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                              THE AVALANCHE

                            _A MYSTERY STORY_

                           BY GERTRUDE ATHERTON

                                   1919

TO CHARLES HANSON TOWNE

CHAPTER I

Price Ruyler knew that many secrets had been inhumed by the earthquake
and fire of San Francisco and wondered if his wife's had been one of
them. After all, she had been born in this city of odd and whispered
pasts, and there were moments when his silent mother-in-law suggested a
past of her own.

That there was a secret of some sort he had been progressively convinced
for quite six months. Moreover, he felt equally sure that this impalpable
gray cloud had not drifted even transiently between himself and his wife
during the first year and a half of their marriage. They had been
uncommonly happy; they were happy yet ... the difference lay not in the
quality of Hélène's devotion, enhanced always by an outspoken admiration
for himself and his achievements, but in subtle changes of temperament
and spirits.

She had been a gay and irresponsible young creature when he married her,
so much so that he had found it expedient to put her on an allowance and
ask her not to ran up staggering bills in the fashionable shops; which
she visited daily, as much for the pleasure of the informal encounter
with other lively and irresponsible young luminaries of San Francisco
society as for the excitement of buying what she did not want.

He had broached the subject with some trepidation, for they had never had
a quarrel; but she had shown no resentment whatever, merely an eager
desire to please him. She even went directly down to the Palace Hotel and
reproached her august parent for failing to warn her that a dollar was
not capable of infinite expansion.

But no wonder she had been extravagant, she told Ruyler plaintively. It
had been like a fairy tale, this sudden release from the rigid
economies of her girlhood, when she had rarely had a franc in her
pocket, and they had lived in a suite of the old family villa on one
of the hills of Rouen, Madame Delano paying her brother for their
lodging, and dressing herself and Hélène with the aid of a half
paralyzed seamstress with a fiery red nose. Ma foi! It was the
nightmare of her youth, that nose and that croaking voice. But the
woman had fingers, and a taste! And her mother could have concocted a
smart evening frock out of an old window curtain.

But the petted little daughter was never asked to go out and buy a spool
of thread, much less was she consulted in the household economies. All
she noticed was that her clothes were smarter than Cousin Marthe's, who
had a real dressmaker, and was subject to fits of jealous sulks. No
wonder that when money was poured into her lap out in this wonderful
California she had assumed that it was made only to spend.

But she would learn! She would learn! She would ask her mother that very
day to initiate her into the fascinating secrets of personal economies,
teach her how to portion out her quarterly allowance between her
wardrobe, club dues, charities, even her private automobile.

This last heroic suggestion was her own, and although her husband
protested he finally agreed; it was well she should learn just what it
cost to be a woman of fashion in San Francisco, and the allowance was
very generous. His old steward, Mannings, ran the household, although as
he went through the form of laying the bills before his little mistress
on the third of every month, she knew that the upkeep of the San
Francisco house and the Burlingame villa ran into a small fortune a year.

"It is not that I am threatened with financial disaster," Ruyler had said
to her. "But San Francisco has not recovered yet, and it is impossible to
say just when she will recover. I want to be absolutely sure of my
expenditures."

She had promised vehemently, and, as far as he knew, she had kept her
promise. He had received no more bills, and it was obvious that her
haughty chauffeur was paid on schedule time, until, seized with another
economical spasm, she sold her car and bought a small electric which she
could drive herself.

Ruyler, little as he liked his mother-in-law, was intensely grateful to
her for the dexterity with which she had adjusted Hélène's mind to the
new condition. She even taught her how to keep books in an elemental way
and balanced them herself on the first of every month. As Hélène Ruyler
had a mind as quick and supple as it was cultivated in _les graces_, she
soon ceased to feel the chafing of her new harness, although she did
squander the sum she had reserved for three months mere pocket money upon
a hat; which was sent to the house by her wily milliner on the first day
of the second quarter. She confessed this with tears, and her husband,
who thought her feminine passion for hats adorable, dried her tears and
took her to the opening night of a new play. But he did not furnish the
pathetic little gold mesh bag, and as he made her promise not to borrow,
she did not treat her friends to tea or ices at any of the fashionable
rendezvous for a month. Then her native French thrift came to her aid and
she sold a superfluous gold purse, a wedding present, to an envious
friend at a handsome bargain.

That was ancient history now. It was twenty months since Price had
received a bill, and secret inquiries during the past two had satisfied
him that his wife's name was written in the books of no shop in San
Francisco that she would condescend to visit. Therefore, this maddening
but intangible barrier had nothing to do with a change of habit that had
not caused an hour of tears and sulks. Hélène had a quick temper but a
gay and sweet disposition, normally high spirits, little apparent
selfishness, and a naïve adoration of masculine superiority and strength;
altogether, with her high bred beauty and her dignity in public, an
enchanting creature and an ideal wife for a busy man of inherited social
position and no small degree of pride.

But all this lovely equipment was blurred, almost obscured at times, by
the shadow that he was beginning to liken to the San Francisco fogs that
drifted through the Golden Gate and settled down into the deep hollows of
the Marin hills; moving gently but restlessly even there, like ghostly
floating tides. He could see them from his library window, where he often
finished his afternoon's work with his secretaries.

But the fog drifted back to the Pacific, and the shadow that encompassed
his wife did not, or rarely. It chilled their ardors, even their serene
domesticity. She was often as gay and impulsive as ever, but with abrupt
reserves, an implication not only of a new maturity of spirit, but of
watchfulness, even fear. She had once gone so far as to give voice
passionately to the dogma that no two mortals had the right to be as
happy as they were; then laughed apologetically and "guessed" that the
old Puritan spirit of her father's people was coming to life in her
Gallic little soul; then, with another change of mood, added defiantly
that it was time America were rid of its baneful inheritance, and that
she would be happy to-day if the skies fell to-morrow. She had flung
herself into her husband's arms, and even while he embraced her the eyes
of his spirit searched for the girl wife who had fled and left this more
subtly fascinating but incomprehensible creature in her place.

II

The morning was Sunday and he sat in the large window of his library that
overlooked the Bay of San Francisco. The house, which stood on one of the
highest hills, he had bought and remodeled for his bride. The books that
lined these walls had belonged to his Ruyler grandfather, bought in a day
when business men had time to read and it was the fashion for a gentleman
to cultivate the intellectual tracts of his brain. The portraits that
hung above, against the dark paneling, were the work of his mother's
father, one of the celebrated portrait painters of his time, and were
replicas of the eminent and mighty he had painted. Maharajas, kings,
emperors, famous diplomats, men of letters, artists of his own small
class, statesmen and several of the famous beauties of their brief day;
these had been the favorite grandson's inheritance from Masewell Price,
and they made an impressive frieze, unique in the splendid homes of the
city of Ruyler's adoption.

He had brought them from New York when he had decided to live in
California, and hung them in his bachelor quarters. He had soon made up
his mind that he must remain in San Francisco for at least ten years if
he would maintain the business he had rescued from the disaster of 1906
at the level where he had, by the severest application of his life,
placed it by the end of 1908. Meanwhile he had grown to like San
Francisco better than he would have believed possible when he arrived in
the wrecked city, still smoking, and haunted with the subtle odors of
fires that had consumed more than products of the vegetable kingdom.

The vast ruin with its tottering arches and broken columns, its lonely
walls looking as if bitten by prehistoric monsters that must haunt this
ancient coast, the soft pastel colors the great fire had given as sole
compensation for all it had taken, the grotesque twisted masses of steel
and the aged gray hills that had looked down on so many fires, had
appealed powerfully to his imagination, and made him feel, when wandering
alone at night, as if his brain cells were haunted by old memories of
Antioch when Nature had annihilated in an instant what man had lavished
upon her for centuries. Nowhere, not even in what was left of ancient
Rome, had he ever received such an impression of the age of the world and
of the nothingness of man as among the ruins of this ridiculously modern
city of San Francisco. It fascinated him, but he told himself then that
he should leave it without a pang. He was a New Yorker of the seventh
generation of his house, and the rest of the United States of America was
merely incidental.

The business, a branch of the great New York firm founded in 1840 by an
ancestor grown weary of watching the broad acres of Ruyler Manor
automatically transmute themselves into the yearly rent-roll, and
reverting to the energy and merchant instincts of his Dutch ancestors,
had been conducted skillfully for the thirty years preceding the
disaster by Price's uncle, Dryden Ruyler. But the earthquake and fire in
which so many uninsured millions had vanished, had also wrecked men past
the rebounding age, and Dryden Ruyler was one of them. He might have
borne the destruction of the old business building down on Front Street,
or even the temporary stagnation of trade, but when the Pacific Union
Club disappeared in the raging furnace, and, like many of his old
cronies who had no home either in the country or out in the Western
Addition, he was driven over to Oakland for lodgings, this ghastly
climax of horrors--he escaped in a milk wagon after sleeping for two
nights without shelter on the bare hills behind San Francisco, while the
fire roared its defiance to the futile detonations of dynamite, and his
sciatica was as fiery as the atmosphere--had broken the old man's
spirit, and he had announced his determination to return to
Ruyler-on-Hudson and die as a gentleman should.

There was no question of Price's father, Morgan Ruyler, leaving New
York, even if he had contemplated the sacrifice for a moment; that his
second son and general manager of the several branches of the great
business of Ruyler and Sons--as integral a part of the ancient history
of San Francisco as of the comparatively modern history of New
York--should go, was so much a matter of course that Price had taken the
first Overland train that left New York after the receipt of his uncle's
despairing telegram.

In spite of the fortune behind him and his own expert training, the
struggle to rebuild the old business to its former standard had been
unintermittent. The terrific shock to the city's energies was followed
by a general depression, and the insane spending of a certain class of
San Franciscans when their insurance money was paid, was like a brief
last crackling in a cold stove, and, moreover, was of no help to the
wholesale houses.

But Price Ruyler, like so many of his new associates in like case, had
emerged triumphant; and with the unqualified approval and respect of the
substantial citizens of San Francisco.

It was this position he had won in a community where he had experienced
the unique sensation of being a pioneer in at the rebirth of a great
city, as well as the outdoor sports that kept him fit, that had endeared
California to Ruyler, and in time caused him whimsically to visualize New
York as a sternly accusing instead of a beckoning finger. Long before he
found time to play polo at Burlingame he had conceived a deep respect for
a climate where a man might ride horseback, shoot, drive a racing car, or
tramp, for at least eight months of the year with no menace of sudden
downpour, and hardly a change in the weight of his clothes.

To-day the rain was dashing against his windows and the wind howled about
the exposed angles of his house with that personal fury of assault with
which storms brewed out in the vast wastes of the Pacific deride the
enthusiastic baptism of a too confident explorer. All he could see of the
bay was a mad race of white caps, and dark blurs which only memory
assured him were rocky storm-beaten islands; mountain tops, so geological
tradition ran, whose roots were in an unquiet valley long since dropped
from mortal gaze.

The waves were leaping high against the old forts at the entrance to the
Golden Gate, and occasionally he saw a small craft drift perilously near
to the rocks. But he loved the wild weather of San Francisco, for he was
by nature an imaginative man and he liked to think that he would have
followed the career of letters had not the traditions of the great
commercial house of Ruyler and Sons, forced him to carry on the burden.

The men of his family had never been idlers since the recrudescence of
ancestral energy in the person of Morgan Ruyler I; it was no part of
their profound sense of aristocracy to retire on inherited or invested
wealth; they believed that your fine American of the old stock should die
in harness; and if the harness had been fashioned and elaborated by
ancestors whose portraits hung in the Chamber of Commerce, all the more
reason to keep it spic and up to date instead of letting it lapse into
those historic vaults where so many once honored names lay rotting. They
were a hard, tight-fisted lot, the Ruylers, and Price in one secluded but
cherished wing of his mind was unlike them only because his mother was
the daughter of Masefield Price and would have been an artist herself if
her scandalized husband would have consented. Morgan Ruyler IV had
overlooked his father-in-law's divagation from the orthodox standards of
his own family because he had been a spectacular financial success;
bringing home ropes of enormous pearls from India in addition to the
fantastic sums paid him by enraptured native princes. But while Morgan
Ruyler believed that rich men should work and make their sons work, if
only because an idle class was both out of place in a republic and
conducive to unrest in the masses, it was quite otherwise with women.
They were for men to shelter, and it was their sole duty to be useful in
the home, and, wherever possible, ornamental in public. Nor had he the
least faith in female talent.

Marian Ruyler had yielded the point and departed hopefully for a broader
sphere when her second and favorite son was eight. Morgan Ruyler married
again as soon as convention would permit, this time carefully selecting a
wife of the soundest New York predispositions and with a personal
admiration of Queen Victoria; and he had watched young Price like an
affectionate but inexorable parent hawk until the young man followed his
brother--a quintessential Ruyler--into the now historic firm. However, he
suffered little from anxiety. Price, too, was conservative, intensely
proud of the family traditions, an almost impassioned worker, and
unselfish as men go. Two sons in every generation must enter the firm. It
was not in the Ruyler blood to take long chances.

Life out here in California had been too hurried for more than fleeting
moments of self-study, but on this idle Sunday morning Price Ruyler's
perturbed mind wandered to that inner self of his to which he once had
longed to give a freer expression. It was odd that the conservative
training, the rigid traditions of his family, conventional,
old-fashioned, Puritanical, as became the best stock of New York, a stock
that in the Ruyler family had seemed to carry its own antidote for the
poisons ever seeking entrance to the spiritual conduits of the rich, had
left any place for that sentimental romantic tide in his nature which had
swept him into marriage with a girl outside of his own class; a girl of
whose family he had known practically nothing until his outraged father
had cabled to a correspondent in Paris to make investigation of the
Perrin family of Rouen, to which the girl's mother claimed to belong.

The inquiries were satisfactory; they were quite respectable,
bourgeois, silk merchants in a small way--although at least two strata
below that haute bourgeoisie which now regarded itself as the real
upper class of the République Française. A true Ruyler, however, would
have fled at the first danger signal, never have reached the point
where inquiries were in order.

California was replete with charming, beautiful, and superlatively
healthy girls; the climate produced them as it did its superabundance of
fruit, flowers, and vegetables. But they had left Price Ruyler
untroubled. He had been far more interested watching San Francisco rise
from its ruins, transformed almost overnight from a picturesque but
ramshackle city, a patchwork of different eras, into a staid metropolis
of concrete and steel, defiant alike of earthquake and fire. He had liked
the new experience of being a pioneer, which so subtly expanded his
starved ego that he had, by unconscious degrees, made up his mind to
remain out here as the permanent head of the San Francisco House; and in
time, no doubt, marry one of these fine, hardy, frank, out-of-door,
wholly unsubtle California girls. Moreover, he had found in San Francisco
several New Yorkers as well as Englishmen of his own class--notably John
Gwynne, who had thrown over one of the greatest of English peerages to
follow his personal tastes in a legislative career--all of whom had
settled down into that free and independent life from motives not
dissimilar from his own.

But he had ceased to be an untroubled spirit from the moment he met
Hélène Delano. He had gone down to Monterey for polo, and he had
forgotten the dinner to which he had brought a keen appetite, and stared
at her as she entered the immense dining room with her mother.

It was not her beauty, although that was considerable, that had summarily
transposed his gallant if cool admiration for all charming well bred
women into a submerging recognition of woman in particular; it was her
unlikeness to any of the girls he had been riding, dancing, playing golf
and tennis with during the past year and a half (for two years after his
arrival he had seen nothing of society whatever). Later that evening he
defined this dissimilarity from the American girl as the result not only
of her French blood but of her European training, her quiet secluded
girlhood in a provincial town of great beauty, where she had received a
leisurely education rare in the United States, seen or read little of the
great world (she had visited Paris only twice and briefly), her mind
charmingly developed by conscientious tutors. But at the moment he
thought that the compelling power lay in some deep subtlety of eye, her
little air of lofty aloofness, her classic small features in a small
face, and the top-heavy masses of blue black hair which she carried with
a certain naïve pride as if it were her only vanity; in her general
unlikeness to the gray-eyed fair-haired American--a type to which himself
belonged. Her only point in common with this fashionable set patronizing
Del Monte for the hour, was the ineffable style with which she wore her
perfect little white frock; an American inheritance, he assumed after he
knew her; for, as he recalled provincial French women, style was not
their strong point.

When he met her eyes some twenty minutes later, he dismissed the
impression of subtlety, for their black depths were quick with an eager
wonder and curiosity. Later they grew wistful, and he guessed that she
knew none of these smart folk, down, like himself, for the tournament;
people who were chattering from table to table like a large family. That
some of his girl acquaintances were interested in the young stranger he
inferred from speculative and appraising eyes that were turned upon her
from time to time.

Price, with some irony, wondered at their curiosity. The San Francisco
girl, he had discovered, possessed an extra sense all her own. There was
no lofty indifference about her. She had the worth-while stranger
detected and tabulated and his or her social destiny settled before the
Eastern train had disgorged its contents at the Oakland mole. And even
the immense florid mother of this lovely girl, with her own masses of
snow white hair dressed in a manner becoming her age, and a severe gown
of black Chantilly net, relieved by the merest trifle of jet, looked the
reverse of the nondescript tourist. The girl wore white embroidered silk
muslin and a thin gold chain with a small ruby pendant. She was rather
above the average height, although not as tall as her mother, and if she
were as thin as fashion commanded, her bones were so small that her neck
and arms looked almost plump. Her expressive eyes were as black as her
hair, and her only large feature. Her skin was of a quite remarkably pink
whiteness, although there was a pink color in her lips and cheeks. The
older men stared at her more persistently than the younger ones, who
liked their own sort and not girls who looked as if they might be "booky"
and "spring things on a fellow."

There was a ball in the evening and once more mother and daughter sat
apart, while the flower of San Francisco--an inclusive term for the
select circles of Menlo Park, Atherton, Burlingame, San Mateo, far San
Rafael and Belvedere--romped as one great family. Newport, Ruyler
reflected for the twentieth time, did it no better. To the stranger
peering through the magic bars they were now as insensible as befitted
their code. These two people knew nobody and that was the end of it.

IV

But Price noted that now the girl's eyes were merely wistful, and once or
twice he saw them fill with tears. As three of the dowagers merely
sniffed when he sought possible information, he finally had recourse to
the manager of the hotel, D.V. Bimmer. They were a Madame and
Mademoiselle Delano from Rouen, and had been at the hotel for a
fortnight, not seeming to mind its comparative emptiness, but enjoying
the sea bathing and the drives. The girl rode, and went out every morning
with a groom.

"But didn't they bring any letters?" asked Ruyler. "They are ladies and
one letter would have done the business. That poor girl is having the
deuce of a time."

"D.V.," who knew "everybody" in California, and all their secrets, shook
his head. "'Fraid not. The French maid told the floor valet that although
the father was American--from New England somewheres--and the girl born
in California, accidentally as it were, she had lived in France all her
life--she's just eighteen--never crossed the ocean before. Can you beat
it? Until last month, and then they came from Hong Kong--taking a trip
round the world in good old style. The madame, who scarcely opens her
month, did condescend to tell me that she had admired California very
much when she was here before, and intended to travel all over the state.
Perhaps I met her in that far off long ago, for I was managing a hotel in
San Francisco about that time, and her face haunts me somehow--although
when features get all swallowed up by fat like that you can't locate
them. The girl, too, reminds me of some one, but of course she was in
arms when she left and as I ain't much on cathedrals I never went to
Rouen. Of course it's the old trick, bringing a pretty girl to a
fashionable watering place to marry her off, but these folks are not
poor. Not what we'd call rich, perhaps, but good and solid. I don't fall
for the old lady; she's a cool proposition or I miss my guess, but the
girl's all right. I've seen too many girls in this Mecca for adventurous
females and never made a mistake yet. I wish some of our grand dames
would extend the glad hand. But I'm afraid they won't. Terrible
exclusive, this bunch."

Ruyler scowled and walked back to the ballroom. The exclusiveness of this
young society on the wrong side of the continent sometimes made him
homesick and sometimes made him sick. He saw little chance for this poor
girl to enjoy the rights of her radiant youth if her mother had not taken
the precaution to bring letters. France was full of Californians. Many
lived there. Surely she must have met some one she could have made use
of. It was tragic to watch a pathetic young thing staring at two or three
hundred young men and maidens disporting themselves with the natural
hilarity of youth, and but few of them too ill-natured to welcome a young
and lovely stranger if properly introduced.

He experienced a desperate impulse to go up to the mother and offer
her the hospitality of the evening, ask her to regard him as her host.
But Madame Delano had a frozen eye, and no doubt orthodox French ideas
on the subject of young girls. A moment later his eye fell on Mrs.
Ford Thornton.

"Fordy" was many times a millionaire, and his handsome intelligent wife
lived the life of her class. But she was far less conservative than any
woman Price had met in San Francisco. Although she was no longer young he
had more than once detected symptoms of a wild and insurgent spirit, and
an impatient contempt for the routine she was compelled to follow or go
into retirement. She was always leaving abruptly for Europe, and every
once in a while she did something quite uncanonical; enjoying wickedly
the consternation she caused among the serenely regulated, and betraying
to the keen eyes of the New Yorker an ironic appreciation of the immense
wealth which enabled her to do as she chose, answerable to no one. Her
husband was uxorious and she had no children. She had seemed to Price
more restless than usual of late and showing unmistakable signs of abrupt
departure. (He was sure she dusted the soles of her boots as she locked
the door of drawing-room A.) Perhaps to-night she might be in a
schismatic mood.

She was standing apart, a tall, dark, almost fiercely haughty woman, but
dressed with a certain arrogant simplicity, without jewels, her hair in a
careless knot at the base of her head. There were times when she was
impeccably groomed, others when she looked as if an infuriated maid had
left her helpless. She was, as Ruyler well knew, a kind and generous
woman (in certain of her moods), with whom the dastardly cradle fates had
experimented, hoping for high drama when the whip of life snapped once
too often. Perhaps she had found her revenge as well as her consolation
in cheating them.

It was evident to Price that she had been snubbing somebody, for a group
of matrons, flushed and drawn apart, were whispering resentfully. Price
Ruyler stood in no awe of her. He could match her arrogance, and he liked
and admired her more than any of his new friends. They quarreled
furiously but she had never snubbed him.

He walked over to her, his cool gray eyes lit with the pleasure in seeing
her that she had learned to expect. "Good evening, oh, Queen of the
Pacific," he said lightly. "You are looking quite wonderful as usual. Are
you standing alone almost in the middle of the room to emphasize
the--difference?"

"I am in no mood for compliments, satiric or otherwise." She looked him
over with cool penetration. "I may not massage or have my old cuticle
ripped off. If I choose to look my age you must admit that it gives me
one more claim to originality."

"You should have let the world know long since just how original you are,
instead of settling down into the leadership of San Francisco society--"

He enjoyed provoking her. Her dark narrow eyes opened and flashed as they
must have done in their unchastened youth. "Don't dare call me the leader
of this--this!"

"Granted. But the fact remains that your word alone is law. Therefore I
am about to ask you to forget that I am a bungling diplomat and do a kind
act. For once you would be able to be both kind and original."

"I did not know you went in for charities. I am sick of shelling out."

"My only part in charities is shelling out."

"Well, come to the point. What do you want?"

"I want you to go over to that lady--Madame Delano, her name is--sitting
beside that beautiful girl, and introduce yourself and then me. They are
strangers and I'd like to give them a good time."

"How disinterested of you!" She looked the isolated couple over. "The
girl is all right, but I don't like the mother. She is well dressed--oh,
correct from tip to toe--but not quite the lady."

Ruyler's cool insolent gaze swept the dado of amiable overfed ladies who
fanned themselves against the wall.

"None of that! You know that I do not tolerate the New York attitude.
At least we know who ours are; they came into their own respectably,
and with no uncertain touch. Of course it is stupid of them to get fat.
Naturally it makes them look _bourgeoise_. But this is a lazy climate.
As to that woman: there is something about her I do not like. She is
aggressively not massaged, not made up. Only a woman of assured
position can afford to be mid-Victorian. It is now quite the smart
thing to make up."

"No doubt her position is assured in her own provincial town. It will be
easy enough to drop her if she doesn't go down. You can't deny that the
girl is all right--and a sweet pathetic figure."

"If the girl marries one of our boys--and no doubt that is what she was
brought here for--we shall not be able to get rid of the mother. We've
tried that and failed."

At that moment Ruyler's eyes met those of the girl. They flashed an
irresistible appeal. He drew a short breath. How different she looked!
She radiated a subtle promise of perfect companionship. Price Ruyler did
what all men will do until the end of time. He made up his mind that he
had found his woman and without vocal assistance.

Mrs. Thornton, who had been watching the unusual mobility of his face,
met his eyes with a satirical smile in her own, her thin red curling lips
drawn almost straight for a moment. She had played with the fancy, before
anger banished it, that if she had been twenty years younger.... Men had
fallen madly in love with her in her own day.... She detected the
symptoms in this man at once. Her savage will compelled her to accept
accumulating years without a concession. But she had forgotten nothing.

Ruyler may have read her thoughts.

"You know," he said, with an attempt at lightness, although the coast
wind tan, which was his only claim to coloring, had paled a little, "that
girl reminds me so much of you that I have made up my mind to marry her.
I don't care who she is. If you don't help me to meet her conventionally
I'll manage somehow, but I should hate to practice any subterfuges on the
woman I intend to make my wife."

For a moment he had the sensation of being pinned to the wall by that
narrow concentrated gaze. Then Mrs. Thornton swung on her heel. "I'll do
it," she said.

She walked across the room with the supple grace her slender figure had
never lost and sat down beside the older woman. In a moment the
astonished dowagers who had "suffered from her fiendish temper all
evening," saw her talking with spontaneous graciousness to both the
strangers. Madame Delano was at first more distant and reserved than Mrs.
Thornton had ever been, manifestly betraying all the suspicion and
unsocial instincts of her class; but she thawed, and the two women
chatted, while once more the girl's eyes wandered to the dancers.

When Mrs. Thornton had tormented Ruyler for quite fifteen minutes she
beckoned to him imperiously. A moment later he was whirling the girl down
the ball room and thrilling at her contact.

V

The wooing had been as headlong as his falling in love. Hélène Delano had
a deep sweet voice, which completed the conquest during the hour they
spent in the grounds under the shelter of a great palm, until hunted down
by a horrified parent.

Hélène talked frankly of her life. Her mother had been visiting relatives
in a small New England town--Holbrook Centre, she believed it was called,
but hard American names did not cling to her memory--she loved the soft
Latin and Indian names in California--and there she had met and married
her father, James Delano. They were on their way to Japan when business
detained him in San Francisco much longer than he had expected and she
was born. She believed that he had owned a ranch that he wanted to sell.
He died on the voyage across the Pacific and her mother had returned to
live among her own people in Rouen--very plain bourgeois, but of a
respectability, Oh, là! là!

"But it was a tiresome life for a young girl with American blood in her,
monsieur." Her mother's income from her husband's estate was not large,
but they lived in a wing of the old house and were very comfortable. From
her window there was a lovely view of the Seine winding off to Paris.
"Oh, monsieur, how I used to long to go to Paris! America was too far. I
never even dreamed of it. But Paris! And only two little glimpses of
it--the last when we spent a fortnight there before sailing, to get me
some nice frocks...."

She had studied hard--but hard! She knew four languages, she told Ruyler
proudly. "I had no _dot_ then, you see. It was possible I might have to
teach one day. A governess in England, Oh, là! là!"

But six months ago a good old uncle had died and left them some money.
She would have a little _dot_ now, and they could travel. Maman said she
would not have a large enough _dot_ to make a fine marriage in France,
but that the English and American men were more romantic. They went first
to the Orient, as there were many Englishmen of good family to be met
there. "But maman is difficult to please," she added with her enchanting
artlessness, "as difficult as I myself, monsieur. I wish to fall in love
like the American girls. Maman says it is not necessary, but I am half
American, so, why not? There was an English gentleman with a nice title
in Hong Kong and maman was quite pleased with him until she discovered
that he gambled or did something equally horrid and she bought our
tickets for San Francisco right away."

Yes, she was enjoying her travels, but she was a little lonesome; in
Rouen at least she had her cousins. For the first time in her life she
was talking to a young man alone; even on the steamer she was not
permitted to speak to any of the nice young men who looked as if they
would like her if only maman would relent.

"In our ugly old rooms in Rouen maman cherished me like some rare little
flower in an old earthen pot," she added quaintly. "Now the pot has
tinsel and tissue paper round it, but until to-night I have felt as if I
might just as well be an old cabbage."

But it had been heaven to dance with a young man who was not a cousin;
and to sit out alone with him in the moonlight, Oh, _grace à Dieu_!

Traveling she had read modern novels for the first time. There were many
in the ship's library, oh, but dozens! and she knew now how American and
English girls enjoyed life. Her mother had been ill nearly all the way
over. She had given her word not to speak to any one, but maman had been
ignorant of the library replete with the novelists of the day, and
although she was not untruthful, _enfin_, she saw no reason to ask her
too anxious parent for another prohibition and condemn herself to yawn
at the sea.

Ruyler proposed at the end of a week. She was the only really innocent,
unspoiled, unselfconscious girl he had ever met, almost as old-fashioned
as his great grandmother must have been. Not that he set forth her
virtues to bolster his determination to marry a girl of no family even in
her own country; he was madly in love, and life without her was
unthinkable; but he tabulated the thousand points to her credit for the
benefit of his outraged father.

He did not pretend to like Madame Delano. She was a hard, calculating,
sordid old bourgeoisie, but when he refused the little _dot_ she would
have settled upon Hélène, he knew that he had won her friendship and that
she would give him no trouble. She was not a mother-in-law to be ashamed
of, for her manners were coldly correct, her education in youth had
evidently been adequate, and in her obese way she was imposing. She gave
him to understand that she had no more desire to live with her son-in-law
than he with her, and established herself in a small suite in the Palace
Hotel. After a "lifetime" in a provincial town, economizing mercilessly,
she felt, she remarked in one of her rare expansive moments, that she had
earned the right to look on at life in a great hotel.

The rainy season she spent in Southern California, moving from one large
hotel crowded with Eastern visitors to another. This uncommon
self-indulgence and her devotion to Hélène were the only weak spots
Ruyler was able to discover in that cast-iron character. She seldom
attended the brilliant entertainments of her daughter and refused the
endowed car offered by her son-in-law. Hélène married to the best _parti_
in San Francisco and quite happy, she seemed content to settle down into
the role of the onlooker at the kaleidoscope of life. She spent eight
hours of the day and evening seated in an arm chair in the court of the
Palace Hotel, and for air rode out to the end of the California Street
car line, always on the front seat of the dummy. She was dubbed a "quaint
old party" by her new acquaintances and left to her own devices. If she
didn't want them they could jolly well do without her.

VI

Hélène's social success was immediate and permanent. Californians rarely
do things by halves. Society was no exception. She had "walked off" with
the most desirable man in town, but they were good gamblers. When they
lost they paid. She had married into "their set." They had accepted her.
She was one of them. No secret order is more loyal to its initiates.

During that first year and a half of ideal happiness Ruyler, in what
leisure he could command, found Hélène's rapidly expanding mind as
companionable as he had hoped; and the girlish dignity she never lost,
for all her naiveté and vivacity, gratified his pride and compelled, upon
their second brief visit to New York, even the unqualified approval of
his family.

She had inherited all the subtle adaptability of her father's race,
nothing of the cold and rigid narrowness of her mother's class. Price had
feared that her lively mind might reveal disconcerting shallows, but
these little voids were but the divine hiatuses of youth. He sometimes
wondered just how strong her character was. There were times when she
showed a pronounced inclination for the line of least resistance ... but
her youth ... her too sheltered bringing up ... those drab cramped
years ... no wonder....

He was glad on the whole that his was the part to mold. Nevertheless, he
had his inconsistencies. Unlike many men of strong will and driving
purpose he liked strength of character and pronounced individuality in
women; and he, too, had had fleeting visions of what life might have been
had Flora Thornton entered life twenty years later. He had been quite
sincere in telling her that the young stranger reminded him of the most
powerful personality he had met in California, and he believed that
within a reasonable time Hélène would be as variously cultivated, as
widely, if less erratically developed. But was there any such insurgent
force in her depths? It was not within the possibilities that at any time
in her life Flora Thornton had been pliable.

A man had little time to study his wife in California these days. Or at
any time? He sometimes wondered. Certainly happy marriages were rare and
divorces many. Fine weather nearly all the year round played the deuce
with domesticity, and his business could not be neglected for the long
vacation abroad to which they both had looked forward so ardently.

Sometimes, even before this vague gray mist had risen between them, he
had had moments of wondering whether he knew his wife at all. How could a
man know a woman who did not yet know herself? He sighed and wished he
had more time to explore the uncharted seas of a woman's soul.

But the cause of the change in her was something far less picturesque,
something concrete and sinister. He felt sure of that....

VII

Unless--but that was ridiculous! Impossible!

He sprang to his feet, incredulous, disgusted at the mere thought.

But why not? She was very young, and older and wiser women were afflicted
with inconsistencies, little tenacious desires and vanities never quite
to be grasped by the elemental male.

He went over to a bookcase containing heavy works of reference and
pressed his index finger into the molding. It swung outward, revealing
the door of a safe. He manipulated the combination, took from a drawer of
the interior a box, opened it and stared at a magnificent Burmah ruby. It
was or had been a royal jewel, presented to Masewell Price by one of the
great princes of India whose portrait he had painted. The pearls had all
been captured long since by Price's sisters and by Morgan V. for his
wife; but this ruby his mother had given him as she lay dying. She had
bidden him leave it in his father's safe until he was out of college, and
then keep it as closely in his personal possession as possible. It would
be turned over to him with the rest of his private fortune.

"Never let any woman wear it," she had whispered. "It brings luck to men
but not to women. Nothing could have affected my luck one way or the
other--I was born to have nothing I wanted, but you, dear little boy.
Keep it for your luck and in a safe place, but near you."

He had looked back upon this scene as he grew older as the mere
expression of a whim of dissolution, but it had made so deep an
impression upon him at the time that insensibly the words sank into his
plastic mind creating a superstition that refused to yield to reason. The
ruby was Hélène's birthstone and she was passionately fond of it. She had
begged and coaxed to wear this jewel, and upon one occasion had stamped
her little foot and sulked throughout the evening. He had given her a
ruby bar, had the clasp of her pearl necklace set with rabies, and last
Christmas had presented her with a small but fine "pigeon blood"
encircled with diamonds. These had enraptured her for the moment, but she
had always circled back to the historic stone, over which her indulgent
husband was so unaccountably obstinate.

Until lately. He recalled that for several months she had not mentioned
it. Could she have been indulging in a prolonged attack of interior
sulks, which affected her spirits, dimmed her radiant personality? He
abominated the idea but admitted the possibility. She would not be the
first person to be the victim of a secret but furious passion for jewels.
He recalled a novel of Hichens; not the matter but the central idea.
Authors of other races had used the same motive. Well, if his wife had an
abnormal streak in her the sooner he found out the truth the better.

He closed the door of the safe, swung the bookcase into place, slipped
the ruby with its curious gold chain that looked massive but hardly
weighed an ounce, into his pocket, rang for a servant and told him to ask
Mrs. Ruyler to come down to the library as soon as she was dressed.

CHAPTER II

Ruyler sighed as he heard his wife walk down the hall. There had been a
time when she came running like a child at his summons, but in these days
she walked with a leisurely dignity which to his possibly morbid ear
betrayed a certain crab-like disposition in her little high heels to slip
backward along the polished floor.

She came in smiling, however, and kissed him quickly and warmly. Her
extraordinary hair hung down in two long braids, their blue blackness
undulating among the soft folds of her thin pink negligée. For the first
time Ruyler realized that pink was Hélène's favorite color; she seldom
wore anything else except white or black, and then always relieved with
pink. And why not, with that deep pink blush in her white cheeks, and the
velvet blackness of her eyes? People still raved over Hélène Ruyler's
"coloring," and Price told himself once more as she stood before him, her
little head dragged back by the weight of her plaits, her slender throat
crossed by a narrow line of black velvet, that he had married one of the
most beautiful girls he had ever seen.

He was seized with a sudden sharp pang of jealousy and caught her in his
arms roughly, his gray eyes almost as black as hers.

"Tell me," he exclaimed, and the new fear almost choked him, "does any
other man interest you--the least little bit?"

She stared at him and then burst into the most natural laugh he had heard
from her for months. "That is simply too funny to talk about."

"But I am able to give you so little of my time. Working or tired out at
night--letting you go out so much alone--but I haven't the heart to
insist that you yawn over a book, while I am shut up here, or too fagged
to talk even to you. Life is becoming a tragedy for business men--if
they've got it in them to care for anything else."

"Well, don't add to the tragedy by cultivating jealousy. I've told you
that I am perfectly willing to give up Society and sit like Dora holding
your pens--or filling your fountain pen--no, you dictate. What chance has
a woman in a business man's life?"

"None, alas, except to look beautiful and be happy. Are you that?--the
last I mean, of course!"

She nestled closer to him and laughed again. "More so than ever. To be
frank you have completed my happiness by being jealous. I have wondered
sometimes if it were a compliment--your being so sure of me."

"That's my idea of love."

"Well, it's mine, too. But if you want me to stay home--"

"Oh, no! You are fond of society? Really, I mean? Why shouldn't you
be?--a young thing--"

"What else is there? Of course, I should enjoy it much more if you were
always with me. Shall we never have that year in Europe together?"

"God knows. Something is wrong with the world. It needs
reorganizing--from the top down. It is inhuman, the way even rich men
have to work--to remain rich! But sit down."

He led her over to a chair before the window. The storm was decreasing in
violence, the heavy curtain of rain was no longer tossed, but falling in
straight intermittent lines, and the islands were coming to life. Even
the high and heavy crest of Mount Tamalpais was dimly visible.

"It is the last of the storms, I fancy. Spring is overdue," said Price,
who, however, was covertly watching his wife's face. Her color had faded
a little, her lids drooped over eyes that stared out at the still
turbulent waters.

"I love these San Francisco storms," she said abruptly. "I am so glad we
have these few wild months. But Mrs. Thornton has worried and so have we.
Her fête at San Mateo comes off on the fourteenth, the first
entertainment she has given since her return, and it would be ghastly if
it rained. It should be a wonderful sight--those grounds--everybody in
fancy dress with little black velvet masks. Don't you think you can go?"

"The fourteenth? I'll try to make it. Who are you to be?"

"Beatrice d'Este--in a court gown of black tissue instead of velvet, with
just a touch of pink--oh, but a wonderful creation! I designed it myself.
We are not bothering too much about historical accuracy."

"How would you like this for the touch of pink!" He took the immense ruby
from his pocket and tossed it into her lap.

For a moment she stared at it with expanding eyes, then gave a
little shriek of rapture and flung herself into his arms, the child
he had married.

"Is it true? But true? Shall I wear this wonderful thing? The women will
die of jealousy. I shall feel like an empress--but more, more, I shall
wear this lovely thing--I, I, Hélène Ruyler, born Perrin, who never had a
franc in her pocket in Rouen! Price! Have you changed your mind--but no!
I cannot believe it."

That was it then! He watched her mobile face sharply. It expressed
nothing but the excited rapture of a very young woman over a magnificent
toy. There was none of the morbid feverish passion he had dreadfully
anticipated. His spirits felt lighter, although he sighed that a bauble,
even if it were one of the finest of its kind in the world, should have
projected its sinister shadow between them. It had a wicked history. But
Hélène saw no shadows. She held it up to the light, peered into it as it
lay half concealed in the cup of her slender white hands, fondled it
against her cheek, hung the chain about her neck.

"How I have dreamed of it," she murmured. "How did you come to change
your mind?"

"I thought it a pity such a fine jewel should live forever in a safe; and
it will become you above all women. Nature must have had you in her eye
when she designed the ruby. I had a sudden vision ... and made up my mind
that you should wear it the first time I was able to take you to a party.
I must keep the letter of my promise."

"And I can only wear it when you are with me?"

"I am afraid so."

"I'm you, if there is anything in the marriage ceremony." Then she kissed
him impulsively. "But I won't be a little pig. And I can tell everybody
between now and the Thornton fête that I am going to wear it, and I can
think and dream of my triumph meanwhile. But why didn't you let me know
you were down? It is Sunday, our only day. I overslept shockingly. I
didn't get home till two."

"Two? Do you dance until two every night?"

"What else? They lead such a purposeless life out here. We sometimes have
classes--but they don't last long. I have almost forgotten that I once
had a serious mind. But what would you? It is either society or suffrage.
I won't be as serious as that yet. I mean to be young--but young! for
five more years. Then I shall become a 'leader,' or vote for the
President, or ride on a float in a suffrage parade dressed as the Goddess
of Liberty, with my hair down."

He laughed, more and more relieved. "Yes, please remain young until you
are twenty-five. By that time I hope the world will have adjusted itself
and I shall have the leisure to companion you. Meanwhile, be a child. It
is very refreshing to me. Come. I must lock this thing up. I have an
interview here with Spaulding in about ten minutes."

She gave it up reluctantly, kissing it much as she had kissed him during
their engagement; warm, lingering, but almost impersonal kisses. The ruby
seemed miraculously to have restored her beaten youth.

She sat on the edge of a chair as he opened the safe and placed the jewel
in its box and drawer.

"There is one other thing I wanted to ask," he said as he rose. "Is your
allowance sufficient? It has sometimes occurred to me that you wanted
more--for some feminine extravagance."

The light went out of her face. He wondered whimsically if he had locked
it in with the ruby, and once more he was conscious that something
intangible floated between them. But she looked at him squarely with her
shadowed eyes.

"Oh, one could spend any amount, of course, but I really have
quite enough."

"You shall have double your present allowance when these cursed times
improve. And I have always intended to settle a couple of hundred
thousand on you--a quarter of a million--as soon as I could realize
without loss on certain investments. But one day I want you to be quite
independent."

Her eyes had opened very wide. "A quarter of a million? And it would be
all my own? I could do anything with it I liked?"

"Well--I think I should put it in trust. I haven't much faith in the
resistance of your sex to tempting investments promising a high rate of
interest."

"I have heard you say that when rich men die the amount of worthless
stock found in their safe deposit boxes passes belief."

"Quite true. But that is hardly an argument in favor of trusting an even
more inexperienced sex with large sums of money."

She laughed, but less naturally than when he had been seized with an
unwonted spasm of jealousy. "You will always get the best of me in an
argument," she said with her exquisite politeness. "Really, I think I
love being wholly dependent upon you. Here comes your detective. What
a bore. But at least we lunch together if we do have company. And
thank you, thank you a thousand times for promising I shall wear the
ruby at last."

She slipped her hand into his for a second, then left the room, smiling
over her shoulder, as the locally celebrated "Jake" Spaulding entered.
Both Ruyler and his general manager had thought it best to have their
cashier watched. There were rumors of gambling and other road house
diversions, and they proposed to save their man to the firm, if possible;
if not, to discharge him before he followed the usual course and involved
Ruyler and Sons in the loss of thousands they could ill afford to spare.

On the following day Ruyler, who had looked upon the whirlwind of passion
that had swept him into a romantic and unworldly marriage, as likely to
remain the one brief drama of his prosaic business man's life, began
dimly to apprehend that he was hovering on the edge of a sinister and
complicated drama whose end he could as little foresee as he could escape
from the hand of Fate that was pushing him inexorably forward. When Fate
suddenly begins to take a dramatic interest in a man whose course has run
like a yacht before a strong breeze, she precipitates him toward one half
crisis after another in order to confuse his mental powers and render him
wholly a puppet for the final act. These little Earth histrionics are
arranged no doubt for the weary gods, who hardly brook a mere mortal
rising triumphantly above the malignant moods of the master playwright.

He lunched at the Pacific Union Club and caught the down-town California
Street cable car as it passed, finding his favorite seat on the left side
of the "dummy" unoccupied. He was thinking of Hélène, a little
disappointed, but on the whole vastly relieved, congratulating himself
that, no longer haunted, he could give his mind wholly to the important
question of the merger he contemplated with a rival house that had limped
along since the disaster, but had at last manifested its willingness to
accept the offer of Ruyler and Sons.

It was a moment before he realized that his mother-in-law occupied the
front seat across the narrow space, and even before he recognized that
large bulk, he had registered something rigid and tense in its muscles;
strained in its attitude. When he raised his eyes to the face he found
himself looking at the right cheek instead of the left, and it was
pervaded by a sickly green tint quite unlike Madame Delano's florid
color. She was listening to a man who sat just behind her on the long
seat that ran the length of the dummy. Although the day was clear, there
was still a sharp wind and no one else sat outside.

Ruyler knew the man by sight. Before the fire he had owned some of the
most disreputable houses in the district the car would pass on its way to
the terminus. The buildings were uninsured, and he had made his living
since as a detective. Even his political breed had gone out of power in
the new San Francisco, but he was well equipped for a certain type of
detective work. He had a remarkable memory for faces and could pierce any
disguise, he was as persistent as a ferret, and his knowledge of the
underworld of San Francisco was illimitable. But his chief assets were
that he looked so little like a detective, and that, so secretive were
his methods, his calling was practically unknown. He had set up a cheap
restaurant with a gambling room behind at which the police winked,
although pretending to raid him now and again. He was a large soft man
with pendulous cheeks streaked with red, a predatory nose, and a black
overhanging mustache. His name was 'Gene Bisbee, and there was a
tradition that in his younger days he had been handsome, and irresistible
to the women who had made his fortune.

Ruyler was absently wondering what his haughty mother-in-law could have
to say to such a man when to his amazement Bisbee planted his elbow in
the pillow of flesh just below Madame Delano's neck, and said easily:

"Oh, come off, Marie. I'd know you if you were twenty years older and
fifty pounds heavier--and that's going some. Bimmer and two or three
others are not so sure--won't bet on it--for twenty years, and, let me
see--you weighed about a hundred and thirty-five--perfect figger--in the
old days. Must weigh two seventy-five now. That makes one forty-five
pounds extra. Well, that and time, and white hair, would change pretty
near any woman, particularly one with small features. You look a real old
lady, and you can't be mor'n forty-five. How did you manage the white
hair? Bleach?"

Ruyler felt his heart turn over. The frozen blood pounded in his brain
and distended his own muscles, his mouth unclosed to let his breath
escape. Then he became aware that the woman had recovered herself and
moved forward, displacing the familiar elbow. She turned imperiously to
the motorman.

"Stop at the corner," she said. "And if this man attempts to follow me
please send back a policeman. He is intoxicated."

The car stopped at the corner of the street opposite the site of the
old Saint Mary's Cathedral, a street where once had been that row of
small and evil cottages where French women, painted, scantily dressed
in a travesty of the evening gown, called to the passer-by through the
slats of old-fashioned green shutters. That had been before Ruyler's
day, but he knew the history of the neighborhood, and this man's
interest in it. He was not surprised to hear Bisbee laugh aloud as
Madame Delano, who stepped off the car with astonishing agility,
waddled down the now respectable street. But she held her head
majestically and did not look back.

Ruyler squared his back lest the man, glancing over, recognize him. That
would be more than he could bear. As the car reached Front Street he
sprang from the dummy and walked rapidly north to Ruyler and Sons. He
locked himself in his private office, dismissing his stenographer with
the excuse that he had important business to think out and must not be
disturbed.

II

But business was forgotten. He was as nearly in a state of panic as was
possible for a man of his inheritance and ordered life. He belonged to
that class of New Yorker that looked with cold disgust upon the women of
commerce. So far as he knew he had never exchanged a word with one of
them, and had often listened with impatience to the reminiscences of his
San Francisco friends, now married and at least intermittently decent, of
the famous ladies who once had reigned in the gay night life of San
Francisco.

And his mother-in-law! The mother of his wife!

Her name was Marie. In that chaos of flesh an interested eye might
discover the ruins of beauty. Her hair, he knew, had been black. He
recalled the terror expressed in every line of that mountainous
figure--which may well have been perfect twenty years ago. The green
pallor of her cheek! And he had long felt, rather than knew, that she
possessed magnificent powers of bluff. Her dignified exit had been no
more convincing to him than to Bisbee.

He went back over the past and recalled all he knew of the woman whose
daughter he had married. She had visited the United States about
twenty-one years ago, met and married Delano, and remained in San
Francisco two or three months on their way to Japan. Delano had died on
the voyage across the Pacific, been buried at sea, and his widow had
returned to her family in Rouen and settled down in her brother's
household.

This was practically all he knew, for it was all that Hélène knew, and
Madame Delano never wasted words. It had not occurred to him to question
her. Their status in Rouen was established, and if not distinguished it
was indubitably respectable and not remotely suggestive of mystery.

Price, convinced that Hélène's father must have been a gentleman,
recalled that he had asked her one day to tell him something of the
Delanos, but his wife had replied vaguely that she believed her
mother had been too sad to talk about him for a long while, and then
probably had got out of the habit. She knew nothing more than she
already had told him.

It came back to him, however, that several times his wife's casual
references to the past, and particularly regarding her parents, had not
dove-tailed, but that he had dismissed the impression; attributing it to
some lapse in his own attention. He had a bad habit of listening and
thinking out a knotty business problem at the same time. And there is a
curious inhibition in loyal minds which forbids them to put two and two
together until suspicion is inescapably aroused.

He had a very well ordered mind, furnished with innumerable little pigeon
holes, which flew open at the proper vibration from his admirable memory.
He concentrated this memory upon a little bureau of purely personal
receptacles and before long certain careless phrases of his wife stood in
a neat row.

She had mentioned upon one occasion that she thought she must have been
about five when she arrived in Rouen, and remembered her first impression
of the Cathedral as well as the boats on the Seine at night. And Cousin
Pierre had taken her up the river one Sunday to the church on the height
which had been built for a statue of the Virgin that had been excavated
there, and bade her kneel and pray at this station for what she wished
most. She had prayed for a large wax doll that said papa and mama, and
behold, it had arrived the next day.

Madame Delano had told him unequivocally that she had gone directly to
Rouen after her husband's death ... but again, although Hélène
remembered arriving in Rouen with her mother, she must have been left
for a time elsewhere, for Hélène had another memory--of a convent, where
she had tarried for what seemed a very long time to her childish mind.
Could she have been sent to a convent from the house in Rouen when she
was so little that her memories of that first sojourn were confused? And
why? The family had apparently been fond of "la petite Americaine," and
even if her devoted mother had been obliged to leave her for several
years it is doubtful if they would have sent so young a child to a
convent. Rack his memory as he would he could recall no allusion to such
a journey, to any separation between mother and child after they were
established in Rouen.

But he did remember one of Madame Delano's few references to the past,
which might suggest that she had left the child somewhere while she went
home to make peace with her family to get her bearings. Her brother had
not approved of her marrying an American. "But," she had added
graciously, "you see I had no such prejudice. Neither now nor then. James
was the best of husbands."

"James!" "Jim."

He had heard the name Jim as he boarded the dummy, uttered in extremely
familiar accents; by Bisbee, of course. Yes, and something else. "We all
felt bad when he croaked."

His feverishly alert memory darted to another pigeon hole and exhumed
another treasure. Some ten or twelve months ago he had been obliged to go
to a northern county on business that involved buying up smaller
concerns, and would keep him away for a fortnight or more. He had taken
Hélène, and as they were motoring through one of the old towns she had
leaned forward with a little gasp exclaiming:

"How exactly like! If I didn't know that I had never been in California
before except merely to be born here I could vow that is where I lived
with the dear nuns."

He had asked idly: "Where was your convent?" and she had shaken her head.
"Maman says I never was in a convent, that I dreamed it." She had lifted
to Ruyler a puzzled face. "I remember she punished me once, when I was
about seven and persisted in talking about the convent--I suppose I had
forgotten it for a time in the new life, and something brought it back to
me. But it is the most vivid memory of my childhood. Do you think I could
have been one of those uncanny children that live in a dream world? I
hope not. I like to think I am quite normal and full to the brim of
common sense." He had laughed and told her not to worry. He had lived in
a dream world himself when he was little.

The conviction grew upon him as he sat there that Hélène had spent the
first five years of her life at the Ursuline Convent in St. Peter. What
had her mother--young and beautiful--been doing during those years, the
years of a mother's most anxious devotion and pleasurable interest? He
searched his memory for Club reminiscences of a Marie Delano of twenty
years earlier, or less. No such name rewarded his mental explorations,
and Marie Delano was not a name likely to escape.

He exclaimed aloud at his stupidity. The astute French woman was hardly
likely to return to the scene of her former triumphs with an innocent
young daughter and an infamous name. Nor, apparently, had she carried it
to Rouen after she had manifestly foresworn vice for the sake of her
child, even to the length of resigning herself to the dullness of a
provincial town.

But "Jim"? Her husband? Could Bisbee have referred to some other Jim who
had "croaked" recently? Such women have more than one Jim in their
voluminous lives.

Ruyler had that order of mental temperament to which dubiety is the
one unendurable condition; he had none of that cowardice which
postpones an unpleasant solution until the inevitable moment. Whatever
this hideous mystery he would solve it as quickly as possible and then
put it out of his life. Beyond question poor Hélène was the victim of
blackmail; that was the logical explanation of her ill-concealed
anxiety--misery, no doubt!

He wished she had had the courage to come directly to him, but it was
idle to expect the resolution of a woman of thirty in a child of twenty.
It was apparent that she had even tried to shield her mother, for that
Madame Delano had been caught unaware to-day was indisputable.

What incredible impudence--or courage?--to return here! There were other
resorts in the South and on the Eastern Coast where a pretty girl might
reap the harvest of innocent and lovely youth.

Once more his mind abruptly focused itself.

Shortly after his marriage Madame Delano had asked him casually if he
could inform her as to the reliability of a certain firm of lawyers,
Lawton, Cross and Co. She "thought of buying a ranch," and the firm had
been suggested to her by some one or other of these rich people. She also
wished to make a will.

He had replied as casually that it was a leading firm, and forgotten the
incident promptly. He recalled now that several times he had seen his
mother-in-law coming out of the Monadnock Building, where this firm had
its offices. He had upon one occasion met her in the lift and she had
explained with unaccustomed volubility that she was still thinking of
buying a ranch, possibly in Napa County. She understood that quite a
fortune might be made in fruit, and it would be a diverting interest for
her old age. Possibly she might encourage a favorite nephew to come out
and help her run it.

Ruyler, who had been absorbed in his own affairs and hated the sight of
any woman during business hours, had felt like telling her that if she
wanted to sink her money in a ranch, that was as good a way to get rid of
it as any, but had merely nodded and left the elevator. He was not the
man to give any one unasked advice and be snubbed for his pains.

If "Jim" was her husband and had "croaked" some two years since, what
more natural than that she had been obliged to come to California and
settle his estate? Lawton and Cross would keep her secret, as California
lawyers, with or without blackmail, had kept many others; perhaps she was
an old friend of Lawton's. He had been a "bird" in his time.

Undoubtedly this was the solution. Otherwise she never would have risked
the return to San Francisco, even with her changed appearance.

It was time to dismiss speculation and proceed to action. He rang up
detective headquarters and asked Jake Spaulding to come to him at once.

Spaulding began: "But the matter ain't ripe yet, boss. Nothin' doin'
last night--"

But Ruyler cut him short. "Please come immediately--no, not here. Meet me
at Long's."

He left the building and walked rapidly to a well-known bar where
estimable citizens, even when impervious to the seductions of cocktail
and highball, often met in private soundproof rooms to discuss momentous
deals, or invoke the aid of detectives whose appearance in home or office
might cause the wary bird to fly away.

The detective did not drink, so Ruyler ordered cigars, and a few moments
later Spaulding strolled in. His physical movements always belied his
nervous keen face. He was the antithesis of 'Gene Bisbee. All honest men
compelled to have dealings with him liked and trusted him. A rich man
could confide a disgraceful predicament to his keeping without fear of
blackmail, and a poor man, if his cause were interesting, might command
his services with a nominal fee. He loved the work and regarded himself
as an artist, inasmuch as he was exercising a highly cultivated gift, not
merely pursuing a lucrative profession. He sometimes longed, it is true,
for worthier objects upon which to lavish this gift, and he found them a
few years later when the world went to war. He was one of the most
valuable men in the Federal Secret Service before the end of 1915.

"What's up?" he asked, as he took possession of the most comfortable
chair in the little room and lit a cigar. "You look as if you hadn't
slept for a week, and you were lookin' fine yesterday."

"Do you mind if I only half confide in you? It's a delicate matter. I'd
like to ask you a few questions and may possibly ask you to find the
answer to several others."

"Fire away. Curiosity is not my vice. I'll only call for a clean breast
if I find I can't work in the dark."

"Thanks. Do--do you remember any woman of the town named--Marie Delano?"
He swallowed hard but brought it out. "Who may have flourished here
fifteen or twenty years ago?"

Spaulding knew that Ruyler's wife had been named Delano, but he refrained
from whistling and fixed his sharp honest blue eyes on the opposite wall.

"Nope. Sounds fancy enough, but she was no Queen of the Red Light
District in S.F."

"I was convinced she could not have been known under that name. Do you
know of any woman of that sort who was married--possibly--to a man whose
first name was James--Jim--and who left abruptly, while she was still
young and handsome, just about fifteen years ago?"

"Lord, that's a poser! Do you mean to say she married and retired--landed
some simp? They do once in a while. Could tell you queer things about
certain ancestries in this old town."

"No--I don't think that was it. I have reason to think she had been
married for at least six years before she left. Can't you think of any
Marie who was married to a Jim--in--in that class of life?"

"I was pretty much of a kid fifteen years ago, but I can recall quite a
few Maries and even more Jims. But the Jims were much too wary to marry
the Maries. Try it again, partner. Let us approach from another angle.
What did your Marie look like?"

"She must have been tall--uncommonly tall--with black hair and small
features; black eyes that must have been large at that time.
I--I--believe she had a very fine figure."

"What nationality?"

"French."

The detective recrossed his legs. "French. Oh, Lord! The town was fairly
overrun with them. Made you think there was nothing in all this talk
about gay Paree. All the ladybirds seemed to have taken refuge here. You
have no idea of her last name!"

"It might have been Perrin."

"Never. Not after she got here and set up in business. More likely
Lestrange or Delacourt--"

"Was there a Delacourt?"

"Not that I remember. I don't see light anywhere. Of course it won't take
me twenty-four hours to get hold of the history and appearance of every
queen who was named Marie fifteen years ago, and your description helps a
lot. Records were burned, but some of the older men on the force are
walking archives. For the matter of that you might draw out some old
codger in your club and get as much as I can give you--"

"Rather not! I think I'll have to give you my confidence."

"Much the shortest and straightest route. Just fancy you're takin' a
nasty dose of medicine for the good of your health. I guess this is a
case where I can't work in the dark."

"Have you ever noticed an elderly woman, seated in the court of the
Palace Hotel--immensely stout?"

"I should say I had. One of the sights of S.F. Why--of course--she's your
mother-in-law!"

"Has there been any talk about her!"

"Some comment on her size. And her childlike delight in watchin'
the show."

"Nothing else? No one has claimed to recognize her?"

Spaulding sat up straight, his nose pointing. "Recognize her? What
d'you mean?"

"I mean that I overheard a conversation--one-sided--to-day on the
California Street dummy, in which Bisbee accused Madame Delano
practically of what I have told you. At least that is the way I
interpreted it. He called her Marie, alluded in an unmistakable manner to
a disgraceful past in which he had known her intimately, and was
confident that he recognized her in spite of her flesh and white hair. I
am positive that she recognized him, although she was clever enough not
to reply."

"Jimminy! The plot thickens. That scoundrel never forgot a face in his
life. I don't train with him--not by a long sight--so if there's been any
talk in his bunch, I naturally wouldn't have heard it. You say her name
is Marie now?"

"Yes."

"And Perrin is her real name?"

"She comes of a well-known family of Rouen of that name. She lived there
with her child for at least thirteen years before her return to
California. Of that I am certain. Her daughter is now twenty. I wish to
know where she kept that child during the first five years of its life. I
have reason to think it was in the Ursuline Convent at St. Peter."

"That's easy settled. And you think the father's first name was Jim?"

"She told me that his name was James Delano. Also that he died within the
first year of their marriage, when the child was two months old, during
the voyage to Japan. That may be, but I can see no reason for her
returning here unless he died more recently and the settlement of his
estate demanded her presence."

"Pretty good reasoning, particularly if you are sure she stayed here
until the child was five. Some of them have pretty decent instincts. She
may have made up her mind to give the kid a chance, and returned to her
relations. Of course we must assume that they knew nothing of her life."

"I am positive they did not. But there had been some sort of
estrangement. I have been given to understand that it was because she
married an American. Of course she may not have written to them at all
for six or seven years. Her story is that she was visiting other
relatives in a place called Holbrook Centre, Vermont, and met this man
and married him. Then that he was detained by business in San Francisco
for several months, and the child born here."

"Good commonplace story. Just the sort that is never questioned. Of
course if she did not correspond with her family during all that time she
could adopt any name for her return to respectability that she chose.
Delano wasn't it? That's certain. What line do you intend to take? After
I've delivered the facts?"

"My object is to have the child's legitimacy established, if possible,
then see that Madame Delano leaves California forever. I think that she
could be terrified by a threat of blackmail. I can't imagine the mere
chance of recognition worrying her, for I should say she had as much
courage as presence of mind. But her passion is money. If she thought
there was any danger of being forced to hand over what she has I fancy
she would get out as quickly as possible. She is an intelligent woman and
I imagine she has taken a sardonic pleasure in sitting out in full view
of San Francisco, and getting away with it."

"And marrying her girl to the greatest catch in California," thought the
detective, but he said:

"I believe you're dead right, although, of course, there may be nothing
in it. Even 'Gene Bisbee might be mistaken, pryin' a gazelle out of an
elephant like that. Now, tell me all you know."

When Ruyler had covered every point Spaulding nodded. "It's possible this
Jim was the maquereau and she made him marry her for the sake of the
child. Doubt if the date can be proved except through the lawyers, and it
will be hard to make them talk. Of course if there is a Holbrook Centre
and she was married there--but I have my doubts. The point is that he
evidently married her if she is settlin' up his estate. I'll find out
what Jims have died within the last three years or so. That's easy. The
direct route to the one we want is through St. Peter. I'll go up
to-night."

"And you'll report to-morrow?"

"Yep. Meet me here at six P.M. Lucky the man seems to have died after
the fire. I'll set some one on the job of searching death records
right away."

CHAPTER IV

Ruyler had half promised to go to a dinner that night at the house of
John Gwynne, whose wife would chaperon his wife afterward to the last of
the Assembly dances.

Gwynne was his English friend who had abandoned the ancient title
inherited untimely when he was making a reputation in the House of
Commons, and become an American citizen in California, where he had a
large ranch originally the property of an American grandmother. His
migration had been justified in his own eyes by his ready adaptation to
the land of his choice and to the opportunities offered in the rebuilding
of San Francisco after the earthquake and fire, as well as in the
renovation of its politics. He had made his ranch profitable, read law as
a stepping-stone to the political career, and had just been elected to
Congress. Ruyler was one of his few intimate friends and had promised to
go to this farewell dinner if possible. A place would be kept vacant for
him until the last minute.

Gwynne had married Isabel Otis[A], a Californian of distinguished beauty
and abilities, whose roots were deep in San Francisco, although she had
"run a ranch" in Sonoma County. The Gwynnes and the Thorntons until
Ruyler met Hélène had been the friends whose society he had sought most
in his rare hours of leisure, and he had spent many summer week-ends at
their country homes. He had hoped that the intimacy would deepen after
his marriage, but Hélène during the past year had gone almost exclusively
with the younger set, the "dancing squad"; natural enough considering her
age, but Ruyler would have expected a girl of so much intelligence, to
say nothing of her severe education, to have tired long since of that
artificial wing of society devoted solely to froth, and gravitated
naturally toward the best the city afforded. But she had appeared to like
the older women better at first than later, although she accepted their
invitations to large dinners and dances.

[Footnote A: See "Ancestors."]

Ruyler made up his mind to attend this dinner at Gwynne's, and telephoned
his acceptance before he left Long's. Business or no business, he should
be his wife's bodyguard hereafter. There were blackmailers in society as
out of it, and it was possible that his ubiquity would frighten them off.
Whether to demand his wife's confidence or not he was undecided. Better
let events determine.

II

When he arrived at home he went directly to Hélène's room, but paused
with his hand on the knob of the door. He heard his mother-in-law's voice
and she was the last person he wished to meet until he was in a position
to tell her to leave the country. He was turning away impatiently when
Madame Delano lifted her hard incisive tones.

"And you promised me!" she exclaimed passionately. "I trusted you, I
never believed--"

Price retreated hurriedly to his own room, and it was not until he
had taken a cold shower and was half dressed that he permitted
himself to think.

That wretch had known, then! It was she who had been blackmailing her
daughter. And the poor child had been afraid to confide in him, to ask
him for money. No wonder her eyes had flashed at the prospect of a
fortune of her own....

An even less welcome ray illuminated his mind at this point. His wife was
not unversed in the arts of dissimulation herself. True, she was French
and took naturally to diplomatic wiles; true, also, the instinct of
self-preservation in even younger members of a sex that man in his
centuries of power had made, superficially, the weaker, was rarely inert.

What woman would wish her husband to know disgraceful ancestral secrets
which were no fault of hers? A much older woman would not be above
entombing them, if the fates were kind. But it saddened him to think that
his wife should be rushed to maturity along the devious way. Poor child,
he must win her confidence as quickly as his limping wits would permit
and shift her burden to his own shoulders.

Having learned through the medium of the house telephone that his
mother-in-law had departed, he knocked at his wife's door. She opened it
at once and there was no mark of agitation on her little oval face under
its proudly carried crown of heavy braids. She was looking very lovely in
a severe black velvet gown whose texture and depth cunningly matched her
eyes and threw into a relief as artful the white purity of her skin and
the delicate pink of lip and cheek.

She smiled at him brilliantly. "It can't be true that you are
going with me?"

"I've reformed. I shall go with you everywhere from this time forth. But
I thought I heard your mother's voice when I came in--"

"She often comes in about dressing time to see me in a new frock. How
heavenly that you will always go with me." Her voice shook a little and
she leaned over to smooth a possible wrinkle in her girdle.

"Will you come down to the library? We are rather early."

He went directly to the safe and took out the ruby and clasped the chain
about her neck. The chain was long and the great jewel took a deeper and
more mysterious color from the somber background of her bodice.

Hélène gasped. "Am I to wear it to-night? That would be too wonderful.
This is the last great night in town."

"Why not? I shall be there to mount guard. You shall always wear it when
I am able to go out with you."

She lifted her radiant face, although it remained subtly immobile with a
new and almost formal self-possession. "I am even more delighted than I
was yesterday, for at the fête there will be so much novelty to distract
attention. You always think of the nicest possible things."

When they were in the taxi he put his arm about her.

"I wonder," he began gropingly, "if you would mind not going out when I
cannot go with you? I'll go as often as I can manage. There are
reasons--"

He felt her light body grow rigid. "Reasons? You told me only
yesterday--"

"I know. But I have been thinking it over. That is rather a fast lot you
run with. I know, of course, they are F.F.C.'s, and all the rest of it,
but if I ever drove up to the Club House in Burlingame in the morning and
saw you sitting on the veranda smoking and drinking gin fizzes--"

"You never will! I could not swallow a gin fizz, or any nasty mixed
drink. And although I have had my cigarette after meals ever since I was
fifteen, I never smoke in public."

"I confess I cannot see you in the picture that rose for some perverse
reason in my mind; but--well, you really are too young to go about so
much without your husband--"

"I am always chaperoned to the large affairs. Mrs. Gwynne takes me to the
Fairmont to-night."

"I know. But scandal is bred in the marrow of San Francisco. Its social
history is founded upon it, and it is almost a matter of principle to
replace decaying props. Do you mind so much not going about unless I can
be with you?"

"No, of course not." Her voice was sweet and submissive, but her body did
not relax. She added graciously: "After all, there are so many luncheons,
and we often dance in the afternoon."

He had not thought of that! What avail to guard her merely in the
evening? It was not her life that was in danger....

And he seemed as immeasurably far from obtaining her confidence as
before. He had always understood that the ways of matrimonial diplomacy
were strewn with pitfalls and wished that some one had opened a school
for married men before his time.

He made another clumsy attempt. The cab was swift and had almost covered
the long distance between the Western Addition and Russian Hill. "Other
things have worried me. You are so generous. Society here as elsewhere
has its parasites, its dead beats, trying to limp along by borrowing,
gambling, 'amusing,' doing dirty work of various sorts. It has worried me
lest one or more of these creatures may have tried to impose on you with
hard luck tales--borrow--"

She laughed hysterically. "Price, you are too funny! I do lend
occasionally--to the girls, when their allowance runs out before the
first of the month; but I don't know any dead beats."

He plunged desperately. "Your mother's voice sounded rather agitated for
her. Of course I did not stop to listen, but it occurred to me that she
may have been gambling in stocks, or have got into some bad land deal.
She is so confoundedly close-mouthed--if she wants money send her to me."

Hélène sat very straight. Her little aquiline profile against the passing
street lights was as aloof as imperial features on an ancient coin.

"Really, Price, I don't think you can be as busy as you pretend if you
have time to indulge in such flights of imagination. Maman has never
tried to borrow a penny of me, and she is the last person on earth to
gamble in stocks or any thing else. Or to buy land except on expert
advice. I think she has given up that idea, anyhow. She said this evening
she thought it was time for her to visit our people in Rouen."

"Oh, she did! Hélène, I must tell you frankly that I heard her reproach
you for having broken a promise, and she spoke with deep feeling."

It was possible that the Roman profile turned white, but in the dusk of
the car he could not be sure. His wife, however, merely shrugged her
shoulders and replied calmly:

"My dear Price, if that has worried you, why didn't you say so at once? I
am rather ashamed to tell you, all the same. Maman has been at me lately
to persuade you to let her have the ruby for a week. She is dreadfully
superstitious, poor maman, and is convinced it would bring her some
tremendous good fortune--"

"I have never met a woman who, I could swear, was freer from
superstition--"

Price closed his lips angrily. Of what use to tax her feminine defenses
further? He had known her long enough to be sure she would rather tell
the truth than lie. It was evident that she had no intention of lowering
her barriers, and he must play the game from the other end: get the proof
he needed and engineer his mother-in-law out of the United States.

Some time, however, he would have it out with his wife. Being a business
man and always alert to outwit the other man, he wanted neither intrigue
nor mystery in his home, but a serene happiness founded upon perfect
confidence. He found it impossible to remain appalled or angry at his
wife's readiness of resource in guarding a family secret that must have
shocked the youth in her almost out of existence.

He patted her hand, and felt its chill within the glove.

"It was like you never to have mentioned it," he murmured. "For, of
course, it is quite impossible."

"That is what I told her decidedly to-night, and I do not think she will
ask again. It hurts me to refuse dear maman anything. Her devotion to me
has been wonderful--but wonderful," she added on a defiant note.

"A mother's devotion, particularly to a girl of your sort, does not make
any call upon my exclamation points. But here we are."

The car rolled up the graded driveway Gwynne had built for the old San
Francisco house that before his day had been approached by an almost
perpendicular flight of wooden steps. They were late and the company
had assembled: the Thorntons, Trennahans, and eight or ten young
people, all of whom would be chaperoned by the married women to the
dance at the Fairmont.

Russian Hill had escaped the fire, but Nob Hill had been burnt down to
its bones, and the Thorntons and Trennahans had not rebuilt, preferring,
like many others, to live the year round in their country homes and use
the hotels in winter.

The moment Hélène entered the drawing-room it was evident that the ruby
was to make as great a sensation as the soul of woman could desire. Even
the older people flocked about her and the girls were frank and shrill in
their astonishment and rapture.

"Hélène! Darling! The duckiest thing--I never saw anything so perfectly
dandy and wonderful! I'd go simply mad! Do, just let me touch it! I
could eat it!"

Mrs. Thornton, who at any time scorned to conceal envy, or pretend
indifference, looked at the great burning stone with a sigh and turned to
her husband.

"Why didn't you manage to get it for me?" she demanded. "It would be far
more suitable--a magnificent stone like that!--on me than on that baby."

"My darling," murmured Ford anxiously, "I never laid eyes on the thing
before, or on one like it. I'll find out where Ruyler got it, and try--"

"Do you suppose I'd come out with a duplicate? You should have thought of
it years ago. You always promised to take me to India."

"It should be on you!" He gazed at her adoringly. Her hair was dressed
in a high and stately fashion to-night. She wore a gown of gold brocade
and a necklace and little tiara of emeralds and diamonds; she was
looking very handsome and very regal. Thornton was a thin, dark, nervous
wisp of a man, who had borne his share of the burdens laid upon his city
in the cataclysm of 1906, but if his wife had demanded an enormous
historic ruby he would have done his best to gratify her. But how the
deuce could a man--

Mrs. Gwynne was holding the stone in her hand and smiling into its
flaming depths without envy. She was one of those women of dazzling white
skin, black hair and blue eyes, who, when wise, never wear any jewels but
pearls. She wore the Gwynne pearls to-night and a shimmering white gown.

Ruyler glanced round the fine old room with the warm feeling of
satisfaction he always experienced at a San Francisco function, where the
women were almost as invariably pretty as they were gay and friendly. He
did not like the younger men he met on these occasions as well as he did
many of the older ones; the serious ones would not waste their time on
society, and there were too many of the sort who were asked everywhere
because they had made a cult of fashion, whether they could afford it or
not. A few were the sons of wealthy parents, and were more dissipated
than those obliged to "hold down" a job that provided them with money
enough above their bare living expenses to make them useful and
presentable.

Ruyler looked upon both sorts as cumberers of the earth, and only
tolerated them in his own house when his wife gave a party and dancing
men must be had at any price.

There was one man here to-night for whom he had always held particular
detestation. His name was Nicolas Doremus. He was a broker in a small
way, but Ruyler guessed that he made the best part of his income at
bridge, possibly poker. He lived with two other men in a handsome
apartment in one of the new buildings that were changing the old skyline
of San Francisco. His dancing teas and suppers were admirably appointed
and the most exclusive people went to them.

Ruyler knew his history in a general way. His father had made a fortune
in "Con. Virginia" in the Seventies, and his mother for a few years had
been the social equal of the women who now patronized her son. But
unfortunately the gambling microbe settled down in Harry Doremus' veins,
and shortly after his son was born he engaged his favorite room at the
Cliff House and blew out his brains. His wife was left with a large
house, which as a last act of grace he had forborne to mortgage and made
over to her by deed. She immediately advertised for boarders, and as her
cooking was excellent and she had the wit to drop out of society and give
her undivided attention to business, she prospered exceedingly.

She concentrated her ambitions upon her only child; sent him to a private
school patronized by the sons of the wealthy, and herself taught him
every ingratiating social art. She wanted him to go to college, but by
this time "Nick" was nineteen and as highly developed a snob as her
maternal heart had planned. Knowing that he must support himself
eventually, he was determined to begin his business career at once, and
believed, with some truth, that there was a prejudice in this broad field
against college men. He entered the brokerage firm of a bachelor who had
occupied Mrs. Doremus' best suite for fifteen years, and made a
satisfactory clerk, the while he cultivated his mother's old friends.

When Mrs. Doremus died he sold the house and good will for a considerable
sum, and, combining it with her respectable savings, formed a partnership
with two other young fellows, whose fathers were rich, but old-fashioned
enough to insist that their sons should work. Nick did most of the work.
His partners, during the rainy season, sat with their feet on the
radiator and read the popular magazines, and in fine weather upheld the
outdoor traditions of the state.

The firm had a slender patronage, as Ruyler happened to know, but Doremus
was a member of the Pacific Union Club, and although he dined out every
night, he must have spent six or seven thousand a year. It was amiably
assumed that his social services,--he played and sang and often
entertained exacting groups throughout an entire evening--his fetching
and carrying for one rich old lady, accounted for his ability to keep out
of debt and pay for his many extravagances; but Ruyler knew that he was
principally esteemed at the small green table, and he vaguely recalled as
he looked over his head to-night that he had heard disconnected murmurs
of less honorable sources of revenue.

As Ruyler turned away with a frown he met Gwynne's eyes traveling from
the same direction. "I didn't ask him," he said apologetically. "Hate men
too well dressed. Looks as if he posed for tailors' ads in the weeklies.
Never could stand the social parasite anyhow, but Aileen Lawton asked
Isabel to let her bring him, as they are going to open the ball to-night
with some new kind of turkey trot.

"Glad I'm off for Washington. California's the greatest place on earth in
the dry season, but I'd have passed few winters here if it hadn't been
for the work we all had to do, and even then it would have been heavy
going without my wife's companionship."

Ruyler sighed. Should he ever enjoy his wife's companionship? And into
what sort of woman would she develop if forced along crooked ways by ugly
secrets, blackmail, perpetual lying and deceit? He longed impatiently for
the decisive interview with Spaulding on the morrow. Then, at least he
could prepare for action, and, after all, even of more importance now
than winning his wife's confidence and saving her from mental anguish,
was the averting of a scandal that would echo across the continent
straight into the ears of his half-reconciled father.

IV

It was about halfway through dinner that the primitive man in him routed
every variety of apprehension that had tormented him since two o'clock
that afternoon.

Trennahan, another distinguished New Yorker, who had made his home in
California for many years, had taken in Mrs. Gwynne, and his Spanish
California wife sat at the foot of the table with the host. Ford had
been given a lively girl, Aileen Lawton, to dissipate the financial
anxieties of the day, and, to Ruyler's satisfaction, Mrs. Thornton had
fallen to his lot and he sat on the left of Isabel. In this little group
at the head of the table, his chosen intimates, who were more interested
in the affairs of the world than in Consummate California, Ruyler had
forgotten his wife for a time and had not noticed with whom she had gone
in to dinner.

But during an interval when Mrs. Thornton's attention had been captured
by the man on her right, and the others drawn into a discussion over
the merits of the new mayor, Price became aware that Doremus sat beside
his wife halfway down the table on the opposite side, and that they
were talking, if not arguing, in a low tone, oblivious for the moment
of the company.

The deferential bend was absent from the neck of the adroit social
explorer, his head was alertly poised above the lovely young matron whose
beauty, wealth, and foreign personality, to say nothing of the importance
of her husband, gave her something of the standing of royalty in the
aristocratic little republic of San Francisco Society. There was a vague
threat in that poise, as if at any moment venom might dart down and
strike that drooping head with its crown of blue-black braids. Suddenly
Hélène lifted her eyes, full of appeal, to the round pale blue orbs that
at this moment openly expressed a cold and ruthless mind.

Ruyler endeavored to piece together those disconnected whispers--letters
discovered or stolen--blackmail--but such whispers were too often the
whiffs from energetic but empty minds, always floating about and never
seeming to bring any culprit to book.

Had this man got hold of his wife's secret?

But this merely sequacious thought was promptly routed. The young man,
who was undeniably good looking and was rumored to possess a certain cold
charm for women--although, to be sure, the wary San Francisco heiress had
so far been impervious to it--was now leaning over Mrs. Price Ruyler with
a coaxing possessive air, and the appeal left Hélène's eyes as she smiled
coquettishly and began to talk with her usual animation; but still in a
tone that was little more than a murmur.

She moved her shoulder closer to the man she evidently was bent upon
fascinating, and her long eyelashes swept up and down while her black
eyes flashed and her pink color deepened.

There was a faint amusement mixed with Doremus' habitual air of amiable
deference, and somewhat more of assurance, but he was as absorbed as
Hélène and had no eyes for Janet Maynard, on his left, whose fortune ran
into millions.

For a moment Ruyler, who had kept his nerve through several years of
racking strain which, even an American is seldom called upon to survive,
wondered if he were losing his mind. To business and all its fluctuations
and even abnormalities, he had been bred; there was probably no condition
possible in the world of finance and commerce which could shatter his
self-possession, cloud his mental processes. But his personal life had
been singularly free of storms. Even his emotional upheaval, when he had
fallen completely in love for the first time, had lacked that torment of
uncertainty which might have played a certain havoc, for a time, with
those quick unalterable decisions of the business hour; and even his
engagement had only lasted a month.

It was true that during the past six months he had worried off and on
about the shadow that had fallen upon his wife's spirits and affected his
own, but, when he had had time to think of it, before yesterday morning,
he had assumed it was due to some phase of feminine psychology which he
had never mastered. That she could be interested in another man never had
crossed his mind, in spite of his passing flare of jealousy. She was
still passionately in love with, him, for all her vagaries--or so he had
thought--

Ruyler was conscious of a riotous confusion of mind that really made him
apprehensive. Had he witnessed that scene on the dummy--this
afternoon?--it seemed a long while ago--had he heard those portentous
words of his mother-in-law to his wife?--had they meant that she had
warned her daughter against the bad blood in her veins, extracted a
promise--broken!--to walk in the narrow way of the dutiful
wife--mercifully spared by a fortunate marriage the terrible temptations
of the older woman's youth? Had Hélène confessed ... in desperate need of
help, advice? ... Doremus was just the bounder to compromise a woman and
then blackmail her.... Good God! What _was_ it?

For all his mental turmoil he realized that here alone was the only
possible menace to his life's happiness. His mother-in-law's past was a
bitter pill for a proud man to swallow, and there was even the
possibility of his wife's illegitimacy, but, after all, those were
matters belonging to the past, and the past quickly receded to limbo
these days.

Even an open scandal, if some one of the offal sheets of San Francisco
got hold of the story and published it, would be forgotten in time. But
this--if his wife had fallen in love with another man--and women had no
discrimination where love was concerned--(if a decent chap got a lovely
girl it was mainly by luck; the rotters got just as good)--then indeed he
was in the midst of disaster without end. The present was chaos and the
future a blank. He'd enlist in the first war and get himself shot....

Hélène had a charming light coquetry, wholly French, and she exercised it
indiscriminately, much to the delight of the old beaux, for she loved to
please, to be admired; she had an innocent desire that all men should
think her quite beautiful and irresistible. Even her husband had never
seen her in an unbecoming _déshabillé_; she coquetted with him
shamelessly, whenever she was not too gloriously serious and intent only
upon making him happy. Until lately--

This was by no means her ordinary form.

He had come upon too many couples in remote corners of conservatories,
had been a not unaccomplished principal in his own day ... there was,
beyond question, some deep understanding between her and this man.

Suddenly Ruyler's gaze burned through to his wife's consciousness. She
moved her eyes to his, flushed to her hair, then for a moment looked
almost gray. But she recovered herself immediately and further showed her
remarkable powers of self-possession by turning back to her partner and
talking to him with animation instead of plunging into conversation with
the man on her right.

At the same moment Ruyler became subtly aware that Mrs. Thornton was
looking at his wife and Doremus, and as his eyes focused he saw her long,
thin, mobile mouth curl and her eyes fill with open disdain. The mist in
his brain fled as abruptly as an inland fog out in the bay before one of
the sudden winds of the Pacific. In any case, his mind hardly could have
remained in a state of confusion for long; but that his young wife was
being openly contemned by the cleverest as well as the most powerful
woman in San Francisco was enough to restore his equilibrium in a flash.
Whatever his wife's indiscretions, it was his business to protect her
until such time as he had proof of more than indiscretion. And in this
instance he should be his own detective.

He turned to Mrs. Thornton.

"Going on to the Fairmont?" he asked.

"Oh, yes, I have a new gown--have you admired it? Arrived from Paris last
night--and I am chaperoning two of these girls. You are not, of course?"

"I did intend to, but it's no go. Still, I may drop in late and take my
wife home--"

"Let me take her home." Was his imagination morbid, or was there
something both peremptory and eager in Mrs. Thornton's tones? "I'm
stopping at the Fairmont, of course, but Fordy and I often take a drive
after a hot night and a heavy supper."

"If you would take her home in case I miss it. I must go to the office--"

"I'd like to. That's settled." This time her tones were warm and
friendly. Ruyler knew that Mrs. Thornton did not like his wife, but her
friendliness toward him, since her return from Europe three or four
months ago, had increased, if anything. His mind was now working with its
accustomed keen clarity. He recalled that there had been no surprise
mixed with the contempt in her regard of his wife and Doremus.... He also
recalled that several times of late when he had met her at the
Fairmont--where he often lunched with a group of men--she had regarded
him with a curious considering glance, which he suddenly vocalized as:
"How long?"

This affair had been going on for some time, then. Either it was common
talk, or some circumstance had enlightened Mrs. Thornton alone.

He glanced around the table. No one appeared to be taking the slightest
notice of one of many flirtations. At least, whatever his wife's
infatuation, he could avert gossip. Mrs. Thornton might be a tigress, but
she was not a cat.

"When do you go down to Burlingame?" she asked.

"Not for two or three weeks yet. I don't fancy merely sleeping in the
country. But by that time things will ease up a bit and I can get down
every day in time to have a game of golf before dinner."

"Shall Mrs. Ruyler migrate with the rest?"

"Hardly."

"It will be dull for her in town. No reflections on your charming
society, but of course she does not get much of it, and she will miss her
young friends. After all, she is a child and needs playmates."

Ruyler darted at her a sharp look, but she was smiling amiably. Doremus
and the men he lived with, in town had a bungalow at Burlingame and they
bought their commutation tickets at precisely the fashionable moment.
"She will stay in town," he said shortly. "She needs a rest, and San
Francisco is the healthiest spot on earth."

"But trying to the nerves when what we inaccurately call the trade winds
begin. Why not let her stay with me? Of course she would be lonely in her
own house, and is too young to stay there alone anyhow, but I'd like to
put her up, and you certainly could run down week-ends--possibly oftener.
American men are always obsessed with the idea that they are twice as
busy as they really are."

"You are too good. I'll put it up to Hélène. Of course it is for her to
decide. I'd like it mighty well." But grateful as he was, his uneasiness
deepened at her evident desire to place her forces at his disposal.

CHAPTER V

"And you won't take me to the party?" Hélène pouted charmingly as her
husband laid her pink taffeta wrap over her shoulders. "I thought you
said you might make it, and it would be too delightful to dance with you
once more."

"I'm afraid not. The Australian mail came in just as business closed and
it's on my mind. I want to go over it carefully before I dictate the
answers in the morning, and that means two or three hours of hard work
that will leave me pretty well fagged out. Mrs. Thornton has offered to
take you home."

"I hate her."

"Oh, please don't!" Ruyler smiled into her somber eyes. "She wants the
drive, and it would be taking the Gwynnes so far out of the way. Mrs.
Thornton very kindly suggested it."

"I hate her," said Hélène conclusively. "I wish now I'd kept my own car.
Then I could always go home alone."

"You shall have a car next winter. And this time I shall not permit you
to pay for it out of your allowance--which in any case I hope to increase
by that time."

Her eyes flamed, but not with anger. "Then I'll sell my electric to
Aileen Lawton right away. We have the touring car in the country, and
she has been trying to make her father buy her an electric--"

"I'm afraid you'll be disappointed in your bargain. Second-hand cars, no
matter what their condition, always go at a sacrifice, and old Lawton is
a notorious screw. Better not let it go for two or three hundreds; you
look very sweet driving about in it.... Oh, by the way--I had
forgotten." He slipped his hand under her coat, unfastened the chain and
slipped the jewel into his pocket. "I am sorry," he said, with real
contrition, "and almost wish I had forgotten the thing; but I am a little
superstitious about keeping that old promise."

She laughed. "And yet you will not permit poor maman a little
superstition of her own! But I am rather glad. Everybody at the ball will
hear of the ruby, and I shall be able to keep them in suspense until the
Thornton fête. Good night. Don't work too hard. Couldn't you get there
for supper?"

"'Fraid not."

II

He did go down to the office and glance through the Australian mail,
but at a few moments before twelve he took a California Street car up
to the Fairmont Hotel and went directly to the ballroom. Mrs.
Thornton was standing just within the doorway, but came toward him
with lifted eyebrows.

"This is like old times," she said playfully.

"I found less mail than I expected and thought I would come and have a
dance with my wife." His eyes wandered over the large room, gayly
decorated, and filled with dancing couples.

Mrs. Thornton laughed. "A belle like your wife? She is always engaged for
every dance on her program before she is halfway down this corridor."

"Oh, well, husbands have some rights. I'll take it by force. I don't see
her--she must be sitting out."

Mrs. Thornton slipped her arm through his. "This dance has just begun.
Walk me up and down. I am tired of standing on one foot."

They strolled down the corridor and through the large central hall. Older
folks sat or stood in groups; a few young couples were sitting out.
Ruyler did not see his wife, and concluded she had been resting at the
moment in the dowager ranks against the wall of the ballroom. The music
ceased sooner than he expected and Mrs. Thornton, who had been talking
with animation on the subject of several fine pictures she had bought
while abroad for the Museum in Golden Gate Park, including one by
Masefield Price, broke off with an impatient exclamation: "Bother! I must
run up to my room at once and telephone. Wait for me here."

She steered him toward a group of men. "Mr. Gwynne, keep Mr. Ruyler from
causing a riot in the ballroom. He insists upon dancing with his wife.
Hold him by force."

They were standing near the staircase and some distance from the lift.
Mrs. Thornton ran up the stairs, pausing for an irresistible moment and
looking down at the company. As she stood there, poised, she looked a
royal figure with her cloth of gold train covering the steps below her
and her high and flashing head. "Wait for me," she said, imperiously to
Price. "I cannot meander down that corridor, deserted and alone."

Ruyler smiled at her, but said to Gwynne: "I'll just go and engage my
wife for a dance and be back in a jiffy--"

Gwynne clasped his hand about Ruyler's arm. "Just a moment, old chap. I
want your opinion--"

"But there is the music again. I'll be knocking people over--"

"You will if you go now, and there'll be dancing for hours yet. Your wife
has been dividing up--now, tell me if you back me in this proposition or
not. I'm going to Washington to represent you fellows--"

But Ruyler had broken politely away and was walking down the long
corridor. When he arrived at the ballroom he saw at a glance that his
wife was not there, for the floor was only half filled. But there were
other rooms where dancers sat in couples or groups when tired. He went
hastily through all of them, but saw nothing of his wife. Nor of Doremus.

Mrs. Thornton had gone in search of her.

And Gwynne knew.

This time the hot blood was pounding in his head. He felt as he imagined
madmen did when about to run amok. Or quite as primitive as any
Californian of the surging "Fifties."

He was in one of the smaller rooms and he sat down in a corner with his
back to the few people in it and endeavored to take hold of himself; the
conventional training of several lifetimes and his own intense pride
forbade a scene in public. But his curved fingers longed for Doremus'
throat and he made up his mind that if his awful suspicions were
vindicated he would beat his wife black and blue. That was far more
sensible and manly than running whining to a divorce court.

The effort at self-control left him gasping, but when he rose from his
shelter he was outwardly composed, and determined to seek Gwynne and
force the truth from him. He would not discuss his wife with another
woman. And whatever this hideous tragedy brooding over his life he would
go out and come to grips with it at once.

And in the corridor he saw his wife chatting gayly with a group of young
friends. Her color was paler than usual, perhaps, but that was not
uncommon at a party, and otherwise she was as unruffled, as normal in
appearance and manner, as when they had parted at the Gwynnes'.

Nevertheless, he went directly up to her, and as she gave a little cry of
pleased surprise, he drew her hand through his arm. "Come!" he said
imperiously. "You are to dance this with me. I broke away on purpose--"

"But, darling, I am full up--"

"You have skipped at least two. I have been looking everywhere for you--"

"Polly Roberts dragged me upstairs to see the new gowns M. Dupont brought
her from Paris. They came this afternoon--so did Mrs. Thornton's--but of
course I'll dance this with you. You don't look well," she added
anxiously. "Aren't you?"

"Quite, but rather tired--mentally. I need a dance...."

He wondered if she had gently propelled him down the corridor. They were
some distance from the group. It was impossible for him to go back and
ask if his wife's story were true. Mrs. Thornton was nowhere to be seen,
neither in the corridor nor in the ballroom. Nor was Doremus. He set his
teeth grimly and managed to smile down upon his wife.

"I shall insist upon having more than one," he said gallantly. "At least
three hesitations."

She drew in her breath with a mock sigh and swept from under her long
lashes a glance that still had the power to thrill him. "Outrageous, but
I shall try to bear up," and the next moment they were giving a graceful
exhibition of the tango.

"I don't see your friend Doremus," he said casually, as he stood fanning
her at the end of the dance.

She lifted her eyebrows haughtily. "My friend? That parasite?"

"You seemed very friendly at dinner."

"I usually am with my dinner companion. One's hostess is to be
considered. Oh--I remember--he was telling me some very amusing gossip,
although he teased me into fearing he wouldn't. Now, if you are going to
dance this hesitation with me you had better whirl me off. It is Mr.
Thornton's, and I see him coming."

Ruyler did not see Doremus until supper was half over and then the young
man entered the dining-room hurriedly, his usually serene brow lowering
and his lips set. He walked directly up to Hélène.

"Beastly luck!" he exclaimed. "Hello, Ruyler. Didn't know you honored
parties any more. I had to break away to meet the Overland train--beastly
thing was late, of course. Then I had to take them to five hotels before
I could settle them. They had two beastly little dogs and the hotels
wouldn't take them in and they wouldn't give up the dogs. Some one ought
to set up a high-class dog hotel. Sure it would pay. But you'll give me
the first after supper, won't you?"

Hélène gave him a casual smile that was a poor reward for his elaborate
apology. "So sorry," she said with the sweet distant manner in which she
disposed of bores and climbers, "but Mr. Ruyler and I are both tired. We
are going home directly after supper."

CHAPTER VI

On the following day at six o'clock Ruyler went to Long's to meet Jake
Spaulding. By a supreme effort of will he had put his private affairs out
of his mind and concentrated on the business details which demanded the
most highly trained of his faculties. But now he felt relaxed, almost
languid, as he walked along Montgomery Street toward the rendezvous. He
met no one he knew. The historic Montgomery Street, once the center of
the city's life, was almost deserted, but half rebuilt. He could saunter
and think undisturbed.

What was he to hear? And what bearing would it be found to have on his
wife's conduct?

He had gone to sleep last night as sure as a man may be of anything that
his wife was no more interested in Doremus than in any other of the
young men who found time to dance attendance upon idle, bored, but
virtuous wives.

If the man knew her secret and were endeavoring to exact blackmail he
would pay his price with joy--after thrashing him, for he would have
sacrificed the half of his fortune never to experience again not only the
demoralizing attack of jealous madness of the night before, which had
brought in its wake the uneasy doubt if civilization were as far advanced
as he had fondly imagined, but the sensation of amazed contempt which had
swept over him at the dinner table as he had seen his wife, whom he had
believed to be a woman of instinctive taste and fastidiousness,
manifestly upon intimate terms with a creature who should have been
walking on four legs. Better, perhaps, the desire to kill a woman than to
despise her--

He slammed the door when he entered the little room reserved for him, and
barely restrained himself from flinging his hat into a corner and
breaking a chair on the table. His languor had vanished.

Spaulding followed him immediately.

"Howdy," he said genially, as he pushed his own hat on the back of his
head and bit hungrily at the end of a cigar. "Suppose you've been
impatient--unless too busy to think about it."

"I'd like to know what you've found out as quickly as you can tell me."

"Well, to begin with the kid. I had some trouble at the convent. They're
a close-mouthed lot, nuns. But I frightened them. Told them it was a
property matter, and unless they answered my questions privately they'd
have to answer them in court. Then they came through."

"Well?"

Spaulding lit his cigar and handed the match to Ruyler, who ground it
under his heel.

"Just about nineteen years ago a Frenchwoman, giving her name as Madame
Dubois, arrived one day with a child a year old and asked the nuns to
take care of it, promising a fancy payment. The child had been on a farm
with a wet-nurse (French style), but Madame Dubois wanted it to learn
from the first to speak proper English and French, and to live in a
refined atmosphere generally from the time it was able to take notice.
She said she was on the stage and had to travel, so was not able to give
the kid the attention it should have, and the doctor had told her that
traveling was bad for kids that age, anyhow. Her lawyers would pay the
baby's board on the first of every month--"

"Who were the lawyers?"

"Lawton and Cross."

"I thought so. Go on."

"The nuns, who, after all, knew their California, thought they smelt a
rat, for the woman was extraordinarily handsome, magnificently dressed;
the Mother Superior--who is a woman of the world, all right--read the
newspapers, and had never seen the name of Dubois--and knew that only
stars drew fat salaries. She asked some sharp questions about the father,
and the woman replied readily that he was a scientific man, an inventor,
and--well, it was natural, was it not? they did not get on very well. He
disliked the stage, but she had been on it before she married him, and
dullness and want of money for her own needs and her child's had driven
her back. He had lived in Los Angeles for a time, but had recently gone
East to take a high-salaried position. It was with his consent that she
asked the nuns to take the child--possibly for two or three years. When
she was a famous actress and could leave the road, she would keep house
for her husband in New York, and make a home for the child.

"The Mother Superior, by this time, had made up her mind that the father
wished the child removed from the mother's influence, and although she
took the whole yarn with a bag of salt, the child was the most beautiful
she had ever seen, and obviously healthy and amiable. Moreover, the
convent was to receive two hundred dollars a month--"

"What?"

"Exactly. Can you beat it? The Mother Superior made up her mind it was
her duty to bring up the little thing in the way it should go. As the
woman was leaving she said something about a possible reconciliation with
her family, who lived in France; they had not written her since she went
on the stage. They were of a respectability!--of the old tradition! But
if they came round she might take the child to them, if her husband would
consent. She should like it to be brought up in France--

"Here the Mother Superior interrupted her sharply. Was her husband a
Frenchman? And she answered, no doubt before she thought, for these
people always forget something, that no, he was an American--her family,
also, detested Americans. The Mother Superior once more interrupted her
glibness. How, then, did he have a French name? Oh, but that was her
stage name--she always went by it and had given it without thinking. What
was her husband's name? After a second's hesitation she stupidly give the
name Smith. I can see the mouth of the Mother Superior as it set in a
grim line. 'Very well,' said she, 'the child's name is Hélène Smith'; and
although the woman made a wry face she was forced to submit.

"The child remained there four years, and the Mother Superior had some
reason to believe that 'Madame Dubois' spent a good part of that time in
San Francisco. She came at irregular intervals to see the child--always
in vacation, when there were no pupils in the convent, and always at
night. The Mother Superior, however, thought it best to make no
investigations, for the child throve, they were all daffy about her, and
the money came promptly on the first of every month. When the mother came
she always brought a trunk full of fine underclothes, and left the money
for a new uniform. Then, one day, Madame Dubois arrived in widow's weeds,
said that her husband was dead, leaving her quite well off, and that she
was returning to France."

"And Madame Delano's story is that he died on the way to Japan--if it is
the same woman--"

"Haven't a doubt of it myself. I did a little cabling before I left last
night to a man I know in Paris to find out just when Madame Delano
returned with her child to live with her family in Rouen. He got busy and
here is his answer--just fifteen years ago almost to the minute."

"Then who was her husband?"

"There you've got me--so far. He was no 'scientist, who later accepted
a high-salaried position.' A decent chap of that sort would have
written to his child, paid her board himself, most likely taken it away
from the mother--"

"But she may have kidnapped it--"

"People are too easy traced in this State--especially that sort. Nor do
I believe she was an actress. There never was any actress of that
name--not so you'd notice it, anyhow, and that woman would have been
known for her looks and height even if she couldn't act. Moreover, if
she was an actress there would be no sense in giving the nuns a false
name, since she had admitted the fact. No, it's my guess that she was
something worse."

"Well, I've prepared myself for anything."

"I figure out that she was the mistress of one of our rich highfliers,
and that when he got tired of her he pensioned her off, and she made up
her mind to reform on account of the kid, and went back to Rouen, and
proceeded to identify herself with her class by growing old and shapeless
as quickly as possible. She must have adopted the name Delano in New York
before she bought her steamer ticket, for although I've had a man on the
hunt, the only Delanos of that time were eminently respectable--"

"Why are you sure she was not a--well--woman of the town?"

"Because, there again--there's no dame of that time either of that name
or looks--neither Dubois nor Delano. Of course, they come and go, but
there's every reason to think she stayed right on here in S.F. Of
course, I've only had twenty-four hours--I'll find out in another
twenty-four just what conspicuous women of fifteen to twenty years ago
measure up to what she must have looked like--I got the Mother Superior
to describe her minutely: nearly six feet, clear dark skin with a
natural red color--no make-up; very small features, but well made--nose
and mouth I'm talking about. The eyes were a good size, very black with
rather thin eyelashes. Lots of black hair. Stunning figure. Rather large
ears and hands and feet. She always dressed in black, the handsomest
sort. They generally do."

"Well?" asked Ruyler through his teeth. He had no doubt the woman was his
mother-in-law. "The Jameses? What of them?"

"That's the snag. Rest is easy in comparison. Innumerable Jameses must
have died about that time, to say nothing of all the way along the line,
but while some of the records were saved in 1906, most went up in smoke.
Moreover, there's just the chance that he didn't die here. But that's
going on the supposition that the man died when she left California,
which don't fit our theory. I still think he died not so very long before
her return to California, and that she probably came to collect a legacy
he had left her. Otherwise, I should think it's about the last place she
would have come to. I put a man on the job before I left of collecting
the Jameses who've died since the fire. Here they are."

He took a list from his pocket and read:

"James Hogg, bookkeeper--races, of course. James Fowler, saloon-keeper.
James Despard, called 'Frenchy,' a clever crook who lived on
blackmail--said to have a gift for getting hold of secrets of men and
women in high society and squeezing them good and plenty--"

He paused. "Of course, that might be the man. There are points. I'll have
his life looked into, but somehow I don't believe it. I have a hunch the
man was a higher-up. The sort of woman the Mother Superior described can
get the best, and they take it. To proceed: James Dillingworth, lawyer,
died in the odor of sanctity, but you never can tell; I'll have him
investigated, too. James Maston--I haven't had time to have had the
private lives of any of these men looked into, but I knew some of them,
and Maston, who was a journalist, left a wife and three children and was
little, if any, over thirty. James Cobham, broker--he was getting on to
fifty, left about a million, came near being indicted during the Graft
Prosecutions, and although his wife has been in the newspapers as a
society leader for the last twenty years, and he was one of the founders
of Burlingame, and then was active in changing the name of the high part
to Hillsboro when the swells felt they couldn't be identified with the
village any longer, and he handed out wads the first of every year to
charity, there are stories that he came near being divorced by his
haughty wife about fifteen years ago. Of course, those men don't parade
their mistresses openly like they did thirty years ago--I mean men with
any social position to keep up. But now and again the wife finds a note,
or receives an anonymous letter, and gets busy. Then it's the divorce
court, unless he can smooth her down, and promises reform. Cobham seems