THE CABLE

THE CABLE

A Novel

BY
MARION AMES TAGGART
Author of “No Handicap”

BENZIGER BROTHERS

New York, Cincinnati, Chicago
BENZIGER BROTHERS
Publishers of Benziger’s Magazine
1923

Copyright 1923, by Benziger Brothers
Printed in the United States of America

Dedicated
ex voto
to
THE LITTLE WHITE CHURCH
of
ST. MARY OF THE MOUNT
at
Mount Pocono

CONTENTS

THE CABLE

CHAPTER I
ENTER MISS CICELY ADAIR

A GROUP of small boys stood on the corner, looking anxiously down the shaded street. They ranged from eight to twelve years in age; from grimy hands to universal griminess in uncleanliness; from comfortable meagreness to ragged poverty in clothing, while in race they were polyglot, but they were identical in the impatience with which they scanned the sidewalk, vision-length, and found it empty though there were frequent passers-by.

“Gee! What’s the matter wid her?”

“Say! She wouldn’t go th’ udder way?”

“Th’ odder way nothin’! Don’t she know we’re waitin’?”

The tallest, but also the raggedest, boy of the group made a fine gesture, drawing a nickel watch from somewhere between his bagging shirt and tight trousers. “’Tain’t so late,” he said, displaying the watch’s candid face. “Twenty to one by mine, an’ I set her by the city hall when de ball dropped’t noon. She ain’t so late.”

“Whatjer bet she’s got, sour balls ’r peanuts?” asked the smallest boy.

“Pennies, maybe!” hopefully suggested a young Israelite not without guile; he was saving up for an excursion.

“Git out! She don’t hand ’em out less’n she didn’t have time to buy nothin’,” a boy scornfully rebuked him. “Didn’ she tell us she hadn’t no use fer money presen’s less’n she was up against it fer time?”

“I bet she’s got somepin!” declared a round little colored boy. “We’d ought t’ be gittin’ down town; mos’ in gen’ly she’s here by now, an’ we’s gotter git our af’ernoon ’ditions.”

“Oh, chase yourself, Coony! ’Tain’t near two. Dere she is!”

The last speaker ended in a triumphant yell, wildly pointing down the street as he jumped up and down, his bare feet thudding on the pavement; his comrades echoed the yell with Indian War Dance gestures.

The cause of this suspense and final excitement was a slender young figure, tall for a girl, but looking taller than its actual height because of its boyish lines, the straight short skirt and straight loose jacket which clad it.

The girl wore light-weight summer tweed, several colors blended in its weave to a tone of warm brownish drab. Her gloveless hands were thrust into the jacket’s side pockets; she wore a sailor hat, pushed back somewhat from her brow, but even if it had been set on her head straight, it would not have confined her masses of brilliant hair; they wreathed her face in lawless rings which had the effect of a halo worn in jest.

She walked with a free, careless grace, a stride that was businesslike, yet springing, as of one who enjoyed the business which claimed her. Her face, which was not pretty, yet was compounded of many irregular charms, enhanced by a perfectly regular beauty of skin, was bright with smiles as she espied the shabby, yelling band awaiting her; the smile displayed an unbroken row of strong white teeth between full red lips. She waved her hand at the lads with a gesture which was like their own as they waved back at her, a straight-out motion from the brim of her hat, then flung widely out to the right.

“Gosh, ain’t her hair red!” cried one of the boys, struck by the glow of the rings under the sailor hat in the sunshine.

“Red nothin’! You shut up!”

“Sure it’s red! What is it, then?” The question in derision, not for information.

“It’s—it’s hair.” The defender was at a loss, not being accustomed to define.

“You bet! Red hair! Awful red hair!” The triumphant tone was for victory, not because there was any desire to disparage this newsboys’ goddess.

“Red hair yourse’f! Your mother’s red-headed!” This was a shot in the dark; acquaintance between these boys, being confined to the streets, did not embrace knowledge of family tints.

“Sh’ ain’t! Black!” The wiry little Italian struck his opponent a hard blow on the mouth with the back of his hand, and, with a growl like two puppies, they clinched.

The approaching figure broke into a run and came down upon them, the hair under dispute glowing to the utmost justification of its accuser, but the girl did not come like an avenging angel; her smile had widened and her eyes laughed with her lips, though it was a strong grasp that seized a shoulder of each combatant and swung them apart.

“Here, you young heathens, what’s the matter with you? Fend fighting!” she cried in a breezy, clear young voice. “Tony Caprioli, slow down! Mike McGinty, what’s wrong with you? Breaking the law! Fend fighting, you know, you scalawags!”

“He said you’d got red hair. I said ’tain’t,” muttered Tony, not yet “slowed down.”

“He hit me first. I didn’t mean nawthin’ but—it looked red.” Mike delicately altered the statement that he was about to make, implying that the appearance of the hair was a thing of the past.

The girl threw back her head and the brilliant hair seemed to scintillate as she laughed a jolly laugh.

“Tony, your name means goat—Caprioli—and I’m afraid you’re it! Shame, my dear, when you’re doing your best to bleach my hair, but Mike scores! My hair is red, hot red, and what’s more I’m not sorry it is! Shake, boys, and stop your scrapping! Red hair is what gives me pep, and pep is what makes me hustle around—when I’m late, too!—and buy toffy squares for the crowd! So it’s all right, friend Tony, though I’m much obliged to you for standing up for me! Catch, fellows! I bought a box, two boxes, three squares apiece, and good luck to you all! Hurry up! It’s almost one o’clock, and I’ll have to run the rest of the way, or the girl I relieve will fight me!”

The animosity in the air cleared up like magic under the spell of this girl’s merry laughter of eyes and lips. She rapidly dealt out sticky squares of toffy to the crowd, and boyishly, though daintily, licked her finger tips when the last square had left them.

“Enough of that!” she cried. “Suck it; don’t chew it! You’ll get no more toffy till cool weather comes! I was a dunce to buy anything so messy. Balls, or peanuts, or anything neat for mine—and so for yours!—till September! So long, boys, dear; I’ve got to hustle. Hope you’ll each sell more than any of the rest! Every last paper you take out. Good-bye!”

She waved her hand to the adoring group; each boy waved back again and shouted: “Good-bye!” in spite of the difficulty of enunciation caused by a large, soft toffy square in the roof of the mouth.

The girl hurried away, not running as she had threatened to do, but walking so fast that running would have been easier.

The group of boys melted around the corner, in the direction of the shortest way to the newspaper offices, and the funny little daily event was over for the time being. The red-haired girl had formed the acquaintance of this young mongrel band, and it had been her kindly whim to make for them a daily small joy to anticipate. She varied her gifts, but she never failed them; that they adored her and exalted her into an incarnate proof that human trustworthiness and kindness was truth, not fiction, she was keen enough to see was the best result of her action.

No one but herself and the boys knew about “this freak philanthropy,” as she called it to herself; it took but a few minutes of her time and not a great expenditure of money. “It was worth it,” so she told herself, “to let her red hair light up the poor little snipes’ noon hour.”

The girl swung into a tall building at a tremendous pace, her hands out of her pockets now, her arms swinging to speed her action, not at all breathless, but softly whistling: “Silver Threads among the Gold,” a little twist around the corners of her lips as she considered how distant that state of things was from her own radiant locks.

She burst out of the elevator and into the great room of the telephone exchange almost with one movement, covering the intervening space between one and the other door on a sort of slide.

“Well, Cis Adair! If I didn’t begin to wonder if you’d get here!” cried a small, extremely-ornamented young person waspishly, as the boyish red-haired girl appeared, throwing off her hat and jacket and hanging them up rapidly, smiling her gay smile at the small person whom she succeeded.

“Sure—ly, Amelia! Don’t I always get there, whether it’s to work or to play? I’m only five minutes late, anyway,” cried the newcomer, harnessing her ears.

“Five minutes is five minutes when you’ve got to get home, eat and dress. I’ve got a date, I’d have you know, Miss Cicely!” retorted Amelia.

“Lucky you! Fruit market’s always closed for me; can’t even get a date, not ever!” sighed Cicely with a pensive droop of the head and an inimitable little wink at the girl on her farther side. “Sorry, Amelia! I’ll come five minutes early to-morrow, so get another date ready. Might I hint that you’d get there sooner if you started, now I am here, than if you lingered to reproach me?”

The other girls laughed, and Amelia Day flounced away with a toss of her head. It was recognized in the office that there “was no sort of use in trying to get ahead of Cis Adair.” Most of the girls liked her, a few of them were her devoted admirers, so it was only Amelia who ever really longed to damage her happy-go-lucky confidence in herself and in all her world.

“Funny little old Amelia!” Cis said after Amelia had gone. “Seems to disagree with herself so like fury, and not to be able to cut herself out of her diet.”

“Oh, Cis!” murmured Nan Dowling, Cis’s next neighbor, at whom she had winked. “You do say such ridiculous things, and such just-right ones! You ought to write. That’s Amelia all over; she does disagree with herself—little sour ball!”

“Thought we agreed not to fuss about her,” hinted Cis. “I don’t have to, as long as my shift follows hers; I don’t have more than a ships-that-pass-in-the-night, au revoir intercourse with Miss Day.”

“No, but I do! I have her from nine to one, except during lunch, right in your place! Why aren’t you on all through my shift, you blessed old duck, Cis?” cried Nan.

“Never could answer whys, Nan; nothing harder,” said Cis cheerfully. “Be glad you’ve got the chance to sun yourself in the light of my hair from one to six! And that we don’t get a whole lot of calls on our wires, usually, till after three, so we can ‘chin.’”

“Amelia is raving jealous of you, Cis, and you know why!” said Nan. “She’d have your scalp, if she could get it.”

“If she could get it she’d be welcome to it,” declared Cis imperturbably. “Anyone that lets a person get her hands on her scalp so she can lift it, deserves to be scalped; that’s what I say! Amelia can’t harm me as long as I do my work and tend strictly to my own affairs. If you mean that Amelia Day is still stewing because that puffy Harold Brown thought he’d enjoy thinking that he thought a lot of me—” Cis shrugged her shoulders to conclude her sentence. “Stuff!” she added.

Nan laughed, but she looked anxious. “All the same, Amelia would love to get you out, Cis,” she said. “Of course you don’t care a rap what Harold Brown does—”

“Care!” Cis interrupted her. “Ever see a chestnut worm?”

Both girls went off into a spasm of laughter, subdued, not to disturb their companions. Harold Brown was large, plump, puffy and abnormally white; nothing was needed to point Cis’s rhetorical question.

“Oh, Cis!” sighed Nan, as she sighed many times a day, in fervent, admiring delight over Cicely’s high spirits. “Such a Cis!”

Nan had a call just then, but when she had answered it and was free again, she turned to Cis.

“It’s not only Harold Brown, Cis; you don’t seem to care about any of them,” she said.

“Meaning boys and men?” asked Cis. “Wrong you are, my Nanny: I love ’em all.”

“Yes, like one of themselves!” retorted Nan. “But not the way they do you! You’re like a jolly boy yourself, friendly as anything, but you don’t—And there are lots of them crazy about you! You make them sort of crazy over you, Cis, with your come-on-stand-off way, and your sort of—heady charm, like champagne!”

“Oh, say!” protested Cis. “Much you know about champagne, kid dear! You got that out of a novel; own up! The price of it per bottle, and the Eighteenth sitting on the bottles, shows that’s a pure flight of fancy! Stick to facts, Anna Dowling! Me heady! I should say not!”

With that Cicely had a call, followed by five other calls, which kept her busy plugging in and attending to the time for awhile. When this was over, a lull followed, and Cis turned again to Nan.

“That was a coincidence, a sort of coincidental run,” she said, “The first call was Parkway 58—and we know what that is, don’t we, Nanny?”

“Of course; Miss Lucas,” said Nan promptly.

“Neither of us ever thinks of any other Lucas but Miss Jeanette Lucas; we always forget there are other Lucases, a father, a mother, a younger sister, and a few boys, too young to matter, scattering along,” commented Cis. “But it was for Miss Lucas, and what is more, it was her betrothed calling her. I always know his voice. To be truthful, I don’t half like it; it’s sweet, cloying, yet it isn’t sweet—sounds the way maple syrup tastes when it’s just beginning to work. At our house maple syrup always seems to work before it gets eaten; I don’t know how often Miss Spencer puts it on the table like that! It’s an awful sell when you pour it over cakes! Well, about Mr. Herbert Dale’s voice. I’m nuts on voices; I think they give their owners away more than anything else, and I don’t like that voice over the ’phone. Hope I’m wrong, because Miss Jeanette Lucas is a fine girl. I met her once, though she wouldn’t remember it, probably. She’s a gentle, sweet, ladylike, old-fashioned sort of girl, and I imagine she’s the kind that loves a man adoringly, when she gets about it.”

“That’s the way to love the man one marries,” declared romantic Nan.

“No disputing the proposition, but it’s dangerous, because most men are quite a good deal human,” Cis observed dryly.

“You needn’t talk! If you ever fall in love, you’ll pave the path of the man with your whole self!” cried Nan.

“Heavens! Not so loud, Nan! That’s nothing to tell a crowd! Besides I would not!” whispered Cicely.

Then with a swift abandonment of her position, she said aloud, with a suppressed vehemence: “Well, what would be the fun of loving any other way?”

“Not much fun, either, when you take it like a fatal disease,” said Nan. “Where was the coincidence in Mr. Dale’s calling up Miss Lucas, Cis?”

“Nowhere. But the coincidence was that the rest of those calls I had were Miss Lucas calling up Oldboy’s store, and a dressmaker, and a jeweller, and a garage,” Cis explained.

“She would, she does every day. Of course she would, now that she is getting ready to be married as fast as she can,” murmured Nan, disappointed that there was no more in Cicely’s mystery.

“Yes, of course,” agreed Cis. “I merely said that she called these people as soon as her betrothed rang off. Ever notice the way he calls? I’d not only know his voice over a wire in China, but he gives the number so peculiarly: ‘I’d like to get 58, the Parkway, if you please.’” Cis imitated an oily, smooth voice, unctuously used, and Nan laughed.

“That’s he!” she cried. “You’re a mocking bird as well as a tanager, as you call yourself, Cis! The paper last Sunday had Miss Lucas’ picture on the society page, with Mr. Herbert Dale’s, and said they’d be married on the 10th of next month, in our church, with a Nuptial Mass. Is Mr. Dale a Catholic, Cis?”

“Not enough to notice, I think,” said Cis. “His people are. The Lucases are strict; I suspect that sweet Jeanette will make him toe the mark when it comes to the wedding. Probably she’s got a candle burning all the time before the Lourdes shrine, and means to make him a saint at the end of six months. Wish she may! I’m sure I don’t really know but he’s going that way on his own, but I honestly hate his voice!”

“Aren’t you queer, Cis? You don’t often get down on anyone; you’re pretty sure to give everyone the benefit of the doubt,” cried Nan, wondering. Then she hesitated, and whispered: “Did you go to the seven o’clock yesterday, Cis, dear?”

Cis shook her head, her color mounting slightly.

“I didn’t see you at the eight o’clock Mass, as usual,” persisted Nan timidly, for Cicely looked forbidding.

“Good reason why,” said Cis shortly. “I wasn’t there. And I didn’t go to Late Mass, so don’t go on to that, Nan; I didn’t go at all.”

“Oh, Cicely dear!” Pain crept into Nan’s words, though they were whispered.

“Well! Oh, Nan dear!” Cis tried to laugh at her. “Yes, I know I’m bad, but I was so tired! I was out till after one, danced, and ate such a supper! I did mean to go to the eight, but I turned over, stretched and—” Cis made a slight gesture that conveyed the suggestion of a passage beyond daily affairs.

“Cis, oh, Cis! And you are so fine, so splendid! Why don’t you make it perfect? You’re a Catholic,” sighed loving Nan, her gentle eyes clouded.

“I’m nothing else, at least, Nanny, but it doesn’t bother me a great deal, all this that has to do with such far-off things! I’m sorry, nice little Nan! I will brace up, I promise you, and go to Mass Sundays. When I get there, it’s hot and crowded, and I’m just there in my body, and not my mind, and it’s a mighty uncomfortable body, I can tell you that! I wonder if it makes much difference whether you go or not, when you go like an oyster? Sorry, Nanny,” Cis said again, seeing how grieved Nan looked. “I didn’t have your training; maybe that’s it. I went to public school and high school, and my mother died when I was eight, and my father was no good, and went off to his own ways when I was a baby, so I’m kind of a hybrid Catholic-heathen! Sorry, nice little Nan!”

“You’re the biggest girl I know, the truest and finest, and I’m sure God will pull you to Him. You’re too great to miss the Greatest,” said Nan, with such earnestness in spite of her muffled voice, and with such a light in her eyes, that careless Cicely was impressed.

“Put your candle beside Miss Jeanette Lucas’,” she said, knowing that the look in Nan’s eyes foretold prayers for her beloved Cicely’s safety.

“You two girls have talked enough in duet for one day,” remonstrated another girl, a little distance down the table from Cis and Nan. “We like a whack at Cis ourselves, Nan Dowling!”

“Won’t get much more chance to talk, duet or chorus,” said Cis. “Half past two, and the afternoon buzz is beginning.”

It was a particularly busy afternoon in this uptown exchange. Nan went off duty at five, but she waited that night to go out to supper with Cis, whose hours did not end till ten at night, and who supped in the restaurant on the top floor of the building, and returned to the exchange to finish her eight-hours’ shift.

Cis did not know what fear was; she went about the quiet streets after ten o’clock at night, when she was returning to her boarding place, with the same careless assurance with which she walked the streets at ten o’clock in the morning. There was that about her carriage, her free, graceful walk, her faultless complexion, her glowing, abundant, striking hair that made her a conspicuous figure; yet there was also in her entire effect that indifference to notice, that light-hearted frankness, that absence of self-consciousness, which reveals the Una-like girl who walks the earth fearing no man because she seeks no man’s admiration.

It is the glory of our American curious compound, that such a maidenly girl is rarely molested if she keeps within decent neighborhoods at not too-late hours, and Cicely Adair went and came as safely as if she were a child playing in her father’s garden.

“I hate to leave you, Cis, but nothing ever does happen to you,” said Nan, after they had supped, and Cicely was preparing to return to the office and Nan to go home.

“You wouldn’t be a mighty protection, small Nan,” laughed Cis. “Nonsense, child! I’m off by ten, and that’s only an hour after nine, and nine is curfew hour, so that’s all right! I’ll go back to the office and join up the rest of the world on wires, and go home as I always do. Don’t you know, no one would dare molest a red-haired girl? I fly a danger signal on top, and they turn out for me!”

CHAPTER II
THE RÔLE OF PERSEUS

CIS resumed her place at the long table, and slipped what she called “her bridle” around her head with the cheerful philosophy customary to her at this end of her eight-hours’ employment. She had somewhere in the back of her brain a suppressed consciousness that there were pleasanter ways for attractive and lively youth to spend an evening, but this was “her job.” “My job” summed up in Cis’s mind and on her tongue a whole unformulated, yet distinct code of duty. What was one’s job must be done, that was clear enough, and done well, no shirking, still more, no neglect. If one took a job, fidelity was implied in its acceptance: “Take it or leave it, but if you take it, take it down to the ground,” Cis would have put it. She despised a shirker and a slacker; she “played the game straight,” whatever game she entered upon. “Her job” stood for the flag in a soldier’s hand, the pledge of an obligation. “If you take a man’s money deliver the goods,” Cis told another girl who was not serving well her employer’s interests. It was not a bad code to steer by, as far as it went; if it did not imply supernatural motives, it was a good foundation upon which to build them.

The girl who had taken Nan’s place while Cis was out, was by no means Nan; she was an unattractive person to Cicely. Indeed, there was no other girl in the room for whom friendly Cis, who felt kindly disposed to them all, ready to oblige and amuse them, cared in the least. Cicely, who had been graduated from high school, and Nan, the devout little product of the parochial school, were better educated than any of their companions. Neither Cis nor Nan had time, nor desire for much reading; they were far from being cultivated girls, but they were well taught, and they found little to attract them in the foolish interests, badly expressed, the tiresome conversation of their working mates.

So when Cis resumed her place, she nodded in return to the nod from the bobbed hair now beside her; said a few words which set the girl to whom they were spoken, off into a giggle, and turned her attention to her switchboard, as a hint that business only was her end in view.

In this uptown exchange early evening calls were many; there would not have been the opportunity for talk, had Cis desired it, which she and Nan usually found in the afternoon. Cis plugged-in rapidly; answered questions—rather more than was her office—corrected errors, untangled the difficulties of the old gentleman who turned in many calls every night and regularly called wrong numbers, till nine o’clock was recorded on the wall clock regulated by telegraph from Washington, and Cicely Adair drew a long breath.

“One more hour!” she said aloud. “Went fast to-night!”

“Someone meetin’ you, Cis?” asked her neighbor.

Cicely shook her head. “I’m the cat that walks by herself,” she said lightly. “Not a man will bother with me—but, as to that, none will bother me going home, so it works good and bad!”

“Yes, I guess so!” her neighbor derisively replied. “Pity ’bout you! Us girls are on to you, Miss Adair! The fellers’d tumble for you if you didn’t jack ’em up!”

“Fiddlesticks! But I won’t have anyone calling for me; puts you under obligations,” said Cis impatiently.

“You said a mouthful!” the girl endorsed her, then added significantly: “I got one comin’ after me, but I don’t get off till one, Q. T. Dang’rous goin’ alone at that littlest hour!”

The girl laughed and Cis looked disgusted, drawing away with a slight, involuntary movement before she recalled herself. Then she said:

“One is a lot later than ten, more than the four hours later. Glad you’ve someone to see you safe, Mimi.”

Cicely turned back to her switchboard, refusing to share the humor of Mimi’s being escorted home, and as she did so she received a call.

“I’d like to get 12, the Boulevard, if you please,” a voice said.

Cicely said sharply: “What number did you say?”

She recognized the voice and the peculiar form of its call. It was the oily, yet sub-acid voice which Cis had said was like maple syrup beginning to ferment, the voice which she distrusted, the voice of sweet Jeanette Lucas’ betrothed, to whom her marriage was imminent.

“What number did you say?” Cicely therefore said sharply; could he have possibly mistaken his call? Parkway 58 was the Lucas call, and this, Boulevard 12—Why, in the name of all that was good and loyal was this Herbert Dale calling Boulevard 12?

“I’d like to get 12, the Boulevard,” repeated the suave voice, this time with its sub-acid quality less submerged.

Cicely plugged-in for the required number, but her wits were working quickly, her warm heart was beating fast, sending the blood up to her bright hair with a generous, pitying indignation for the girl whom she admired at a distance, whom she had set up in a sort of shrine as the ideal maiden.

Cicely was not in the habit of indulging curiosity by “listening in”; indeed, she felt little curiosity as to other people’s affairs, but now what she felt was not curiosity, but a burning sympathy for that other girl. Therefore she listened in. Only a few moments did she listen to the conversation between Herbert Dale, on one end of the wire, and someone at Boulevard 12 on the other. She heard enough to satisfy her that her favorite theory of voices being indicative had a solid foundation in fact. She jerked herself away from her eavesdropping, let her hands fall into her lap, nervously twisting her fingers, her head bowed as she rapidly examined herself as to what she meant to do about it.

“For the love of Pete, Cis Adair, your face’s redder’n your hair; you’re all red! You listened in! What’s up?” cried her neighbor, putting out her hand to follow Cicely’s example.

“Keep off! It’s my business!” ordered Cicely sharply, and the girl thought it better to abandon her plan, warned by the flash in Cis’s eyes.

“Just hold your tongue, Mimi, a bit; I’ve got to think,” Cis added, and again Mimi obeyed her.

“She won’t thank me,” Cis told herself. “Not now, anyway; may later. But it’s not a square deal to keep her in the dark. If she chooses to go on with him, it’s her business, but she ought to have the chance to choose; that’s it! She’s no sort of idea. She’s a little idiot if she marries him, knowing he can’t be trusted when such a girl’s that has set the 10th for the wedding. But that’s her affair. I’ll not deal straight with her if I don’t let her in on what I know. It’ll hit her hard, poor kid, but it might be worse, only she won’t see that now. It will cost me my job. Mimi’s sure to tell Amelia; she’s thick with her. I’ll be giving her my scalp, sure and certain. Well, what of it? What’s my job, beside the whole life of a mighty fine girl? Mimi may hold her tongue—No, she won’t! Well, if it makes me pay, what’s that to do with the rights of it? I’d take it pretty cruel if another girl didn’t stand by me in Miss Lucas’ place. I’m going to do it!”

Cicely set her plug in Parkway 58; her hand trembled as she did so. Mimi, watching intently, saw it shake. She was suspicious. To let anyone in on a wire to listen to a conversation was to break one of the fundamental laws of the company.

Mimi suspected that Cicely Adair was breaking that law now.

“Is this Miss Lucas? Miss Jeanette Lucas?” Cis asked. “Please hold your receiver. I’m connecting you on a wire. It’s something you must hear. Go ahead.”

Then Cis dropped her face into her hands and sat quite still, as if she were waiting for the stroke of fate. No stroke fell, however; the call for Boulevard 12 was rung off; Cis noted the excess rate, which was considerable, and notified the public station whence the call had come, of the amount due. She half expected to be called by Jeanette Lucas, impersonally, as “Central,” but no such call came, and when the office clock pointed to ten, Cicely arose, doffed her “bridle,” and turned to Mimi.

“See here, Mimi,” she said, “I never did think there was much use in asking a girl for a solemn promise to keep a secret. If you tell her you don’t want something told she won’t tell it, if she’s white; if she’s any other color all the promises this side of Jericho won’t stop her talking. Now, of course you know I did something to-night that’s dead against the rules, but I tell you that it was the only decent thing to do, and whatever happened I knew I had to do it, and I’d do it again this minute, because it was right. I’ve had time to think it over, and I’m surer every instant that I did the square thing. That’s all I can tell you, or anyone, because the rest is none of our business. I don’t want you to tell a living soul what you saw and heard; I ask you not to. And that’s all I can do about it. If you keep your tongue between your teeth I’ll not forget it of you, and I’ll do you a good turn the first chance I get. Signed: Cicely Adair.”

Mimi laughed. “Sent special? All right; I got it. Say, Cis, Amelia ’n me ’s pals, but I’m not with her ’bout you. She’s jealous, that’s what’s eatin’ ’Melia. I ain’t; I don’t haf to be! I won’t tell. It’s a rich one, but I won’t tell; honest, cross m’ heart! The comp’ny wouldn’t do a thing to you if they heard it, I’ll tell the world! Don’t you worry, Cis; I like you; you’re a great one. I’ll never give you away, don’t you fret! Gee! What d’you s’pose ’Melia’d do to you if she had you down like this! She says you think you’re the cat’s miauw. She’d give you a miauw, I’ll say she would!”

“Thanks, Mimi. It’s straight of you to keep this to yourself. Good night,” said Cis, and went away. “Little snipe! Sure she’ll tell Amelia!” she thought as she walked rapidly down the quiet street.

The next day passed without anything unusual to mark it, to Cicely’s surprise. She felt that anything and everything were imminent, but nothing more exciting befell her than being one bag of peanuts short in her noon distribution to her gamin friends, owing to the unforeseen appearance of Tony Caprioli’s little brother, who had to be compensated with a nickel. It was a perfectly satisfactory substitute, Cis found to her relief, mainly because Tony divided his peanuts with the young Luigi, who thus came out well ahead of the game.

The second day, however, Cicely’s bright head fell under the guillotine, a martyr to a certain kind of nobility which makes the figure of the guillotine not unsuitable.

When Cis came into the office, nearly ten minutes ahead of her schedule, there fell upon all the girls that significant hush which eloquently declares by its silence that the newcomer has been the subject of conversation up to the moment when the door swung. Amelia’s face was red beyond and additionally to the paint which frankly adorned her cheeks and lips; she looked malevolent and triumphant. Nan was flushed, almost purpling; her eyes were nervously excited and tearful. All the other girls looked uncomfortable, and most of them looked regretful, Cis was glad to see, for she instantly knew what had happened.

“I’m workin’ double shift, Cis; no need you settin’ down. I’m doin’ your shift till the next orders. You’re to go to th’ office soon’s you show up,” said Amelia gloatingly.

“Well, they were slow about it!” exclaimed Cis swinging around. “I thought I’d hear this yesterday.”

“Oh, Cis, Cis, dear!” moaned Nan.

“Nobody’s to blame but yourself, Cis Adair! Mimi didn’t want to tell on you, but when she tol’ me, I said she’d ought to come out with it, not let nice girls that kep’ the rules get looked at crooked for what they wouldn’t do, not for nothin’. What I say is, it’s easy rule to keep; simply tend to your own bus’nuss. Listenin’ in ain’t what int’rusts me; it don’t girls that’s got gentlemen friends an’ ev’rything. I’ll do your work to-day, Cis Adair, but the comp’ny won’t let me overdo long, I’ll tell the world! You’re wanted in the office, Cis Adair, an’ it’s a cinch you’re not wanted elsewheres!” Amelia delivered her speech explosively.

Cis laughed lightly as she went toward the door.

“Do you honestly think that I didn’t know precisely what would happen when I—when I—danced, would you call it? I knew what the fiddler would cost,” she said. “Don’t weep for me, Amelia! Nancy, stay down and have supper with me, will you? I’ll be waiting for you in the drug store.”

Nan nodded, speechless, and Cis went off, without outward sign of perturbation, to meet the manager of this office, who had always been her friend, as he had proved in many trifling ways.

“Ah, Miss Adair, I’m sorry to have to see you to-day, and for the reason which made me summon you. Please be seated,” he said. “I think you must know that reason?”

“Not much use in play-acting, Mr. Singer, so I’m not going to pretend I don’t! Yes, I know,” said Cis.

“One of our subscribers reported to us yesterday that a girl in our exchange had connected another of our subscribers with a conversation which he was holding. This action has, justly, too, infuriated the gentleman whose conversation was thus overheard. He has demanded that we find and properly punish the offending operator. Her action has led to the most disastrous consequences, in fact to great loss and grief to the gentleman—”

“No! Has it, though?” cried Cis almost springing to her feet. “Then she was game; she did have sense enough to throw him down!”

“Evidently, Miss Adair, your action was intended to work harm to the gentleman. Do you know him personally, or the subscriber whom you connected with his wire?”

Mr. Singer, Cis felt sure, was controlling a desire to laugh.

“No, indeed, but when a nice girl is getting fooled—”

“Now, Miss Adair, that will do. Let us avoid open allusions. Knowing you, I am inclined to think that you acted from a sort of mistaken chivalry; that you yielded to an impulse to save another girl from what you feared would be greater sorrow than you were inflicting upon her. You see, I give you full credit for good, even for rather fine motives, and I acknowledge that it is refreshing to find a girl with ideals such as this reveals. But it won’t do, Miss Adair, it won’t do! The telephone company is not in business to guard morals, nor its subscribers’ welfare; it is in business to transmit messages and to see that their privacy is secured to their subscribers. You have broken one of the fundamental, inviolable rules of your office, and there is nothing for me to do but dismiss you.” Mr. Singer ended with regret in his voice.

“Sure, Mr. Singer!” Cis agreed. “I knew it would come out, and I’d be thrown down. Sorry, but I’d do it right over again this minute.”

“I quite believe that!” Mr. Singer allowed himself a sound of laughter in his throat that did not pass his lips. “You have been a good operator, Miss Adair; quick, yet patient; faithful, punctual, and—until now—highly honorable. I’m exceedingly sorry to lose you, sorrier to dismiss you. I wish that you had not felt it necessary to load your gun and take a shot at birds, which were, after all, not in your field.”

“If you had a daughter, or a sister, a nice, a lovely girl, all innocent and—and well, white, Mr. Singer, wouldn’t you give her a chance to keep out of a regular sell, wouldn’t you put her wise and let her have her chance, at least? I bet you would, and I did!” cried Cicely.

Mr. Singer arose, holding out his hand in farewell, not otherwise replying to Cicely’s question.

“Good-bye, Miss Adair, and good luck. If I can be of use to you, let me know. But in your next position keep to your rules, and don’t let your imagination lead you into quixotic scrapes,” he said. “The cashier will give you your check. I’ll gladly recommend you to anyone whom you may send to me, but I cannot condone your disobedience here.”

“Of course not!” Cis heartily agreed. “Thanks, Mr. Singer. I knew I’d lose my head, so don’t feel sorry about it. You know red heads get through worse thickets than this one. You’ve been downright dandy to me; much obliged, honest! Good-bye; sorry to say it to you, but I’m glad about the rest of it.”

“We had a little difficulty in identifying the offender, but at last we did so, through one of the girls whose friend had been a witness to your imprudence,” said Mr. Singer, politely holding the door open for his unrepentant employee to leave him.

“There weren’t many between whom to choose; all you had to do was to ask me; I’m on till ten on that section. I’d have told you I did it, if you’d asked me,” said Cis, halting in the doorway.

“You certainly would have, Cicely the Sincere!” cried Mr. Singer, and this time he laughed aloud.

Nan hurried from the exchange at five o’clock sharp, and around to the drug store where Cicely was awaiting her.

“We don’t eat to-night in the Tel. Restaurant, Nancy Bell; we eat at Hildreth’s, one of his regular old ripping platter suppers: lobster; little necks sitting around him; broiled finan haddy, relishes—who minds being a Catholic on Friday when she’s got the price of Hildreth’s about her?” cried Cis, seizing Nan’s hand and tucking it into her arm. “Drew my last check from the Tel. Co., so it’s on me, and a treat at Hildreth’s, just to celebrate!”

“Oh, Cis, Cis, what are you going to do next?” sighed Nan, yielding, yet disapproving this extravagance.

“After the supper? I hadn’t thought. Movie? But we don’t care for movies!” Cis pretended to meditate.

“You know I don’t mean that! What sort of work will you try for? Where will you go—”

Cis interrupted her by whistling blithely, as well as any boy could whistle, as indifferent as a boy to passers-by: “Oh, boys, where do we go from here?”

“Wait till after lobster, Nan, and I’ll tell you,” Cis then said, seeing Nan’s real distress.

“Oh, that means something that would spoil my appetite!” cried prophetic Nan.

After a delicious supper in the famous sea-food specialty restaurant, to which Cis did fuller justice than Nan, Cis lay back in her chair, her small cup of black coffee before her, her eyes on the contorted shoulders of the ’cellist of the orchestra of four pieces which “helped float the fish,” Cis said.

“Going to tell me?” hinted Nan.

“I hate to, Nan, because I know you’ll hate it, and so do I, when I think of you. But I’m going to get out of here, altogether; I’m going to Beaconhite to try my luck,” announced Cicely.

“Beaconhite! Whatever for?” gasped Nan.

“Never could tell you,” said Cis airily. “Always wanted to try that little city. Spells its name so crazy, that’s one reason; must have been Beacon Height once, of course. I always had an idea I’d like it; it’s hustling, yet settled. I’ve some money saved up; not much; enough to carry me on till I get to earning, and I’m dead sick, dead tired of here! Not tired of you, little Nan, but of the place. I think I’d better move up a square or two; ’tisn’t good to cork up too much fermentation. Honest, Nan, it’s lucky I’ve not taken up that vitamine bug they’re all rushing so! If I ate yeast cakes, like the rest of ’em, I’d fly to pieces! I’m going to Beaconhite and show it what a red-haired girl can do to it! Nanny, don’t look so sorry! And don’t cry, dear! That lobster shell had enough salt water, and too much hot water!”

“You’ll forget all about me, and I love you dearly, Cis,” faltered Nan.

“I’m just as fond of you as you are of me, nice little Silly!” cried Cis. “Only I’m not keen on mushiness. You’ve got to allow me one virtue: I stick when once I’m stuck; no waving around to this solid body! We’ll be just as good friends, and we’ll get together again, here or there, but it’s the truth, Nan; I’ve got to break off, and break out new, or my red hair’ll blaze up like a fire balloon, and there’ll be no more of Miss Adair! I hated to tell you, but I’m glad it’s done! If this hadn’t happened in the office I’d have left next October; now it has happened, I’m going right off—or sooner.”

“Right off? How soon, Cis?” faltered Nan.

“This is Friday; don’t you think Monday is a good day to start a new record? First day of the week, first week day of the week, and washing day?” Cis suggested.

“I don’t suppose any other day would be easier,” admitted Nan. “Will you stay with me Sunday night, start from my house? Oh, Cis, Cis! There are only two days before Monday, and I never dreamed, never once dreamed this morning that I’d ever lose you!”

“I’m not dreaming it now, Nanny dear. We’re friends for keeps. You can’t lose me; I’m not that sort. Come along, Nan. I’m fed up on lobster, and I’m much more fed up on those fiddlers three—like Old King Cole’s. But I seem to miss a jolly old soul in this crowd of two!”

Cis jumped up, paid the reckoning, and tucked Nan under her arm after her usual custom, her height and Nan’s being adapted to this arrangement.

Thus they left the restaurant, Cis humming an old song which she had picked up from one of her elders: “You can’t lose me, mah Honey,” as appropriate to her assurance, to Nan, and as if she had not a care in the world.

CHAPTER III
MISS JEANETTE LUCAS

CIS spent Saturday forenoon picking up her belongings, packing certain things in a large old trunk, others of more immediate emphasis in a perfectly new, smaller trunk, leaving pictures and the few pieces of bric-a-brac which she owned, to be boxed.

She was entirely cheerful over these preparations, whistling softly between closed teeth, sometimes breaking into a snatch of song; it was evident that change was by no means unwelcome to her.

Nan Dowling, on the contrary, sat on the edge of the bed, avoiding physical comfort as her body dropped from extreme mental discomfort, watching Cis with her hands clasped, hanging forward between her knees; her lips drawn down, her eyes gloomy. She had the forenoon free because she was going on duty at one, Cis’s old time, having made an exchange with another girl who gladly accepted the chance to have an evening off, especially Saturday evening.

“Cis, don’t take everything you own with you!” remonstrated Nan. “Pack a trunk to leave at my house.”

“I wonder why?” said Cis absent-mindedly. “Believe I’ll give this blouse to the waitress. It’s a bit tight for me, though it’s still as good as ever, but that poor little lean thing will like something decent, and she’ll be able to lap it over the way it was meant to go; I can’t.”

She held up a pretty linen shirt-waist, turning it by the shoulders, considering it in the sunshine’s strong light.

“You wonder why you should leave a trunk with me?” Nan persisted, ignoring Cis’s suggestion of the gift. “Because it looks so horridly final when you’ve taken everything with you; you may want to come home again. At least you might let me hope that you will, let me feel I had a link with you.”

“I won’t come back next winter, Nanny; I’ll push on farther if Beaconhite doesn’t appreciate me—or I appreciate it. I don’t say I’ll never come back, but I know I’m going to keep away a while,” declared Cis. “So there’s no telling what I could get on without. And as to that word ‘home’ you used, where’s my home? In those trunks! A girl like me, without kith nor kin, boarding or lodging, hasn’t a home. Of course, I’ll always call this old town home, because I was born here and grew up here, but that’s nonsense, when you come to think of it. You’re the only thing here to come back to; I don’t need to leave a trunk to hitch me up to you, small Person! So your silly Cicely takes all she owns with her. Say, Nan, why do you suppose they didn’t nickname me Silly, instead of Cis? Comes just as straight from Cicely!”

“Oh, dear Cis! You always make me feel as if you were a kite and the rope was slipping through my fingers! You’re the friendliest thing, yet you don’t care one bit for people—unless it is for me?” sighed Nan. “Aren’t you going to say good-bye to Father Lennon? And—and—go to confession this afternoon before you start?”

Cis shook her head hard. “Not time for confession for me yet; not for quite a long while. I’ll turn up somewhere by Easter, maybe at Christmas! Don’t look bothered, good little Nan! I’m going to be honest whatever else I am. I often wonder if I’m honest to go at all. You don’t think God can like us to pretend, do you?” Cis turned unexpectedly serious.

“I think He likes us to hold on hard when we are tempted to let go, and that we can be honest in wanting to hold on, at least,” said Nan slowly. “I’m pretty sure this idea you have of being honest is dangerous. Isn’t it just as honest to receive the sacraments because you know you ought to, as because you happen to feel like it? And there’s more merit in it, so it is sure to earn the feeling for you after a while?”

Nan spoke hesitatingly; she stood in awe of Cis, of her cleverness, her reserves, and also her unreserve, which was likely at any time to shock Nan.

“Maybe, nice Nanny,” Cis assented lightly. “I’m so full of pep that I don’t crave anything that life can’t give, and I don’t think I’m a great sinner, honest! I’m pretty square; I tell the truth; I hate lowness; I don’t harm people, I even like to oil other people’s springs when the going’s hard. I don’t know exactly what religion does mean to me; I’ve got some, at least I’d never be anything but Catholic, but I can’t see why I’m not living a decent life, better than some people’s who are at confession every couple of weeks or so.”

“Of course, Cis, and you’re a peach; you know what I think of you, part of it, anyway. But that’s not all of it. I’m no good at explaining, but all that’s just this world,” Nan faltered; she could have made her meaning clearer, but she shrank from preaching to Cis.

“This world it is, Nancy Bell! Where else is our address? I’ve heard about it; you mean what they say in church about ‘natural virtues.’ Well, I’d like to know who created nature, what’s wrong with natural virtue? It’s a nice, natural thing to be jolly, and kindly, and not jealous, or hen-minded—hen-minded and snake-acting! And you’ve got to own up that some pious people are just as jealous and harsh as can be, wouldn’t deal half as decently with other folks as Cis, the Sinner! So that same Cis can’t feel she’s so awfully a sinner! As to saying good-bye to Father Lennon, why on earth should I bother him and myself, now I’m going away, when I never saw him to talk to him when I was here?” Cis flicked a scarf into Nan’s face, adding:

“Smile awhile, Nancy! I may be headed wrong, but I’m not dying, and perhaps I’ll brace up and turn saintly before Father Lennon—or someone else—comes to say good-bye to me for good and all!”

“You’re so big and brave and daring; you’re like a soldier! I can’t bear to have you miss connections, Cis.” Nan said softly. “Not enlist.”

“Nice Nanny!” Cis began again, then held up her hand.

“Footsteps on the stairs, strange ones! Nan, they’re coming this way! Think the company is sorry, and is sending me an appointment in the main office?”

Cis opened her door to a boy who knocked, a messenger boy.

“Miss Cicely Adair,” said the boy, glancing from one to the other girl. “Answer. I wait—R. S. V. P., see?”

“I see!” cried Cis, smiling at the boy in perfect sympathy with his boyhood.

“I’m the lady you seek! Sit down—but for goodness’ sake don’t sit on my best hat! I’ll read, then I’ll write—maybe!”

She tore open the envelope addressed to her in an unknown, feminine hand, an unusual hand, full of character and refinement; she drew forth its contents.

“Well, Nan!” exclaimed Cis. “It’s from Miss Lucas! Here, read it!”

Then she threw on the floor a pile of articles which covered a straight chair’s seat, shoved back other things from the table end, and wrote:

Dear Miss Lucas:—I’ll be at your house between three and four, as you ask.

Yours sincerely,
Cicely Adair.

She addressed an envelope, folded her tiny note, sealed it in the envelope, and handed it to the boy, who rose to go.

“You’re one!” he said admiringly. “That’s the kind o’ letter! Don’t have to hurt your eyes over it! Mostly they writes tons. Had the deuce of a time findin’ you!”

“Don’t blame you one bit!” said Cis cordially. “I have an awful time finding myself! But I think it pays in the end.”

“Yeh,” the boy grinned, instantly, like all boys, in perfect sympathy and understanding with Cis. “So long. Much obliged, but it’s paid, both ways.”

“Of course it is, but an ice cream cone does no harm, and that’s outside your day’s wages,” retorted Cis, letting him out. Then she turned to Nan.

“What do you suppose she wants of me? Is it to bless, or to curse me? I’ve got to go, couldn’t refuse and wouldn’t want to, but at the same time if you want to play my part I’ll lend you my clothes, Nan,” she said.

Nan laughed; she would have tripped on Cis’s skirt, short though skirts were, and fallen through her jacket.

“Your clothes are not a good fit for me, Cis, and I’d be less of a fit in your place at Miss Lucas’. I’ll never be able to wait to hear what happens there!” said Nan.

“Pity you’re on duty all this afternoon and evening! But I’m going to Mass to-morrow, sure. If you go to the eight I’ll meet you and tell you all I know,” Cis suggested.

“All right; that’s fine!” Nan’s face brightened. “It’s time I went home to lunch, if I’m to be at the office by one. Remember, you’re to spend to-morrow night with me. Oh, Cis! Your last night!”

“Oh, I don’t know! I look forward to many more nights, Nanny, and some of them with you!” laughed Cis, persistently cheerful.

Cis dressed for her call on Miss Jeanette Lucas with more trepidation than she would have been willing to acknowledge. She looked exceedingly well in setting forth, all in white; plain-tailored linen skirt; fine hand-wrought shirt-waist; a simple white hat of soft straw, with a soft white bow on one side its sole trimming; her masses of glowing, shining red hair emphasized by its snowy setting.

Cis noted her effects in the mirror with approval.

“Not so bad, Cicely, my dear,” she said aloud. “Neat, but not gaudy—except your hair! You’re not in the least a beauty, but you look kept-together, and I’m not ashamed to walk out with you, Miss Adair!”

She nodded at her reflection in the glass, sighed as she took up gloves, which she detested, and ran downstairs, dreading her coming call, yet afraid of being unpunctual.

The Lucas house stood back from the street behind its tall trees, screened from its surroundings, although its neighborhood was the best in town. “The old Lucas place” was a landmark, built shortly after the building of the Republic; it had been finished in time to entertain Lafayette when he had returned to see the new order which his youthful love of adventure had helped to establish on the western continent. It had been deemed a pity that the old estate was exposed to the danger of ultimate transformation into a Roman Catholic institution by the conversion of its present owner to the Faith of France, a Faith which might do very well for French heroes, born to it, but did not do at all for unheroic Americans.

It was an unwarranted anxiety that apprehended such a transformation for the stately house; besides Jeanette, his oldest daughter, Robert Lucas had an older married son, three younger boys and two younger girls, so that heirs were not wanting to save the house from a Sisterhood, nor was its neighborhood falling off to bring about a desire on the part of the Lucas family to sell it.

Cis went up its broad front walk to its wide, simply beautiful front door, impressed and quieted by the repose, the certainty of fundamental things, which reached her even on the exterior of the house.

A soft-footed, soft-voiced maid, with perfect manners, responded to Cicely’s summons. She said: “Please come in, Miss Adair. If you don’t mind, will you go right up to Miss Jeanette’s room? She is expecting you, and gave those orders. I will show you the way.”

She led Cis up a long flight of stairs—the house was remarkably high-ceiled—its steps low, mounting at the easiest possible angle, yet with a broad mahogany handrail to aid in progress. There was a deep recessed landing more than half-way up, an arched window lighting it, a splendid old clock standing back against the wall in its corner.

The maid knocked on a door that stood slightly ajar at the rear of the hall on the second floor, and instantly pushed it open.

“Miss Adair, Miss Jeanette. I brought her right up to you as you told me to,” she said.

The maid stepped back and withdrew down the hall. A girl about Cicely’s age arose from a low couch on which she had been reclining, and said, speaking low, lifelessly, as if speaking were an effort:

“Please come in, Miss Adair. You were kind to come. Will you take this chair?”

She drew forward slightly a deep chair, softly cushioned in dark blue, and herself dropped back on the couch, sidewise among its piled pillows, not lying down, but resting on her elbow. Yet, listless though her attitude was, her left hand clutched the corner of a pillow, wrinkling it tautly in a nervous grasp.

She was dark eyed, dark haired; Cis thought that she had never seen anyone so pale; her olive skin, naturally beautiful in tint and texture, was almost greenish in its livid tint; there were great circles under her eyes which looked sunken, as if they had been staring wide open into the dark for sleepless nights. Cis forgot her embarrassment, her uneasiness as to what might be before her because of her share in what had befallen this girl, in an overwhelming pity for the grief which had thus wrecked her loveliness.

Miss Lucas suddenly spoke, clasping and twisting her fingers, her hands thrust forward on her knees, her eyes burning as they stared at Cis.

“I’ve seen you before,” she said.

“I was introduced to you at a benefit for the Orphans; I served cream. I didn’t expect you to remember me,” Cis answered.

“You have a face to be remembered,” Jeanette Lucas said. “We had hard work tracing you. We—I, rather—wanted to find the girl who——” she broke off; her low, husky notes gave way to a strident tone in her voice. She waved her hands as if she were throwing something away. “See here, Miss Adair, we’ve got to talk frankly, as one girl to another. There has been too much between us to beat about the bush, to try for foolish, futile disguises of speech.”

“I never like them,” said Cis.

“Then—why did you do what you did? Do you know—have you ever known—Herbert Dale?” demanded Jeanette, speaking with such eagerness that she could hardly enunciate.

“Never. I’ve seen him,” replied Cis.

“But you knew that night who he was; you knew it was something concerning me nearly, horribly, tragically nearly. How?”

“He called you often; we get used to voices and ways on the wire, Miss Lucas. All the world knew from the papers that you were to be married; that’s easy to explain,” Cis answered gently.

“What was your motive? Why did you connect me with that wire? Did you hate him, or me?” asked Jeanette.

“Oh, Miss Lucas, why do you say that? Can’t you see why I did it?” cried Cis distressed. “I’d been admiring you; you’re so pretty, so fine, so good, so stainless! It made me sick to think that you might be walking into unhappiness, blind, tricked. I did what I’d want done for me in your place; I put you where you could know, and then whatever you did, you’d do with your eyes open. I wanted you to have a square deal, dear Miss Lucas.”

“At first I loathed you, I would have punished you,” cried Jeanette. “But even at first I knew that I could not marry him. I tried to think I could, that I’d be a St. Monica, but no, oh, no! I could not see him; I could not think of him; he was a painted mummy case that held another body, not the body in which my heart was buried. It was not hatred, it was worse—distrust, horror! He was not only wicked, but he was deceiving. Oh, Cicely Adair, when you put me on that wire you killed innocent, poor young Jeanette Lucas! I don’t know what it has done to me; I shall go on, but never again the girl who answered your call that awful night. We don’t lightly break a promise to marry, we Catholics, but Father Lennon said that I could not marry a man from whom I shrank with horror. I am not going to marry. But I’m not blaming you. I have been blessing you through long, black hours of day and night, all alike dark! I should have died if I had discovered that my husband was a liar, wicked. I thought that I should cure his one defect, his indifference to religion. I know now that he was false to all things, to me as well as to God! Cicely Adair, you’re a Catholic girl; remember this lesson when you think of marrying. I am grateful to you, but, oh, I loved him, I loved him, and he never lived! I can’t mourn the loss of the man I loved; there was no such man. You can put flowers on a grave. I myself am the only grave I have: I am dead, but the man I loved never lived. Oh, me, oh, me!”

“Dear, dear Miss Lucas! Oh, I’m sorry!” cried Cis, beginning to tremble.

“No! Be glad! I’m glad; indeed I am glad and grateful that you saved me from worse! My father never trusted Herbert Dale. Mother liked him, but father was afraid. He blesses you for what you did. It was fine for one girl to stand by another, unknown girl like that! I sent for you to tell you this. I hear the company found out, and dismissed you. There was a fearful scene when I gave back my ring and told Herbert that I knew him at last. He guessed—not at first, but after a while; I’m too dull to keep a secret against his experienced questioning—he guessed how I found out. He swore he’d have the girl dismissed who had put me on his wire. I know that he succeeded. I am profoundly sorry. I owe you what cannot be repaid, but—will you let my father help you in some way? He told me to say to you, when I told him that I meant to find you and thank you, that you would be still more generous and unselfish than you’ve already been, if you would let him help you to your feet again. He said he would be honored in recommending you to any position, a girl with such fine kindness and loyalty and true standards as yours are! Will you be frank with me, please, dear? I’ve spoken to you without the thinnest veil over my face!”

“Bless your dear, sweet soul!” cried Cis. “I’m all right. I’m leaving town to-morrow, going to seek my fortune, if you can imagine it!”

“Oh, no! Are you? It’s worse than I thought,” cried Jeanette aghast. “What a pity, what a shame! And all for me, to save me from being a wretched wife! How could you be so kind to me? Indeed, indeed you must let us do something about it!”

“Dear girl,” said Cis, leaning forward, taking one of Jeanette’s burning hands in her firm, cool, shapely ones, “you mustn’t take that hard. I’m a restless fish; I’ve been wanting a change. I could find a job here, but I’ve been wanting to go away. I’m taking the chance the company’s given me to pull up stakes; that’s all. I’m going Monday, to Beaconhite, just for sport, so don’t you worry over it, you dear!”

“Beaconhite? Oh, father could help you there! His brother is the president of the biggest bank in the city, and if you had a letter to him he’d give you something splendid, I know he would! Will you let father give you a letter to Uncle Wilmer? Please, please say yes!” Jeanette pleaded with hands and eyes, leaning forward eagerly.

“Sure I’ll say yes!” laughed Cis. “And then I’ll say thank you! It’ll be great not to be without a plank on a new ocean. But all I ask is that you and your father will quit feeling that you owe me anything. I knew the company would drop me, but that’s nothing! I tell you I’ve been fidgeting lately. Anyway, what’s that beside marrying the wrong sort? I’ve been fond of you this good while, Miss Jeanette Lucas; I’ve taken comfort in making believe I knew you, and that we were friends. Funny, maybe, but all girls have sort of far-off crushes, I guess! Then, when I’d a chance to be a friend to you in good earnest, you’d better believe I liked it! So that’s all there is to that, my dear!”

Jeanette looked at Cis hard and long, then she leaned over to her and kissed her. “Strange,” she said slowly. “You have come into my life deeply with one stride. No other girl is bound up into my life as you are. As long as I live I shall remember you, the girl who saved me. I shall keep your face, your wonderful red hair, in my mind when I am old and feeble—if I live to be so! It doesn’t seem as though I could go on living, but I know people can’t die because they no longer really live. We are friends, dear, and your sweet, queer dream of me came true.”

“I’m so sorry about you, I ache,” said Cis simply. “What are you going to do, what will become of you? Don’t talk of dying!”

“Father is going to take me to Europe for six months. That’s all I know of a future,” said Jeanette. “I’m stunned; it doesn’t seem true most of the time. Then it is the only truth in all the world, and I reel under the feeling that all else, all I trusted and believed, is false. I never knew wicked people, and if the one who seemed noblest, best, is treacherous, wicked, how do I know, how do I know? I’m not easy to transplant, Cicely; my roots won’t take hold again. But your clear, changing, warm, pitying face looks true. My father and my mother are good, good and dear! I must find my way. Don’t you think I shall?”

“Stop brooding over it,” advised Cis, out of her complete ignorance. “There’s not a man born worth worrying over. Set it down to experience, and quit thinking of it.” Jeanette looked at her wondering, then a faint smile passed over her face, hardly more than the shadow of one, but Cis rejoiced in it.

“That’s good advice, dear,” she said quietly. “But if you have poured yourself, all of yourself, your life and all its parts, into one vessel and it is broken—how do you go on, how gather it all up, into what? Tell me this, brave, wise, ignorant Cicely Adair! Don’t love anyone, Cicely; it hurts!”

“Well,” said Cicely, “I hope I sha’n’t. I like people lots, but I never wanted anyone so I lay awake five minutes wanting them. I must go now. You’ve been mighty good to me. I was afraid you might almost hate me. I think I could love you.”

“You could love someone, and find it as hard as I do; you are the sort that can love,” said Jeanette. “I think I’m fond of you, Cicely Adair. I’m too numb to feel anything but the one pain that absorbs me, but I’m sure I’m fond of you. Father will send that letter to you to-morrow. I’m glad it’s to be Beaconhite, where he can introduce you, but I’m sorry, sorry you are suffering through me.”

“Not a bit of it! I love to go, honest! I was brought up by strangers; my mother died long ago; I live in lodgings; what’s the difference? Good-bye, you dear, dear, lovely Miss Lucas! Go to sleep; you look all in. When I think I made you look like that——”

Jeanette shook her head, and took both of Cicely’s hands.

“It was a blessed deed, dear,” she said. “I sent for you to tell you I’m grateful; not to thank you, because I can’t. We are friends, Cicely. We can’t be parting for always; we have been drawn too close. Will you let me know what happens to you, if letters aren’t too burdensome to you?”

“I’ll tell you, if you care,” said Cis. “Good-bye.”

Jeanette followed Cis to the head of the stairs, and rang for the maid to show her out. Cis looked back, smiling up and waving her hand half-way down.

Jeanette leaned over the broad mahogany rail, her soft silken negligée drawn around her, her eyes burning in their pallid setting, her dark hair loosely shading her face, her white lips pitifully pulled into a smile for Cicely.

Cicely, boyish, unscathed by suffering or desire, yet knew that the girl, Jeanette Lucas, whom she had idealized, had died under that surgery by which she had cut off from her what would have slain her.

Cis walked slowly down the street, pondering the mystery of this contradictory truth.

CHAPTER IV
TRANSPLANTING

CIS spent her last night before setting out to try her fortune, Sunday night, with Nan in the Dowling, pleasant, somewhat crowded little house.

Mr. Lucas had sent to Cicely the letter of introduction to his brother in Beaconhite, promised her by Jeanette. Briefly, but forcibly, it expressed Mr. Lucas’ conviction that Cicely Adair was a person whose ability and fidelity were of the highest order; that he, therefore, felt no hesitation in asking his brother to place her to her advantage, in acknowledgment of a debt which Mr. Lucas owed her and which he did not hope ever fully to cancel.

Cis read the unsealed letter with an elated sense of being armed to meet her new, experimental venture, and hurried around the corner to the public telephone station to call up Miss Lucas, thank her and her father, and tell her that now she knew that she was all right, though she had never been fearful, and to bid Miss Lucas good-bye again, with the injunction not to worry over her. “Or anything else,” Cis added as an afterthought.

Then she went back to her lodgings, finished putting into her suitcase the articles which she needed for that night and her first night in Beaconhite, took a quick, humorous survey of her room, which embraced its every detail, and waved her hand to it, nodding farewell.

“Good-bye, good luck, friend Room,” she said. “You’re not much of a home, but you’ve been mine over two years. Hope you get on well with your new chum, and get dusted regularly, and that she won’t make a fuss over that loose board, nor the broken blind fastening. Wonder if I’ll sleep as well in my new room as I’ve slept in you? One thing, I’ve never in my life had anything to keep me awake nights, so far!”

She took up the suitcase, waiting beside her—it was not light, though it held no heavy articles, but there never was a light suitcase, however packed—and went down the stairs.

Her landlady was awaiting her; she came out of the dining room when she heard Cis’s step, to wish her good luck and bid her good-bye.

“I hope you won’t be sorry, Miss Adair,” she said, without any indication that she considered the hope well-founded. “Personally, I think no one could find a better place than the city we live in, but maybe Beaconhite ain’t so bad. You’ve been a good lodger; always pleasant; prompt with your payments; reg’lar in hours, and you never abused the light priv’lege with an iron, or any such. I’m sorry to lose you; I can truthf’ly say that much, and I wish you well, wherever it may be.”

“Thanks, Miss Spencer. We’ve got on fine, take it as a whole, and I hope the next one in my room may be taken wholier—holier might easily mean two things!” laughed Cis. “Good-bye, good luck! Look after the cat; I like that cat, and she’ll miss my petting. Animals need more than mere food. Good-bye!”

“Now I’m launched!” thought Cis, going off down the street, having shut the front door for the last time with her customary vigorous slam. “No, I’m not! Supper at Dowlings’ and the night there first, then I’ll really be launched! I like Nan heaps, but her mother is quite advice-full!”

Mrs. Dowling was not perfectly sure about Cis, as Cis was sharp enough to perceive. She did not like her indifferent brand of Catholicity, but aside from that, she found nothing to condemn in the girl, or had not so far. “So far” summed up Mrs. Dowling’s attitude toward Cicely; when Nan told her mother that she knew no other girl so intrinsically upright and pure-minded, Mrs. Dowling always said: “I hope she is!” and Nan was helpless to defend Cis against a charitable hope, however dubiously expressed.

Cis was too attractive to men to be wholly trustworthy, Mrs. Dowling felt, with the bias of the rather dull woman who has married the one man who ever noticed her. She could not understand the vivacity that drew others, combined with the nature that allowed no one to pass within definite barriers.

Then young Tom Dowling, only a year and a half Cicely’s junior, found her far too charming; it was bad enough that Nan was her humble adorer, but Tom was another matter. Mrs. Dowling was one of the many women who mistake jealousy for love of their children. Down in the bottom of her heart, Mrs. Dowling felt sure that the act of Providence which removed Cicely Adair from her present field was easily understood, corroborative of her secret misgivings.

Nan and Cicely were bedfellows that last night; like true girls they talked far into it of their views, their hopes, Cicely’s adventure, of Jeanette Lucas and the risks and promises of marriage.

Cis declared that she did not want to marry, nor ever would marry unless there came into her life a man who so filled it that she would be maimed and crippled, lacking him. That man, she added, she did not believe existed. Cis felt self-sufficient, rejoicing in her ability to take care of herself.

Nan, on the other hand, did not mind acknowledging that she thought that she could be quite fond enough of a man to marry him and be happy with him without a cataclysmic passion; he must be good, she added, like a wise little second Eve, because, chiefly, she hoped that she would have many children and she would want their father to be an example to them.

Cis laughed aloud at this, and Nan smothered the laugh in the bedclothes, fearing to disturb her mother at one o’clock.

“I don’t believe many girls pick out a man for the sake of their children; I’m dead sure I’d pick him for myself,” declared Cis.

“I don’t care; they ought to,” maintained Nan stoutly. “How can you bring up children well if their father is bad? And if he’s a good father, he’ll make his wife happy. All women are first of all mothers of souls, like the first woman.”

She admitted to Cicely’s gleeful questioning that she had derived this idea from a mission sermon; in return for which admission Cicely admitted that she had no doubt it was quite right; that she couldn’t object to it as long as she herself didn’t have to marry posterity’s ancestor.

Breakfast was somewhat hurried. Beaconhite was distant over a hundred miles, but its inaccessibility counted for more hours’ travelling than the miles. To reach it Cis must go to New York; cross there to another railway station, and start again for her destination, therefore she was to take an early train to New York.

Tom and Nan were going to see her off. Mrs. Dowling put up a delicious lunch for Cis, and gave it to her with the utmost kindness, and much excellent advice as to conditions and conduct of which young Cicely, accustomed to the world and to make her way in it from her childhood, knew ten times as much as the older woman, and had practically and instinctively formulated her own rules.

“And, my dear,” Mrs. Dowling ended, “I wish you’d at once go and call on some fine priest, get him interested in you. You’re a girl that needs it, though all do who are alone like you. And where’ll you stay to-night, till you find a nice room, in a decent house? And how’ll you know what any house’s like in a new place, unless you call on the priest and he sends you to the right one? You can’t be too careful, Cicely; you heed what one who is old enough to be your mother tells you.”

“I wouldn’t know what to say to the priest if I called on him, Mrs. Dowling,” laughed Cis. “I’ll stay at a hotel, pick out a good one. I’ve made up my mind to take a week off, not present my letter to that other Mr. Lucas for a bit. I’ll get a hotel for five dollars a day, I’m sure, and I’ve decided to spend thirty-five dollars on myself laying off, sizing up Beaconhite for a week. Then I’ll roll up my sleeves and pitch in. I may get acquainted with some decent young fellow of my own age. You take a risk when you pick up a girl, but with a boy you don’t. Then a boy never misunderstands you; you can be honest and friendly with a boy, and he’ll always see it if you’re straight, and play right up to you, good chum-fashion, not looking for trouble, nor for anything behind your jolly good times. I’ll try to find a nice boy, first, in Beaconhite and he can steer me to his sister, or his cousins, and other girls. Isn’t that all so, Tom?”

“Right you are, Cis!” cried Tom. “Fellows know what girls mean—worse luck! It wouldn’t be half-bad if a chap couldn’t always dope you out so easy.”

“Cicely Adair, I wish you had a mother!” cried Mrs. Dowling.

“Don’t you suppose I do?” Cis exclaimed. “The right sort; but we always think our mother would have been the right sort, if we’d had her, of course! You’ve been kind, Mrs. Dowling; indeed I thank you for it. Don’t worry about me. I don’t believe I’ll take a plunge; I sort of believe in my luck. I’m going to keep in mind that I’ve got to be the old maid godmother to Nan’s children, and that she’ll expect a perfect lady for the part! Isn’t it time we were getting off, children? If you make me lose that train you can stop down in town and order crepe for your mother to put on!”