Don't know,' gasped a lady with him. 'It's awful. And Peter Van Dyck is almost… ' Her voice trailed away.

'It's charades, my dear,' Aunt Sophie smoothly explained. 'It's been such a lark, Yolanda, take them directly to the drawing-room. Cocktails.'

Yolanda did.

'Now, young lady,' Aunt Sophie continued severely, 'your conduct has been most disgraceful. I don't know what to do with you. Obviously you are a thief—perhaps even worse. You must leave this house at once, quietly and without further violence. You will, of course, leave the stolen articles behind.'

'They're not so hot, anyway,' said Jo.

'And they're not stolen,' called Peter momentarily feeling sorry for the small, defiant creature looking a little lonely in the great hall. 'I'll explain everything, Auntie. You see, I'm sending those things over to one of my friends. He's going on a trip. Wanted to borrow them. Sent one of the maids—a fresh piece. I admit—but that's how she got here.'

'But why is she wearing them in that ridiculous fashion?' Aunt Sophie persisted, her curiosity overcoming her eagerness to believe in any comfortable explanation.

'Oh, that,' replied Peter, thinking quickly. 'More convenient, you know. Doesn't nave to carry them. Perhaps it even amuses her.'

'Well, it doesn't amuse me,' declared Aunt Sophie with conviction.

'Come, Little Arthur,' said Peter. 'Get me ready.'

He paused and looked back at Jo, who had snatched off the goggles and was standing gazing up at him like a child about to be sent to bed: a child, Peter decided, who certainly should not be allowed to sleep alone.

'Good-bye, mister,' she said. 'And thanks for all the things you've done—even though you shouldn't have.'

Jo made sure that Yolanda, emerging from the drawing-room, overheard her parting remark.

'Hold on!' cried the officer. 'Don't I make no pinch?'

'Pinch yourself, brother,' said Jo. 'You're sleeping on your feet.'

The front door closed behind her.

Chapter 7 SIX CHARACTERS EMBARK IN A FOG

WHEN Peter Van Dyck closed the door to his room his action was accompanied by such violence that Little Arthur, doglike at his heels, barely escaped bisection. Unlike a dog, however, the small, dishonest man emitted no yelp of protest. He merely stood looking at the door and thought of the policeman whose indignant voice still sounded discordantly in the hall below.

'Sanders,' he heard Aunt Sophie saying, 'take the officer to the kitchen and provide for him properly. Perhaps a bottle or so of that Canadian ale might help to relieve his pain.'

Little Arthur's heart sank. Retreat was cut off in the rear. Ahead of him lay a decidedly delicate, not to say dangerous, interview. Squaring his thin shoulders, he raised a timid hand and knocked.

'Come in, you criminal!' a hoarse voice shouted. 'Since when have you troubled to knock on doors?'

Automatically the shoulders resumed their former droop of nervous exhaustion as the criminal entered the room.

'Since when have you troubled to knock?' the voice repeated disagreeably. 'Answer me that.'

Arthur noticed with increasing dread that the owner of the voice was drinking whisky straight in great gulps.

'Always knock, mister,' he muttered. 'Outa hours, that is.'

'When not calling in a professional capacity,' Peter added sarcastically.

'That would be silly,' said Little Arthur on the defensive.

'You malignant germ!' replied Peter, his throat working horribly, Arthur thought, as whisky splashed down its bobbing length. 'You less than louse—worse than louse!'

'Mister,' protested Little Arthur, for some strange reason feeling more hurt for the other's lack of refinement than for any reflection cast on either himself or his habits, 'is that a nice way ter talk?'

'Perhaps not,' said Peter after a moment's reflection. 'There isn't any nice way to talk—not to you.'

'But I'm only a pickpocket,' the man modestly explained. 'This was my first second-storey.'

Peter gulped down some more whisky while considering this statement.

'How do you mean,' he asked, 'your first second-storey? Are you trying to confuse me?'

'No, mister,' said the little dip, 'I'm giving it to you straight. This is the first time I ever done a second-storey. I was only after some drawers—an old pair or so.'

'You lie,' Peter told him. 'You know as well as I do you couldn't wear my drawers. They'd hang all over your little wizened legs.'

'I ain't perticular,' Little Arthur said stoutly. 'Scrunch 'em on somehow, what with a pin or a string or an old nail, for that matter.'

Peter thought this possibility over while absently re-donning his recently shed raiment.

'You must be mad about drawers,' he admitted at last, 'and I don't care a damn if you are. Might be much worse. As a matter of fact, some nice, clean persons might even consider it creditable, Little Arthur, for a man to risk losing his shirt for the sake of a pair of drawers. But I, who don't care a snap of my fingers about either shirt or drawers, can't see it in that light.'

'That's a powerful queer-looking pair you got on now,' vouchsafed Little Arthur. 'Orange stripes, no less! Can't say as I'd care a lot for them drawers myself.'

'Critical, eh?' Peter remarked coldly. 'Well, I'd like to know what sat you up in judgment on my drawers? You never had a pair of silk drawers on your mean little shanks in your life. Not real silk,' he added, his thoughts reverting to Josephine Duval.

'No, mister,' Little Arthur agreed. 'I wear regular drawers—men's drawers. After taking a pike at them things, I can see that all my trouble has been a sheer waste of time.'

'Just for that,' said Peter, with a whisky glitter in his eye, 'I'm going to make you wear a pair of my drawers, the funniest pair I've got, and believe me, I've got some funny ones. Much funnier than these,' his voice trailed on as he rummaged busily in a bureau. 'Ha! This pair's a humdinger. A regular scream. You'll go well in these. Wonder how I was ever so mad as to buy them myself. Red and purple grapes—bunches of 'em. A cute idea.' He turned with the garment to confront the stricken eyes of the petty felon. 'Down with those trousers,' he grated. 'Yank 'em off with a snap.'

'But, mister,' objected the shocked man, 'I'd have to undress naked to put them things on. You see, I wear allovers like—long legs and all.'

'Eh?' said Peter. 'Oh, all right. That doesn't matter a bit. You can drag 'em up over your long ones. Make it snappy now.'

'That wouldn't look right, mister.' Arthur's voice was eloquent with reproach.

'You're going to wear these drawers,' Peter told the pitiful object, 'if I have to disjoint you to get 'em on. Hurry up, man. Don't make me lose my temper.'

'If you make me put them dreadful drawers on,' said the other, 'I think I'll lose my mind.'

'You'll lose more than that if you don't,' Peter snapped, taking a step towards the man.

'Oh, Gord,' whined the unfortunate creature, hastily removing his outer garments, 'all this terror and disgrace just because I got a yen ter feel clean!'

'You don't look so hot, yourself,' Peter assured him as he contemplated the homely lines of the battered union suit. 'From the back you look simply shocking—worse than I ever thought a man could get.'

Little Arthur spun round as if stung.

'Cut it out,' he said in some confusion.

'Now yank these on right over them,' commanded Peter. 'Anything to blot out that awful sight. The back especially.'

Little Arthur yanked them on, and Peter was vividly reminded of a medieval court chamberlain who had fallen upon evil days.

A knock sounded obsequiously on the door. Sanders entered on silent feet. Even his iron self-control was taxed to its utmost to restrain a slight outcry. All the human side of the butler cried out to inquire what inconceivable events were taking place in this room. However, his professional ethics forced him to present a passive face. In his eyes alone could be detected a faint gleam of revulsion. The expression in Little Arthur's eyes as he stood like a shamed maiden in a slave market, as well he might in his weird attire, defied all description. This was because Little Arthur, realizing the delicacy of his position, had bashfully lowered his gaze. Sanders cleared his throat behind a large fat hand.

'Beg pardon, Mr. Peter,' he murmured. 'Is this the new valet?'

'The very newest, Sanders,' replied Peter. 'I've been trying to get some conception of how I look in my own drawers. Never had the opportunity before. What do you think of them, Sanders?'

'Very nice, sir, I am sure,' said Sanders, who prided himself on his asthetic reactions. 'The background is a trifle dingy.'

Oh, that's all right,' remarked Peter airily. 'We can remove the background and have them washed.'

'Burned,' suggested Sanders.

That ain't nice,' broke in Little Arthur with a sob in his voice. 'Call that there copper and let him take me away.'

'I was instructed to inform you, Mr. Peter,' went on the butler, disdainfully disregarding the little crook, 'that Miss Yolanda and your aunt await your presence below, sir. It is almost time to call the motor if you intend to cross by ferry.'

'Why the ferry?' demanded Peter.

'Miss Yolanda finds the tube rather common, sir,' said Sanders, and God only knew what the man was thinking. 'She has decided objections to the ventilation.'

Peter took another drink.

'Little Arthur,' snapped Peter, suddenly brisk, 'pack a suitcase for me—not for yourself, mind you, but for me.'

'Me, mister!' protested the pickpocket. 'Pack it like I am?'

'Certainly,' replied Peter. 'It will amuse me while I'm dressing. And listen to me, Sanders. Tell Miss Yolanda with my compliments that if she doesn't like the tubes she'll have to bear with the subway downtown. I won't drive or be driven in traffic on a night like this.'

'I quite understand, Mr. Peter,' said Sanders, and with a lingering glance at Little Arthur quietly withdrew.

'You oughten ter have let him see me like this,' complained the little man in the large drawers. 'It's more than flesh can bear.'

'I think Sanders took it admirably, taking you all in all,' asserted Peter, 'which is the only way to take you. Step lively with that packing.'

Half an hour later Peter and Yolanda left the Van Dyck residence on foot for a week-end in New Jersey. Behind them came Little Arthur. He was bearing up as well as he could under the weight of two suitcases. Peter was a little drunk and Yolanda a little peeved. Peter's explanations of his conduct had been almost incoherent. He had expected her to take too many things for granted. Still, until the country had recovered somewhat from its protracted attack of melancholia she saw no advantage to herself in precipitating an open break with her fiancé, who was indubitably more than enough mad. As long as coffee remained in popular favour, she would put up with his eccentricities —humour them, in fact.

'The rest will do you good,' she told him as they walked to the subway.

'I never find these house parties in the least way restful,' replied Peter complainingly. 'They wear me down a lot.'

'I know, my dear,' she said tolerantly, 'but one must be seen. Especially persons in our position. Can't afford to stagnate, you know. Must carry on. In these bad times it is expected of us.'

'You mean going to house parties, dinners, dances, and all?' incredulously Peter asked her.

'Obviously,' she replied with the superior patience of a higher being.

'What good does that do?' the man wanted to know.

'Keeps society on an even keel. Offsets the influences of radicalism—communism,' she assured him without batting an eye. 'Shows the nation at large that the real people are not taking seriously all this talk about depression.'

'Strikes me as being a bad excuse for doing even worse,' observed Peter. 'And as for stagnation, that's all you do at these house parties—stagnate. Not that I object to that, but I prefer to do it in my own home.'

'You're such a child,' said Yolanda, tapping him lightly on the arm.

Peter's reply to this was rotten but inaudible.

From the shadows of a building a small figure in a ridiculous duster watched Peter's progress with wicked but devoted eyes. When Little Arthur had lurched by with his burden, the figure discarded the duster and became an exceedingly well-built young woman. With a set face and a determined eye Josephine Duval proceeded to stalk her prey. She was bound for New Jersey herself. She might just as well kill two birds with one stone. And if she did not succeed in killing them, she could at least make them quite uncomfortable.

Josephine had a lovely body, but her mind was altogether bad. An ideal combination.

Ahead of her Little Arthur stumbled through the fog blowing in from the river. He was wishing he had the courage to drop the bags and run, realizing with a pang of regret that he could not make his escape with them.

That same evening Bishop Waller was gratified to discover that both God and his own inclinations coincided in calling him and his newly acquired jaegers to the state of New Jersey. Accordingly he decided to answer this call in person as well as in jaegers. Furthermore, it was his ecclesiastical preference to approach this friendly state through the instrumentality of a ferry-boat, which he earnestly hoped would be less crowded than the tubes.

'And Blakely,' he told his man, at the same time striving to tune out of his voice an overtone of mundane pride, 'be sure you put in an extra pair of those new jaegers—the spring-weight ones.'

Blakely had hoped to be permitted to pack a pair of these new jaegers. He admired them tremendously. In fact, in his quiet humble heart of hearts he almost found the hardihood to wish that he too were a bishop so that he might be able to wear drawers similar to the man he served.

'They're an excellent pair, sir,' he observed as he reverentially carried the new jaegers to the suitcase. 'An excellent pair, if I may say so.'

'Certainly, Blakely,' beamed the Bishop. 'By all means admire the drawers.' He found himself greatly pleased. Crossing the room, he stood for a moment by his man and admired the drawers with him. 'They are excellent in every respect,' he continued pontifically. 'Honestly made and generously fashioned. I find then exceedingly comfortable.'

'I'm sure you must, sir,' agreed Blakely, his eyes involuntarily straying to the lower half of the Bishop as if endeavouring to visualize the ineffable comfort enjoyed by this man of God.

A few minutes later Bishop Waller departed. Stepping into a taxi, he instructed the driver to proceed with judicious perseverance to a downtown ferry slip. Then, with a clean conscience and a contented mind, he settled back in the cab and awaited future developments.

Bishop Waller had not long to wait. The future developed almost too soon.

At about this time Aspirin Liz, after a dust-mottled sort of day, felt herself deeply stirred by a craving for beer—beer and a little companionship over a table unspoiled by a cloth. She desired to relax for a while with the knowledge that a bar was within easy call, that she had merely to press her finger lazily on a bell to have her modest and essentially reasonable wishes filled to the brim, nay to overflowing.

In her youth, when she derived both pleasure and profit from her figure, she had sedulously eschewed beer. Now, when her once lovely body had become an expense without compensation, she indulged it affectionately for the sake of what it had been. She gave it beer up to and sometimes past the limits of its ample capacity. With grim satisfaction she plunged into it great sides of corned beef rising like rocks of Gibraltar from choppy seas of cabbage. She talked to middle-aged ladies of similar tastes, and discovered that, no matter how dissimilar their lives may have been, their interests in life were basically the same, a little rest, a little peace and quiet, food, drink, an audience, and a room of one's own where one could remove in comfort one's stays and shoes.

For Aspirin Liz the most satisfactory escape from the solitude of her four walls lay on the opposite bank of the Hudson. It was her custom occasionally to take a ferry headed for this bank and, arrived there, to seek out one of several water-front cafes in which she was both known and admired for her true worth—a good, solid, level-headed woman with a sincere fondness for beer and a capacity to hold it.

After a day devoted to aspirin, the retired model felt she owed herself beer. And this is an excellent way to feel—one of the most satisfactory feelings extant. Many persons want beer, and almost as many drink beer, but it is given to few—and then very rarely—to be convinced that not only do they want beer but that they actually deserve beer, need it, in fact.

Therefore, it was with a feeling of rectitude almost approaching the self-sacrificial that Aspirin Liz prepared her face, adjusted her hat, shrugged her hips into proper working relations with her corset and, after looking both for and into her pocket-book, departed in the direction of the river.

Thus it came about that the same ferry-boat was enabled to set at naught the various plans and prospects of a diversity of characters. Even more. It was given to this ferry-boat to mingle the interests and alter the destinies of persons whose lives had hitherto developed along seldom intersecting paths.

And as these several characters converged upon this ferry-boat, the fog blew in their faces and blanketed their lungs. Figures swift with purpose lived jerkily for an instant in the eyes of others, then faded out. Trucks tunnelled through wet fluff and dragged a hole behind them. Sound and light were muffled. Distance ceased to be. Each man carried with him the boundaries of his universe. Out there on the river a little hell of whistles dwelt in the heart of the fog.

The ferry-boat drew out. Mist rolled down on its exit. A sharp report and a spit of fire. Then fog where a figure had stood—a half-crouched shape peering in the direction of the ferry-boat now unseen.

There were very few passengers who ascribed the report of the gun to a cause other than the back-firing of an automobile.

Little Arthur was not one of these.

Chapter 8 A SHOT IN THE ARM

IT really does not matter who fired the shot or at whom it was fired, save for the fact that it caused Little Arthur to fall promptly to the afterdeck of the outgoing ferry-boat and to remain there, to all intents and purposes a dead pickpocket. And let it be added that no one was more convinced of this fact than was Little Arthur himself. To begin with, the day had proved too much for his delicately organized nervous structure. Add to this a frail body and two suitcases, and it immediately becomes evident that Little Arthur was in no condition to stand a great deal more of anything. In short, this pocket edition of petty larceny was through—a broken reed.

At the same moment that his newly acquired valet fell to the deck, Peter Van Dyck lurched a little as a stinging sensation manifested itself in his left upper arm. This he promptly dismissed in favour of peering down into the face of the stricken man. It was not much of a face to peer down into—in truth, it was a face he would much rather not have seen at all. From the unprepossessing expression Little Arthur turned to the world, it was obvious he had been mortally wounded.

But what creature in the world was so lacking in aspiration as to want to wound Little Arthur? At his most vigorous moments the small felon was only half alive. This did not mean that the man responsible for his death would be regarded by law as only half a murderer. Not at all. Peter in his heart swore that if he ever discovered who had fired the shot he, Peter Van Dyck, would make it his business to see that the wretch was regarded as being something more than a murderer. In the short time Little Arthur had been with him, Peter had formed a sort of watchful yet commiserating attachment for this unreliable visitant from the underworld. It was one of those inexplicable affections that defy all natural laws, because it was far from natural to be fond of Little Arthur. Most people found it impossible. But Peter was not like most people. He was a great deal worse than those who knew him suspected, and at the same time much better. They had been through a lot together in a few crowded hours, he and Little Arthur. They had suffered much. Side by side they had passed through humiliation and public disgrace.

With a sudden pang Peter thought of the drawers he had forced upon the now lifeless legs. Then came another thought—a worse one. What would the undertaker think about those drawers? Would the man be able to survive the shock? Would he be able to approach those drawers in a purely professional capacity or would he consider them in the light of a personal affront? No undertaker, no matter how case-hardened, would be able to regard them with indifference. No, those drawers presented a problem. Peter felt a little responsible. Life was funny —always letting one in for things.

While these thoughts were flashing through his mind, a small but keenly interested crowd had collected round Peter and the fallen man. Peter knelt down and began to examine him. There was no mark of a bullet wound. No sign of blood.

'Who pipped him, mister?' asked a man's hoarse voice.

'Who did what?' Peter inquired.

'Pipped,' replied the voice. 'You know—gave the little bloke an airing.'

'If you mean who murdered this poor devil,' said Peter, strongly objecting to the speaker's language, 'I wouldn't be surprised if it were you. Gave him an airing! Is that any way to speak of a man shot down in cold blood?'

'Where's the cold blood?' another spectator morbidly wanted to know.

'There ain't a speck on him,' announced still another spectator disappointedly. 'Not a speck. And blood ain't cold to begin with, even a silly-looking geezer's like that.'

Peter was moved to reply.

'Don't let's go into the temperature of his blood right now,' he observed with what he hoped was withering sarcasm. 'You'd look silly yourself if you were murdered, and I'd feel greatly pleased.'

'No, mister,' answered the other. 'I'd look plain scared.'

Dismissing this person as unimportant, Peter endeavoured to turn Little Arthur over to ascertain if he had been shot from behind. Once more he felt a stinging sensation in his left arm.

'Yolanda,' he called, for the first time remembering his fiancée. 'Would you very much mind giving me a hand with Little Arthur? He's been shot.'

'I wouldn't touch Little Arthur with a pair of tongs,' Yolanda coldly replied from the outer fringe of the crowd. 'I am waiting for you to take me to my seat.'

'I'll help you,' said a familiar voice, as Jo knelt down beside him. 'Aren't you strong enough to turn the little blighter over yourself?'

Peter tried without success to conceal his relief when his worried blue eyes looked into the warmly brown ones of Josephine.

'I'm strong enough,' he muttered. 'Merely a little nervous.'

'I get you, mister,' the girl replied in a voice that denoted long years of close companionship. 'Let's go.'

'This isn't a sporting event,' said Peter. 'Don't be so snappy about it. You'll roll him off the boat.'

Together they turned the still figure over. Peter was unable to find any sign of bullet marks. He had been cowardly enough to leave the trousers for Jo to examine. This did not appear to gag her in the least. Several heads were peering down interestedly over her shoulder.

'From the holes in them pants,' said an awed voice, 'it looks like he'd fairly been riddled with bullets.'

'Must have been a machine gun that pinged him in the pants,' another observer declared.

Peter also objected to the use of the term 'ping.' However, he refrained from protesting, realizing that these callous persons must have cut their teeth on lethal weapons and played tag with machine-gun bullets.

'If he was hit by a machine gun,' said Jo in a brisk voice, 'the bullets must have balked at his drawers. From the little I can see, I don't much blame them at all.'

'These are my drawers,' objected Peter.

'What are your drawers doing on him, mister?' a deeply interested voice inquired.

Peter looked pained.

'Does it matter,' he asked, 'what my drawers are doing on this man? He's been mortally wounded. That's what matters now. Whether my drawers are off or on him makes absolutely no difference. In fact,' he added, with a touch of bitterness, 'it doesn't very much matter if he's wearing any drawers at all.'

'Well, a guy's got to wear some sort of drawers,' retorted the rebuked spectator in an injured voice.

'Not the sort I see bits of,' objected another. Josephine's calm voice cut short Peter's reply to this fresh insult.

'Why do you let yourself become involved in these futile discussions?' she asked. 'There might be some life left in the little crook yet.'

They returned the body to its former position and looked at it with baffled eyes. Peter's left hand brushed against the pale face. Instinctively he drew his hand back. Little Arthur's face presented a red smear.

Gord,' a voice whispered, 'the little feller's just beginning to bleed. How do you make that out?'

'Ain't bleedin' from no hole,' said another member of the helpful gathering. 'Must be bleedin' through his pores.'

'How do you mean,' a third voice inquired, 'bleedin' through his paws? He ain't no dog.'

Didn't say he was a dog,' the second voice snapped back. 'Don't have to be a dog to bleed through your pores.'

'But you got to be an animal,' the other announced triumphantly. 'I ain't as dumb as all that.'

'I mean the pores of his skin,' the second speaker replied somewhat wearily.

'Never knew skin had no paws,' said his stubborn opponent.

'You keep thinking of dogs' paws,' the second man replied almost pleadingly, 'while all the time I'm talking about skin pores—tiny little holes.'

Well, why don't you say little holes,' the persistent party demanded, 'instead of using a lot of foreign language?'

'Would you believe it possible?' Peter asked Josephine in a low voice. 'And in the presence of death, at that.'

'The trouble with you,' said the girl, 'is that you let yourself get dragged in. You're just as dumb as they are. Help me—

She stopped suddenly and looked at a dark stain on the left sleeve of Peter's coat; then her eyes sought his hand. Blood was dripping slowly from his knuckles. For a moment her hand flew to her mouth, stifling a little cry. Then she said quite calmly, trying to keep her feelings from flooding through:

'You've been shot in the arm, Mr. Van Dyck.'

'Me?' inquired Peter. 'That's odd. My arm does feel a bit funny now that I come to think of it.'

'What I want to know,' put in a fresh voice, a rough argumentative voice, 'how can this guy bleed when the other feller's shot?'

'Perhaps the bullet went clean through the little feller,' a spectator explained, 'stopping on its way first to kill him, and then bunged into this other bloke.'

'Knew it wasn't his paws,' an all too familiar voice put in. 'He ain't shot at all. Them holes in his pants are just natural holes, worn out, like.'

'Mean to tell me,' another man demanded, 'this big guy gets shot and the little one falls down for him? It ain't reasonable.'

'I don't mean to tell you nothing,' the first voice cried excitedly. 'Wasn't talking to you anyway. Just making a harmless suggestion.'

'You mean useless,' sneered the other.

By this time it was Peter's turn to become indignant. He looked darkly upon the recumbent form of Little Arthur while Josephine did things to his arm.

'Then that dirty dog of a thief,' he said as if to himself, 'has been having a nice long rest while all the time I've been shot in the arm and feeling sorry as hell for him.'

'If you will select your valets from the scum of the underworld,' Josephine told him, looking closely at Little Arthur, 'you must expect things like this to happen.'

'Nobody could have expected this,' said Peter.

'Say, mister,' put in a voice admiringly, 'you must be pretty used to bullets if you don't know when you're shot.'

'Either that or he's just plain dumb,' another passenger explained. 'I'd damn well know if I was shot.'

'I damn well wish you were,' grated Peter; then, turning to the girl beside him : 'I've a good mind to pull down his trousers and see if he hasn't been shot. Something's surely wrong with him.'

'Go on,' replied Jo. 'Pull his trousers off for all I care.'

Whatever the part of Little Arthur it was that remained alive must have been the modest part, for at the mention of his trousers his hands clutched them firmly and his eyes snapped open.

'None of that,' he got out weakly but distinctly. 'Them pants are up for good.'

'Ain't you even shot, buddy?' a voice called out.

'How do I know?' Little Arthur answered. 'I heard a shot and felt its breath.'

The interrogator laughed ironically.

'I guess you're O.K.,' he said. 'To hear a shot is one thing, and to feel a shot's another. You just fainted from fright.'

'Oh, yeah retorted the small man, sitting up with an indignant snap. 'Well, this shot didn't sound like no lullaby to me. It didn't exactly croon in my ear, if yer get what I mean. You'd of fainted, too.'

Little Arthur turned a pair of injured eyes on Peter, whom he regarded in the light of a patron and protector, but he found scant comfort in that quarter.

'If you've settled your discussion entirely to your own satisfaction, Little Arthur—' Peter began coldly.

'Oh, I don't mind the likes of him,' the recovered crook assured Peter.

'That's good,' continued Peter with false solicitude. 'But as I was saying, do you think it would inconvenience you too much if you got yourself to hell off that deck and looked for those two bags?'

'Can't you hunt 'em up yourself while I'm getting my breath?' was the pickpocket's reasonable suggestion.

'Little Arthur,' replied Peter, a feverish glitter burning in his eyes, 'I'm afraid you don't quite understand the position. By rights I should be lying down where you are and you should be where I am. In other words, while you have been taking it easy on the flat of your back I've been slowly bleeding to death looking for your wound, you craven-spirited, low-down, grubby little snatch-purse. Is everything quite clear? Get up, damn your eyes.'

Little Arthur rose hastily from the deck.

'Mean ter say you're shot, mister?' he asked nervously.

'Sure, I'm shot,' growled Peter, 'and have been shot ever since this ferry-boat shoved off a couple of days ago.'

'Then why are you standing up on your feet?' the small thief incredulously inquired.

'We all can't lie down on our backs,' Peter told him with due bitterness. 'You got there first. Find those suitcases and come inside. I'm getting weak.'

Before they moved away, Josephine found an opportunity to add to the pickpocket's mental unrest.

'And if anything happens to Mr. Peter,' she assured the small man, 'anything serious, that is, you're going to spend the rest of your life flat on your back in jail, and I'm going to put you there.'

'Gord, lady!' said Arthur. 'Don't feel that way. I ain't done a thing.'

'No,' she replied coldly, leading Peter away. 'And you look as if your never will, you dip.'

Yolanda met them at the entrance of the women's section of the cabin.

'It's taking terribly long to get across,' she complained; then coolly surveying Josephine—You have met a friend, I see, Peter.'

'Don't you remember me?' Jo asked her sweetly. 'I was the young lady behind the goggles. Your fiancé was nude with me in the closet.'

'Heavens!' exclaimed Yolanda. 'I should think you'd be ashamed to admit it. Are you really going to have a baby?'

'Several, I hope, some day, but not to-day,' said Jo. 'You see, Miss Wilmont, your quondam fiancé has been wounded.'

'Why do you say quondam?' asked Yolanda.—Mr. Van Dyck is still my fiancé.'

'You mean—after all that went on in that closet?'

'Would one of you mind taking a look at this arm?' Peter edged in weakly.

'Just a minute,' retorted Yolanda. 'What did happen in that closet, now that this woman has brought up the subject? I insist on knowing.'

'In detail?' Jo inquired.

'Don't be common,' snapped Yolanda. 'I demand a plain statement from Mr. Van Dyck.'

'Well,' said Josephine with a shrug of her charming shoulders, 'we might as well confess, Peter.' She turned to the waiting girl and extended her outspread hands in a help-less gesture. 'The usual thing,' she said. 'You know—the usual thing.'

'I think I do know,' replied the other, 'but I certainly did not know it was the usual thing. Is she speaking the truth, Peter?'

'Well, didn't you see for yourself?' Jo cried in exasperation. 'He was as naked as a coot, wasn't he? What else but the usual thing?'

'It might be usual with you,' said Yolanda, 'but I didn't think it was with Mr. Van Dyck—especially in a closet. Is it, Peter?'

'Eh?' asked Peter. 'What's that? Oh, no. Certainly not. Most unusual in a closet—almost unthinkable.'

'There you are,' said Josephine with finality. 'He admits it. Says it's unusual, but only in a closet, mind you.'

'I want to sit down,' said Peter. 'Aren't either one of you going to do a thing about this arm?'

'I'll look after you in a minute, Peter,' Yolanda told him.

'No, you won't,' said Josephine. 'After all that has passed between us, that is my privilege.'

'My dear young woman,' replied Yolanda, 'you have no official standing.'

'I can hardly stand at all,' said Peter. 'I'm going to sit down before I fall down.'

Finding a place on the long seat, he sank wearily down beside a stout, neatly arrayed woman with an anticipatory expression in her eyes. Although Peter did not know it at the moment, this woman was thinking entirely in terms of beer. So engrossed had she been in her thoughts, so spiritually steeped in beer, as it were, she had failed to notice how long it was taking for the ferry-boat to nose its way across the fog-piled river. Beneath her breath the woman had been humming 'California, Here I Come'—an old favourite with Aspirin Liz. Peter's near collapse on the bench beside her drew the thoughts of the bemused woman back to her present surroundings, which were not nearly so congenial as those of a water-front cafes. She gave the wounded man a quick survey, then turned halfway round on the bench and faced him. Her eyes were fixed on the dark, moist stain on his sleeve. Liz promptly drew the logical inference. Here was a wounded gunman who with the invariable delicacy of his kind refrained from drawing attention to his little contretemps. From the appearance of this gunman, racketeer, gangster, or whatever his class or creed, Aspirin Liz concluded that his present contretemps was something more than a little. The man looked downright bad. Aspirin Liz, with the quick camaraderie of her training, was worried about him.

'In trouble?' she asked in a low voice.

Peter started nervously. Liz attributed the movement to guilt.

'Yes,' he muttered. 'Terrible trouble. Shot in the arm.'

'Are you asking for a shot in the arm?' Liz asked him. 'Or have you been shot in the arm?'

'Yes,' said Peter. 'I've been. Never take dope.'

'Good,' replied Liz. 'That's one thing you've missed, anyway.'

'What do you mean?' demanded Peter. 'Did you take me for a dope fiend?'

'Never can tell,' said Liz. 'Ought to do something about that arm.'

'What should I do about it?' asked Peter.

'Take it out of its coat sleeve and shirt, for one thing, then take a look at it.'

'In front of all these people?'

'Why not? Never been in your shirt-sleeves before?'

'Much less than that,' said Peter, thinking back over the past few hours. 'You might not believe me, madam, but I've been dashing about naked.'

Liz's opinion of the man underwent a quick change.

'Oh, I see,' she said. 'That explains it. Then you're not a gangster?'

'Certainly not!' indignantly.

'Sort of shot in the line of nobody's business,' said Liz. 'In the pursuit of pleasure, so to speak. Are all husbands born with gats? Come on. Off with that coat.'

'It wasn't that,' complained Peter as she helped him to slip out of his coat. 'Not what you mean at all.'

Josephine and Yolanda, having succeeded in giving each other thoroughly bad tempers, presented themselves before Peter at this moment.

'What did I tell you?' demanded Jo, pointing a finger at Peter. 'There he goes again. Getting undressed already, and I bet he hadn't known the woman five minutes.'

'You viper!' said Peter. 'You'd rather let me bleed to death than stop telling lies.'

'I see you brought your trouble with you,' observed Liz in level tones. 'Those two your molls?'

'Not both of us,' said Jo promptly, with a nod indicating Yolanda. 'She is. I'm just his fancy lady.'

'What am I?' Yolanda demanded.

'It doesn't matter,' replied Aspirin Liz with an amused smile. 'I don't care if you're a couple of nuns. This man's been wounded. You can wash your dirty linen later.'

'Dirty linen!' put in Yolanda disdainfully. 'Peter, am I to be insulted in your presence?'

'Yes,' said Peter, disgusted. 'You are. I'd like to do it myself.'

'You have,' replied Yolanda.

'And speaking about linen,' Jo tossed in, 'I know the colour of his drawers.' Peter groaned aloud at this. 'That,' continued the girl, 'should be enough to convince you of the irregularity of our relations. They're not linen, his drawers. They're silk—all silk with orange stripes. Look for yourself, if you don't believe me.'

'Is that true, Peter?' Yolanda demanded.

'Oh, I don't know,' he answered distractedly, flinching beneath the investigating hands of Liz. 'Maybe she does and maybe she doesn't. I forgot myself. Why don't you drag my trousers off and get my damned drawers witnessed by a notary public?'

'Apparently,' remarked Yolanda, 'you don't care what woman undresses you so long as you get undressed.' 'No,' gritted Peter. 'I like myself that way.'

At this moment an impressive gentleman in clerical attire introduced himself to the contentious group.

'I was told a passenger had been shot,' he began, as if passengers were always being shot. 'Can I be of any help?'

'Well,' Jo replied, favouring the Bishop with a glowing smile, 'he's not quite ready to be buried yet, but if this boat doesn't land somewhere soon you may have the pleasure of chucking him out to sea.'

Bishop Waller permitted himself a faint smile, then stooped over and examined Peter's arm while Aspirin Liz looked at him with respect bred of the awareness of a slightly dappled past. Soon the two of them were working in complete accord to staunch the wound and bandage it, Liz acting in the capacity of water carrier to the man of God. When it came to procuring a bandage she promptly solved the difficulty with a coy look at the Bishop.

'I can see those two ladies don't wear them,' she said reprovingly, 'but I do and always have and always will. Here goes.'

Turning her back on the Bishop, who in justice to his exalted spirit was not at all interested, she did some considerable ripping. Her face flushed from exertion rather than from the inquiring scrutiny of several dozen passengers who sat patiently following her movements with the dull curiosity of the mentally vacant, she turned back to the Bishop and offered him a strip of cloth. This he accepted with a word of dignified commendation, then bound Peter's arm.

'Under the circumstances,' he said when his task was finished, 'this is about the best we can do, but the moment you get ashore, sir, I strongly advise you to see a physician to guard against infection. May I ask how the unfortunate accident occurred?'

'Merely one of the commoner risks of contemporary life in America,' said Peter. 'A stray shot, you know.'

'Exactly,' replied the Bishop. 'To-day one can hardly telephone without having the booth shot from around one.'

He seated himself beside Peter with the air of a man both able and willing to watch the whole night through.

'Most people in telephone booths deserve to be shot,' Josephine declared. 'It's the only way you can get 'em to come out.'

Bishop Waller received this bloodthirsty sentiment with unexpected approval. He had frequently felt that way himself about people in telephone booths, but had never gone so far as to put his feelings into words.

'Of course,' he said judicially, 'one's attitude may change considerably according to whether one is doing the telephoning or the shooting.'

'That's so,' replied Jo. 'Hadn't thought of that.' The Bishop's smile embraced her.

'Of course, my dear,' he said. 'Such minor considerations escape us all at times.'

Hardly had the Bishop rounded off his sentence as such gentlemen will and must, when the ferry-boat fairly tore its heart out in a protesting blast against fate in the guise of fog. As the engines sent chills along its timbers the reversed propellers bit back into the hidden water. From dead ahead came the answering scream of a half-crazed whistle. Danger ten feet off. Passengers ran to look at it, faces pressed against the windows. Eyes too filled with the wonder of ignorance to know they should look frightened. Waiting… drifting smoothly… then a soft, silly bump, a mere touch in the fog.

'Well, your reverence,' said Aspirin Liz, 'there's one of those minor considerations we didn't quite escape.'

'Bishop Waller, madam,' the excellent man informed her calmly. 'Episcopal bishop of the Eastern States. And should this present consideration prove a little less minor than we would like it, let us face it with the fortitude and courage of true Christians-civilized Christians, that is.'

Even at this serious moment Bishop Waller insisted on stressing that nice distinction existing between civilized Christians and savage ones—those who always wore drawers and those who gleefully discarded them after the closing hymn.

A small figure between two suitcases was taking up a great deal of room as it staggered across the cabin towards Peter Van Dyck.

'Here's your bags, mister,' gasped the pickpocket, supporting himself between them.

'Thank you, Little Arthur,' said Peter. 'But we have neither the time nor privacy to dress before sinking, I fear.'

'Are we doing that?' the small man asked in an even smaller voice.

'You had best prepare yourself to meet your God either now or a little later,' Bishop Waller told the pick-pocket in a gentle voice.

'If you don't mind, your honour,' Little Arthur chattered, 'I'm going to pray to God to meet Him much later—with all due respect to Heaven and Himself.'

'You'll never meet Him at all, you thing!' Josephine assured him.

'Peter, please do something,' Yolanda burst out. 'My nerves are on an edge.'

'Don't worry,' said Liz brightly. 'They might be all wet, you know.'

'Ugh!' gasped Little Arthur. 'What are we going to do?'

Then a great voice drilling down through the fog told Little Arthur in no uncertain language exactly what to do.