CHAPTER XVI

by HAZEL GOODWIN KEELER

“LOST IN THIS BLOCK…”

Daniel Wickersham Forrest, architect, of Shore City, U.S.A., quite unknowing at this moment that his name was being repeated many hundreds of miles away, gazed puzzledly at the girl in clerk’s white duck uniform as she stooped over the potato bin near the scales, and vigorously dropped Idahos into a red net sack. Forrest’s puzzlement was due to the strange cap she wore: a bakers’ tam of exaggerated size which proclaimed in red letters that, “Public Food Stores’ Breads are Best”.

She did not see him: at least not any more particularly than she did the hosts of other customers that milled about. A silky chignon of light brown hair rested softly upon her white collar and glinted in the neon lights of the vast interior of the super-market. For though it was only four o’clock in the afternoon, not a ray of the June sun outside found its way within.

“Whence the crown…girl from far-off England?” Forrest hissed in a loud stage-whisper.

She started visibly, though without changing her position or raising her head, peeping at him with a sidelong glance from under her brown lashes.

For the first time, Forrest was struck with the sweeping width of her eyes and the dimpling formation at the outer corners where they met the temples.

He stood there perplexed, waiting as her glance rose slowly—one might even say, fearfully—and found his face. Then suddenly her whole attitude changed, and a relaxed half-smile—a somewhat cynical half-smile, Forrest thought flickered into her own relieved face. Instantly, however, she dropped her eyes again.

“Hello,” she answered. And brief though the greeting was, it still betrayed the accent of one who has not been long from England.

“Remember me, Mary Gresham?” He crouched in front of her until his face was on a level with hers in her stooping position. “Do you?”

A barely perceptible variation in the angle of her head indicated that she did remember him. She continued to drop potatoes into the net.

“Who am I?” he challenged.

“You’re the poem-writing young architect who lists himself in the directories as only, ‘Mr. T-Square Architect Service’; the Tall-Dark-and-Handsome with the Panama hat hanging from his hands, and the newish delft-blue tropical suit that looks every bit of all right; the High-Tension-Line I used to stumble over in the snow outside the store last winter, Saturdays at closing…”

The words were recited like a lesson at school, while the brown earthy nuggets kept time with thudding, bass-drum thumps as they dropped from her swift fingers into the net. He noticed that her eyes at the moment sparkled with highlights of royal blue. During the months of their more active friendship, he had used to call her the girl with the changeable-blue eyes: for hue and shade had varied with every different set of surroundings. He noticed, too, her small, sensitive face—how grave it had grown; the petite form under the neatly-fitting white uniform.

“—the gentleman,” she continued, “who used to push my better judgment over on its shell-like ear and entice me out to dinner”—platt-platt, went the potatoes!—“droopy—no powder—my hair in snakes—clothes quite withered—fresh from the weekly military engagement with the Last Minute Shoppers’ Brigade”—platt-platt!

“And a smudge as badge of honour across your nose?” he teased.

“The chappie—please stick to the subject!—who’s currently the prospective son-in-law”—platt!—“of the self-made industrialist Whosis, Maximilians Randolph.”

The “s” on Maximilian was unmistakable!

Sack now filled, white-sleeved arms shot forward to lift it from floor to scales.

Forrest took hold to lift it for the girl. She tensed so abruptly in resisting his help, however, that the suddenness of the motion sent something catapulting out of her dress.

It struck the floor with a resounding click, shot spinning and skidding across the two or three feet of linoleum and came to a violent stop at the base of the scales stand.

It was a powder compact case: a heart-shaped thing of yellow metal, thin, and as big as the palm of a small hand.

Both looked down at the trinket for what seemed minutes of paralysis, then two right hands went forth at the same moment to pick it up.

She was quicker than he, and her fingers were already closing over it. In another flash, she was buttoning it securely into the bodice pocket of her garb; had risen to her feet and, bag on scales and her back to him, stood gazing fixedly and with a show of nonchalance at the weight indicator.

That the nonchalance was affected was evidenced by the colour of the back of her ear and cheek, which were crimson.

The peculiar tension involved in the whole commonplace incident made it seem quite ridiculous, the real significance of it not becoming patent until some hours later. Meanwhile, a crowd of customers had gathered, in line with the usual ebb and flow pattern of such, and with a sense of frustration Forrest realized he had temporarily lost his chance to have that short, desperately important talk with Mary Gresham that he knew he must have.

He would have to await his circumspect turn in line, that was that!

Approaching the green goods and fruit counters, at a loss what to select, he picked up an apple with cheeks like Falstaff’s, red and bulgy, and brought up at the end of the single file, behind a woman in red baboushka and broad silhouette, whose rolling cart had both trays filled to overflowing.

And then he simply stood. And stood. Twirled his hat in his fingers. Took a small step forward. Settled into his hip-joint. Ruminated.

The line hardly moved. Housewives, employed as many of them were, outside the home, obviously stocked up with enough supplies to keep their provision buying excursions down to once a week or so. The double-tier carriers fairly groaned, not only with packaged goods but with profusions of perishables to be weighed and priced, clipped into bags and marked up with pencil for the cashiers’ information, all by one clerk: and that clerk, Mary.

Undoubtedly, the flood-tide of buyers was at its peak. More drew up behind Forrest to settle and creep along in the almost imperceptible movement of the procession. The aroma of freshly-ground coffee filled the air pleasantly, and from a distance, coffee mills hummed a ceaseless rondo. Cash registers from the region of the entrance doors far behind, mingled in the symphony with their staccato hiccoughs and whirrings. And the quiet whisk of paper bags, the soft clicking of the stapler and the subdued snatches of conversation added a soothing obligato.

As if this were not enough, still another part piped up; that inner voice which becomes active up in the brain whenever an interval of enforced idleness sets in.

The voice, usually parrot-like, usually reiterating a well-worn melody or chanting the sheerest nonsense, at the particular moment in Forrest’s brain chose to repeat the wording of two little signs he had passed on the way to the store. Hand-printed and identical, they were displayed pasted on electric light posts not far from the entrance, and ran:

LOST IN THIS BLOCK

$100 bill

in gold-plated compact case

Name Kay Lee on front

Reward if returned. 148 Maple St.

NO QUESTIONS ASKED

Perhaps, Forrest reflected, that last line indicated that the Fair Unknown wasn’t so sure she had really “lost” her compact. Suspected it had been snatched: boosted: lifted! Maybe, he mused facetiously, it had been boosted by the notorious Mayfair Mary, who was reportedly holing in somewhere in the fair burg of Shore City. Maybe she was at last reduced to nicking hundred dollar bills!

“Mayfair Mary,” took up the chantie in his brain: “Mayfair Mary, expert young pickpocket and sneakthief, who confined her London activities to the Upper Ten, disappeared from the British scene following the failure of her last coup: the attempted theft of the small jewelled crown, or diadem, from the Marchioness of Kingsborough at an exclusive ambassadorial dinner. Authorities report that on two occasions recently, Mayfair Mary’s trail has been picked up and lost again in Shore City… Mayfair Mary, expert young pickpocket…”

It was a repetition of the usual explanatory last paragraph that always ended the currently popular news stories about the elusive, upper-stratum girl-crook.

The woman in the red baboushka moved up a place. Forrest followed; settled into his other hip-joint; shifted his hat to his other hand; put Falstaff in the cradle of his elbow…

“Lost in this block…hundred-dollar bill in gold-plated compact case…name Kay Lee on front…no questions asked… Lost in this block…

“Oh shut up!” This latter to the parrot within him.

It was Forrest’s turn at last, or just about to be. He watched the girl behind the scales as, with concealed speed and mask-like method she finished up with Red Baboushka and turned to face him, her air detached and professional.

Wistfully he surveyed her as he put his purchase down before her.

“Is this all you wanted, sir?” Her gaze remained cool; unseeing.

“No!” he came back. “No! All I wanted was to ask you the simple question where the hec…where in thunder I could have a heart to heart talk with you. But this crowd…And your old landlady tells me you’ve moved and left no address. Listen! If I splash back here later and the ranks have thinned, can I see you then?”

“I have no choice, since I work here,” she murmured.

And shoving his wrapped parcel with one swift motion toward him, turned to the next customer.

A moment later, one of the screen-doors of the entrance shunted back into place with insolent vigour against his heels as he ruminated on this last remark, which had been barely audible. And he found himself outside on the sidewalk before he was emotionally prepared to be there.

“‘Maximilians Randolph!’” he repeated hotly to himself. “‘Prospective son-in-law of Maximilians!’ With an ‘s’ on the millions!” That showed she’d been reading the “Peeping Tom Column” in the morning’s Shore Citizen Daily. Glumly he recalled the item:

Mirabelle Randolph, daughter of the tycoon Maxi-Millions, will say “uh-huh” any hour now and to Mr. T-Square Architect Service himself! Because he’s bought the ring: a star sapphire. The two buzzy bees took that well-known swoop into the stratosphere of lahv when she first visited his very unusual charity building-project, Haven-Towne, in our nearest neighbouring state.

Mary Gresham, he reflected, had made a veritable dagger out of that word Maxi-Millions: run her thrust home, moreover, confident that the presence of “customers” was a shield against any retort from him. He hated himself, not only for the humiliating necessity of having looked her up in the first place, but of having to do so all over again in another hour. He abhorred the whole, denigrating experience!

He’d have to go through with it just the same.

As for Mirabelle, in deciding to ask her to become his wife, his motives were not at all what Miss Gresham obviously deemed them to be. Admitted, he and Mirabelle were not in love! Weren’t there people who’d never been in love who nevertheless were happily married? And as for the Randolph fortune, it was not that which interested Forrest: not for himself, at least! There was a larger issue to this thing: his prospective fiancee had taken the whole idea of his thriving Haven-Towne project straight to her heart.

For years he’d worked in assiduous loneliness: had procured fifty-seven angels for the project, each of whom had provided, or were pledged to provide, the wherewithal for the cost of one cottage, together with the furnishings for one family unit—each of which was limited to six orphans, two adoptive parents who had been bereaved of their own children, two grandparents, one cat and one dog.

Hundreds more cottages were still needed, however. And to get subscriptions for only a fraction of them would undoubtedly take the rest of his normal life. But Mirabelle’s Millions would in one stroke supply all the rest. And that—that—was something so much more important than whether or not Forrest were in love with the said Mirabelle that the two considerations were not to be mentioned in the same breath.

“Haven-Towne’s so wonderfully different, Dan!” she had exclaimed on the occasion of her first visit there with him, a visit which she herself had suggested. “Its cobble-stones! Pine log heating! Horses, wagons, carriages! The village smithy! Why you’ve even got a pie-man, like in ‘Simple Simon!’ There’s miles and miles for more cottages, and that wonderful ring of woods that flanks it all! Could I ever get to work on this in a big way!”

Yes, the “big way” in which she was interested had been apparent from the first.

As for love…

He shrugged his spiritual shoulders.

What was love, anyway, but an anxiety state that destroys sleep and appetite and brings on anaemia?

As Forrest walked along, he suddenly noticed the sidewalk was polka-dotted with rain. Clerks began to appear outside of stores to crank down awnings. Forrest turned up his coat-collar and strode on, parcel clutched under arm, hands in pockets, the right hand having to adjust itself around the box that held the ring he’d bought the previous day: had with him, so it would be in readiness for the evening.

Yes! Love!

In the teens he’d been in love: an artists’ model named Shirley—he’d even forgotten her last name!—a lovely, diaphanous being, sparkling as a diamond, delicate as a fern-frond, by whose glamorous side he’d fondly dreamed of saying, “I do”.

She’d made the grade in the movies, since tucking in radio, television and three marriages on the way. Forrest and she had been desperately in love. That it had been mutual had been quite patent. And because of this, had she not spurned a millionaire?

She had not!

Not any more than would have—say—the famous Mignette of light opera fame. Or Solveig, say, of Norwegian radio renown; or the Duchess of Bluecastle, London’s regal-blooded artists’ model; or Doll Durkin, Hollywood’s recent rave.

At the age of twenty-five, however, one sees with less wishful believing and more experience. One knows that, although only the valiant deserve the fair, only the sons of tycoons get them. The era of womanhood’s casting aside fortune or career for love was vanished. That was, without doubt, as it should be. For love was a passing thing: observation alone bore that out. A fever of a few months at most, it was. And as such, it formed a ridiculously unsafe foundation on which to build a long-term structure like marriage!

But a mutual and charitable interest—now there was a foundation! And that’s what he and Mirabelle would have.

“Mirabelle, I have a confession to make to you.” He reviewed the words as the rain became a patter on the pavement. “I’ve never—what they call—fallen in love with you, exactly. But I’ve admired you so much, and from the very first. And I do like you so tremendously.” That, he decided, would better be told her before he proposed this evening, instead of after, as he’d first planned.

“Darling, I too have a confession to make,” her words would run as she made reply. “You know something? I’ve known what you just told me, and for a long, long time now. But love will come later. And the kind that lasts! Because when two people respect and honour one another…”

Yes, it would be something in that vein, he felt sure. For she’d often expressed her views on life and marriage: he knew them by heart!

The rain had become a bombardment. It made platters of the sidewalks and swam off into the gutters. And the sky was so dark with thick grey that even the lightning was but the puff, as of a defective flashlight bulb.

The perfect time to return to that store!

He whirled about.

A cab which had evidently been crawling along on the slippery pavement behind him, came to a stop, then suddenly picked up speed, shooting ahead with a roar in spite of the cloudburst.

“Wait! Cabby! Hi!” Forrest ran after it for a moment, waving his arms wildly, then gave it up perplexedly.

For Mirabelle’s head and shoulders—or her double’s—had been framed in the rear window.

* * * *

Back in the store, he found the aisles comparatively empty, though the exits were jammed with those who waited for the rain to stop. At the rear, Mary Gresham was still at her post. She was in the act of snatching up a section of watermelon from the weighing tray, her small, oval face grim as she darted an aborted sidelong glance in Forrest’s direction.

“—and two dozen oranges,” a wee girl in front of her piped up from under a huge, transparent rain cape, and reading from a scrap of paper in her hand.

The goddess of the scales reached under them for a bag. Forrest snatched his chance.

“Can I wait for you? Until you’re through here? Please, Mary? I’ll wait as long as…”

“Two dozen, Jeannie?” she asked the child, leaning forward to verify the item on the list.

“Miss Gresham? Mary?” he pleaded. Oranges rained upon scales-tray.

“I’ve got another engagement, Mr. Forrest…Anything else, Jeannie?”

He stood by, powerless, while the various details of finishing with the young customer were accomplished.

“Lost in this block…hundred dollar bill…gold-plated compact case…name Kay Lee on front…Lost in…”

The small customer received her bag and put an end to the chantie in his brain.

“Mary? You see I need your opinion on something. I need it desperately: so desperately you’ll never know. Please let me wait and take you home? No matter how long I have to wait?” He spoke as softly as he could manage.

“What will Mr. Randolph say?” Her voice, too, was shadowy.

“Damn Mr. Randolph! Excuse that, Mary. But I’m not marrying Mr. Randolph.”

“Oh?”

It was the softest purr of a query.

“I’m not even engaged to his daughter,” he added. “Not yet, I’m not. I intend to ask her for that honour, but I haven’t yet.”

“And you want to ask me whether you should or not?”

“Oh, for Creeps, Mary!” His hair felt seaweed on his forehead. A raindrop began to creep down from it, tickled its way through an eyebrow; leap-frogged over his eyelid to hang on his cheek. He hoped she wouldn’t notice it; mistake it for a tear. Not to appear to wipe it away, he left it there.

She did notice it. And she stepped back wearily and leaned against the edge of the fruit tables, arms resting along the metal ledge each side of her, glance straight ahead, eyes misty.

“Why should my advice have any value for you?” she asked straight out into space, not turning her head.

“Why—you see—” He found himself unable to finish; gazed at her mutely; at bay.

“Was it a better job in your new ménage you wanted to offer me?”

“Oh—no, Mary!”

“Very well, then,” she replied. “Don’t wait for me here, but I’ll be glad to see you this evening. But not before seven. Ring the bell at Number One East Elm Street. My landlady will answer. Tell her who you are and she’ll call me.”

“Oh…gee, Mary! Thanks, Mary! Gee…”

He put his hand down to hers. He didn’t quite dare to take it, but he pressed the back of his own against it for a long minute.

Seven-fifteen o’clock, and the rain had stopped completely. The last houses were disappearing into wooded country, and a huge June moon was being born full-grown. It flamed, an orange forest fire through the trees in the east, and toward the very heart of it drove Forrest, with Mary Gresham miraculously beside him. Under an arch of trees, tender with new green leaves that still sparkled with the pendant diamonds of the recent rain, the paved road was a sea of emerald, reflecting a world upside down.

Vanished from his companion’s attire were the store clothes: the baker’s cap, and the white duck cover-all. Instead, jauntily perched on her head was a king’s blue, featherweight milan straw, with a mist of dotted veiling somewhere near the eyes. He had never seen her eyes a pottery blue before; had never seen her cheek round so rosily, nor realized her mouth could be so tenderly sweet and grave.

Here was a Mary Gresham—or at least, here was a materialization of her he’d never met before.

A simple blue linen suit with a froth of crystalline lace at neckline and chest completed her outfit.

“That was downright unfair of you!” he complained, gripping the wheel of his Vinton Convertible. “Your eyes sparkle,” he accused her. “Maybe it’s this June sunset, but that’s behind us. Why look here! Your eyelashes have no right to glisten like shiny little—shiny—See here, Mary. I knew you were pretty. But why didn’t you tell me you were so damned gorgeous?”

Two blue nylon-gloved fingers upon his lips stopped this flow.

“Come, come!” she came back. “I’m no more than comparatively harmless to the eyesight, and maybe not that! And only at times! And only given the opportunity.” She paused. “But you wanted my opinion about something?”

“Yes, I do.” He squared his shoulders severely. “I most certainly do! What I mean…I want your revised opinion.” He peeped around at her. “Furthermore, I won’t let you go until you give it to me. Let’s look up our old stamping-ground: the old New Cheshire Cheese at the crossroads up ahead. The table in the nook, there!”

“Oh, please, not indoors today! You see I’m cooped up so much of the time, and this air is like wine. So sweet and green-smelling.”

“Okay. But at least let’s wind up later for a snack? Some other quaint place, further on perhaps?”

There was no answer, and he turned. She was sitting there, quiet, dreamy, as one who had not heard. Her expression was much more thoughtful than it had been in those gypsy-free days of the winter just gone. Could it be that, like him, she had come to certain inevitable conclusions about love? Love and marriage? The inevitable conclusions to which he had already come?

“It’s this way, you see, Miss Gresham…”

“We’re not in the store now: you may call me Mary.”

“Of course! Well, it’s this way, Mary…” He paused, for there was a green car, behind, that seemed to be anxious to pass. Forrest swerved to the edge of the road to give place, and he noticed that several other cars passed him instead. “It’s this way,” he began again: “I mean, what do you think about people marrying someone they fall desperately in love with?”

“Oh! You fell in love with Mirabelle Randolph?”

“Well you see, that’s just the point: I didn’t.”

If Mary Gresham had any reaction to that statement, critical or not, it was hidden back of her veil.

“Maximilian’s fortune, then. I see.”

“No, Mary. Please don’t say that! It’s not like that at all. Not the way you think. I’m not thinking of myself, you see, Mary. But for a grand cause. For Haven-Towne. Miss Randolph can do everything for it. She’s taken it to her heart the way a child takes…takes…”

“A new toy?” she helped him. “And later breaks it to pieces through boredom or jealousy? Yes, I know the type. Of course, if you’re willing to give up your chances for love, which is everybody’s birthright…” She dismissed the rest with a glance that was the most concentrated essence of a shrug of the shoulders imaginable.

“But that’s what I wanted to talk about, Mary: about what is love? What is it but the infatuation of a few weeks? And the one who falls into the inevitable trap of loving the other the least bit out of step—that is, showing it—showing his love when the other has a sudden toothache or something—why he gets suddenly hated for it by the other. It’s all so unworkable. I’ve watched cases among my acquaintances. I’ve read about others. And from all I can see, love never lasts on both sides. Or stops on both sides, either, which is even more tragic! And since it doesn’t last anyway…”

“It doesn’t in the newspaper stories: that’s for sure,” she sighed.

“So I figured that since really mutual love seems to be only a feather floating temporarily in the wind and bound to come to earth in short order—or let’s say, since love is what they call in science magazines, an ‘unstable chemical combination’ like…like radium…”

A lot of silence was now drifting in from beside him.

“Well, does it?” he challenged.

“Radium’s taking a long while about dying out.”

“Well that was an unfortunate analogy I chose. But you certainly do see, don’t you, how love can’t possibly last? Why, people’d be worn out in a year, if they stayed in love!”

She turned half-way in her seat to face him. “You’ll fall in love some day, Daniel. I know that from the verses you used to write; at least those you read to me last winter. You’ll fall in love, and I hate to think of you planning to lock the gates on yourself. So that through your own decisions, you dared not receive this gift, when it came: this gift that money itself can’t replace, let alone buy. It can’t, you know. So, as long as you’ve brought me out here to get my opinion, well…let me say…” She paused.

“Yes? Go on,” he urged. “Say it, Mary!”

“Well—that I believe love does last! And without prostrating people, either. But, you see, love has stages: growth. And no two stages are alike. It’s only the first shoot of the seedling that we call ‘crazy infatuation’, and that’s wild and wearing. But even infatuation’s necessary, at the beginning, I think, and has to be protected, because it’s so easily injured. But it can be protected, tender and eager as it is, and so fragile. But protected, it grows into a love so strong at last, so high and deep—like an oak tree—or an ocean. And the first, fluttery infatuation is only a prelude to a joy so much more colossal and satisfying; so much more deeply exhilarating, Dan: exciting on a far more comprehensive scale.”

He turned and gazed at her aghast, to verify that this was Mary Gresham speaking.

“Going forward, Dan, from the infatuation stage—why, that’s like swimming out from the shallows of shore into the deep-rocking heart of mid-ocean. And oh!…the first mad in-loveness is like the first flash of lightning that starts the rain that turns into the deluge that becomes the unsounded depths of the—of the sea.”

“Well!” It was Forrest who took the deep breath after that expatiation. “Thoughtful one, aren’t you! But I still insist that happy marriages have been known where neither of the parties to it have been in love with one another. Yet they wind up loving each other, don’t they?”

“If you can call that love…that brother-sister kind of affection. It must be frightfully flat. It’s certainly a far cry from marital love. When people find themselves really in love, marrying is like an explosion: an enlargement of something intangible. Dan, it’s like a force for good, that’s it! An exciting, great, all-pervading force, but for good. And people in love who marry, they’re caught up in this force. Only…” She paused, thoughtful.

“Only?” he prompted.

“Only they have to be really Mr. and Mrs. Right: not just through wishful thinking. And for each other…not just one of them for the other.”

“Ah, yes! But the chance of that happening,” he reminded her: “of that lasting…can you imagine how infinitesimal that chance is? I’m afraid not many would get married.”

“Materialistic-minded people still would, I suppose: love’s not as important to them,” she returned. “And there’re a lot of them. But you’re not one. You’re an idealist, Dan. And an idealist—well, I know I wouldn’t marry anyone on earth unless I’d fallen so head over heels in love that I couldn’t eat or sleep before it was settled. And unless I loved him, faults and virtues and no matter what he was: loved him so much that even if he were a thief—even an international thief, hunted by the police of the whole world—I’d still love him so much I’d die to protect him. And if I married a man without having that feeling, I’d be cheating him. I’d be cheating myself even worse. And I’d expect him finally to hate me for the cheat I was, just as I’d hate a husband I found hadn’t fallen in love with me. Why I’d disappear for ever and ever.”

“But why?” The green car which still had not passed, seemed once more inclined to do so. Again Forrest swung to to the right. “Why would you disappear, Mary?”

“Why? Because I’d know blasted well the day would be bound to come when he would fall in love. With someone or other! And down would crash all his fine theories like a brick house in a cyclone. Some day it will be you the bricks will fall on, Dan. And then where will all this sister-and-brother love with Mirabelle Randolph be? Would it stand the test of real fraternal affection, which properly hasn’t any jealousy in it? And what would happen to Haven-Towne then?”

“You amaze me!” he cried. “How is it that you’ve given so much thought to all these things?”

“Why Daniel Forrest! Haven’t you ever been in love? Haven’t you ever stayed awake nights?”

“Hm!” he equivocated, more to himself than to her, as memories came flooding into his mind. “I stayed awake so many nights, once, that I had to go to a specialist or lose my daily income. She, the same.”

“Why didn’t you marry? Was she married already?”

“She was married to an idea: the idea about the highest bidder. She was adamant, so we both took the sleeping capsules the doctor prescribed. It’s been a revelation, too, how I could have been so much in love then, when it’s all so over now.”

She traced the rim of her dark blue purse as it lay in her lap.

“Maybe while you were still sleepy from the drug,” she offered, “your subconscious mind had a chance to tell your conscious that the girl hadn’t been sporting: willing to give up other things for the important one in life. Perhaps while you were groggy, your disillusionment found its way through to your better judgment, and you found you’d been in love with a build-up done by your own wishful thinking.”

“How do you know about such things, Mary? It’s astounding! Are you some psychiatrist or psychologist in disguise? Working incognito in a store to get material for some thesis for a book? ‘The Psychology of the American Saturday Marketer’ or something?”

“Flattering thought! But no, I’m only one of millions of medical column readers. But to be a bit paranoic myself, do you suppose that car behind is really trying to pass us? Could it be trailing us?”

Her face oddly, had become chalky, as a quick glance at her revealed.

He peered into the road mirror. In truth, the green car was still behind, and sticking quite close to them. An open convertible from the Green Circle Rent-a-Car Service, it bore, like a diadem a-top its windshield, a luminescent circle of green light.

“Could you outstrip them?” she asked.

“Here’s your answer.” And relaxing against the back of the seat, he pressed with his foot upon the accelerator pedal.

The girl beside him settled back, too, but Forrest could tell she was far from being at ease. Now and again she would turn briefly; dart a fearful and fleeting glance behind her.

“All you said about love,” Forrest resumed, “is…well, I don’t quarrel with your logic. It’s just that I’ve never been able to point to a single instance where mutual love lasted.”

“Maybe you didn’t look in all directions.” It was a more or less absent rejoinder, given as she turned about again. “Maybe,” and her attempt to sound casual became more and more apparent, “well…there’s the Robert Brownings. The Samuel Johnsons. The Robert Louis Stevensons—three of a lot that come to mind off-hand—but it’s enough to prove it’s possible…”

Plainly alarmed now, she turned and gazed openly behind her.

For the green car with the bright circlet was not being outdistanced by any means, but kept the same unvarying space of a dozen feet behind, despite the pace Forrest was setting.

“The hot-rod maniacs!” he bit out. “We’ll give them a game of tag!” And he pressed the accelerator the full way. “Okay with you, Mary?”

Silence, again. A peep at her, quick as a light-beam! It showed her quiet, grim, her small face graven, gazing almost fatalistically ahead of her. A skein of brown hair lashed the colourless rounding of her cheek.

“Mary!” Every thought and nerve and fibre within him cried out the word.

At the same moment, the world exploded.

* * * *

It was not a quick, neat crash, like those described in news stories. It was a formidable, long-drawn-out affair of thunder and hissing and heavy seas, with shrieking of brakes, soul-jolting shump-shumps, buckings as of a colossal bucking bronco which sent the horizon dipping and spinning and turning, and over and over; more screaming of brakes; a sensation of being volplaned into the Ethereal, and finally, a great slap! An all-inclusive slap! As if the whole body had been swatted with one, fell swat: the kind of slap where—as the saying goes—one stays slapped! And the silence of death.

Forrest’s eyes opened. They revealed that he was lying on a mound of loose earth, and the last rosy rays of a setting sun brought out in brilliant pencillings a scattering of wooden saw-horses on their sides. Near these, a sign stuck up askew from the bed of loam reading,

Work In Progress. No Thoroughfare

These were but detached, unrelated impressions, for his memory was a blank. He managed to raise his head by means of the neck muscles alone. His body seemed to be nowhere. A few paces away, upside down, its green circlet half-buried in the rubble, a green car lay, wheels still spinning violently in the air.

Recollection was slowly returning. To the left stood his own Vinton Convertible, on its proper four wheels.

It was quite empty.

The rest came back with a bounce.

Wondering where on earth the original Detour sign had been—for there undoubtedly had been one—and when it had escaped him, Forrest found his limbs. And with an enormous wobbling, he was up on his feet.

From the higher vantage, the other slope of the mound was visible. A young woman and a man in chauffeur’s grey regalia were lying there, obviously “out”. The man was Heinrich who drove Randolph’s car, as a rule, and who had obviously been driving the Green Circle rented car for the young woman. And the young woman was Mirabelle. That was easily evident, for she lay on her back, her hat a tangle of broken flowers and straw under her round white neck.

Some distance away was Mary Gresham, on one frail side, an arm flung limply over her head which was uncovered, for her hat lay at the foot of the hillock.

In one-two-three, and with a throaty cry of “Mary”, Forrest was kneeling shakily over her. He scrutinized her face; felt her hands, round and capable-feeling under the blue mesh of her gloves. Tenderly, gently he pushed an arm down under her shoulders. Down and through the soft earth beneath her, it went, and gazing once more into her face, he saw she lived. Then, not at all knowing he was going to, he kissed her.

He certainly had not meant to kiss anybody. It was scarcely the time and place for kissing people. It was the time and place for saving lives: Mirabelle’s life!

Instead…he had kissed Mary.

But she was stirring: moving as in sleep. She tossed, so that she lay on her back, her eyes still closed; her lids quite lifeless; without the slightest sign of a quiver.

He kissed her again.

Her lips were unfathomably sweet. Tenderly warm and living, they were. He almost wished she wouldn’t waken for the moment, it was so suddenly bewilderingly wonderful to hold her like this. So deliriously and staggeringly wonderful!

The third time he kissed her, she opened her eyes; shoved herself quickly to sitting; dazedly ran the palm of her gloved hand up her forehead and blinked. Beyond her, Mirabelle Randolph was just stirring.

“Hi, there! You all right?” Forrest shouted across the distance that separated them. He steadied the girl beside him with a hand at each shoulder.

Mirabelle began to push herself to a sitting posture.

“I…I can’t tell, yet!” she called back. A frown of concentration twisted her forehead as she tested her neck and head, turning the latter left and right.

“Try standing up, Mirabelle,” he cried, still holding on to Mary as though she might topple over like a rag doll.

A low voice breathed ghost-like into his ear, “Why don’t you go and help her up?”

“I’ll help you up,” he all but shouted. “Do you feel any pain, Mary? Is your back all right?”

She nodded.

“Arms?” he asked. “Legs? Move them.”

She flexed them each in turn; nodded again.

“How do you feel?” he persisted.

“You want the truth, the whole truth and so forth?” she queried cryptically.

“Don’t torture me, Mary. What is it?”

And her surprising answer came:

“I never felt better in my whole, entire life.”

Thirty minutes later, and the usual formality of reports lay behind; as also did the advent of the wrecking crew and local highway police for whom a passing farmer had telephoned. And the usual bevy of hopeful reporters. And the final determining that no one and nothing had been inordinately damaged but the profile of a mound of road-bed loam, and the brave beginnings of a new patch of highway. Again Daniel Forrest sat back of the wheel of his car as it slipped noiselessly down the road, and again, miraculously, Mary Gresham sat by his side.

The moon, by this time, glowed more huge and orange than before. It was well above the horizon and flamed through the lower boughs of the trees like an even greater forest fire. Toward it sped the two, taking forty-five in negligent ease.

As he drove, Forrest discovered a strange mental phenomenon: to see the girl beside him, it wasn’t even necessary to turn his head, for her enigmatic little face somehow filled his entire inner vision.

She was speaking:

“You’ve certainly got to admire Miss Mirabelle: not a word of reproach did she have for you. Most girls, you know…especially on the evening they expect to become engaged…Why, she even reminded you of your promised call tonight; frightfully pretty, isn’t she!”

“Mary…” Forrest paused; drove on in silence for some moments to try to form a thought in words: “Mary?”

“What, Dan?”

“You wouldn’t marry me, would you?”

Immediately it was out, he realized how awful it was! In fact, it constituted the world’s worst proposal of marriage. Unromantic! Abrupt! Even the wrong form! …for it anticipated a negative answer, according to the grammar books. He was mortified. He was ashamed of the choking fullness of his voice, too. He felt her astonished gaze like a patch of hazy sun on his cheek.

“Me?” she gasped. “Me—you mean?” He all but shut his eyes against the thought.

“Just…forget it, Mary. I guess I knew it would be a nutty question. I asked as a matter of formal elimination or something. It stands to reason you couldn’t just happen to love me, too. But gee, darling! That accident…It took a brush with Death himself to open my eyes. Gaze on a would-be murderer!”

“Murderer?”

“Was I willing to give the old heart a chance? No! I’ve methodically and maliciously beheaded every little page-boy it sent to me. But all my fine theories didn’t keep me from running straight to you, in time of danger. Straight to you, Mary: not Mirabelle. You it was I tried to save. Suppose I’d been married to her? My God! I’d still have run to save you.”

The realization brought a faint feeling to the pit of his stomach.

“Why…I should have known it this afternoon,” he drove on, fiercely. “In the store! When I felt I couldn’t go on, what with you misunderstanding my motives. Why, nothing ever hurt me so much in my life, Mary, realizing that you were judging me wrong. Me! Trying to sell myself on a lot of cut and dried theories like that!”

“Like that love and marriage don’t mix?” she asked, archly.

“Yeah…and that it’s too much dynamite! Too dangerous to handle! Stuff and truck. Crazy, un-psychological, nutty ideas. I’d stake my life that, if you’d happened to reciprocate what I feel for you, we could have handled that dynamite business without any explosions or wrecks. Let it be dynamite, I’d have said!”

Forrest glanced at her face again. She wasn’t even looking at him.

“I guess,” he concluded aloud, “I’m nothing but a dizzy dreamer. Bull in a china shop. Everything I shouldn’t have been!” He gripped the wheel more tightly. “Naturally it wouldn’t just follow that you conveniently loved me just because I loved you. But—oh, Mary, my darling, I’m so in love with you that I’m completely lost in it. I might as well finish up the murder of the little page-boys. I had it almost done with, anyway.”

“But Dan! Dan!” She touched his forearm and the thrill of it went to his very toes. The landscape flew by in robes of dusky gold. “Darling! Won’t you listen a little, too? Not make the answers to your own questions? Carry on the whole conversation? Who says I don’t like you? And you certainly must have had some little reason to suspect it: we did see an awful lot of each other for five and a half whole months last year. I learned to know you pretty well, and knowing you, Dan, is, I guess, the same as liking you. Your poems alone taught me about you. You can’t imagine how many secrets they let out. And I liked those secrets. I liked the fact, too, that you wanted to be with me with all my smudges and no powder, and never once asked me any questions about my past life. Perhaps you didn’t suspect there was such a lot about me that you didn’t know. But I loved the way you didn’t ask. And best of all, you never once told me you liked me because you thought I was pretty!”

He hunched his shoulders gloomily.

“Thanks, anyway, for letting me down so damned humanely. Of course I catch on. To like isn’t to love.” An involuntary gulping sound in his throat made a squeak of the word.

“But Dan! Dearest Darling! I do love you! I do reciprocate. And it isn’t any brother-and-sister love, either, I can tell you.” She stopped short. “Oh…oh! I shouldn’t have let that out. Not until I told you something else first.”

He had stopped the car right in the middle of the fast lane. His arms stole about her.

“Don’t talk, darling,” he whispered. “Oh, my Dearest One. This is Heaven.”

“No, let me go, Dan. I must say it first. You must know it first, Dan: my past…what I really am. You’ve got to listen.”

“Nothing matters now.”

She resisted his tightening embrace quietly; freed herself, then scanned his features as if appraisingly. Her own were inscrutable.

“Please? Dan?”

“All right, then,” he challenged: “has it got anything to do with that compact case…that heart-shaped thing you dropped this afternoon?”

She nodded gravely, gazing clearly into his eyes.

“Well, then, tell me only one thing: and remember… no matter what you answer, it still makes no difference! Is there a name on the front of the case?”

She caught her small lower lip between even, white teeth, all motion arrested like a stopped cinema in the middle of action. Carefully, slowly, she nodded her head again.

“Then, definitely”…he almost shouted it…“we’ll say no more about it. At least, not until afterwards. Certainly not until we’ve reached the suburb a few laps ahead and gone through a few details. Parson’s Corner is where everybody else gets married on short order in June, so we might as well start the season. That steeple—see it above those poplars?—that’s where the town hall is. Marriage equipment day and night: licence bureau, a ring booth, even the little church that holds up the steeple, and a minister who knows the services of all the main denominations.” He fumbled in his pocket. “Do you realize the wonder of it?” he asked: “that we love one another? Wild, logical, sane insanity of being in love! Glorious insanity!”

The ring box out and open, he drew forth the star sapphire. From its deep, clear depths he could see the star as it slipped about within like an imprisoned fairy. The ring had been ordered to the specification of a larger size, and he slid it easily over Mary’s finger.

Tenderly she returned his kiss. Her eyes were twin worlds.

* * * *

“Morning Dial!” cried the newsboy the next morning at the filling station on the outskirts of Haven-Towne. He flourished a newspaper toward Forrest and his bride, who waited in the car. For, ink still wet on the marriage certificate, and the “I pronounce you” still ringing in their ears, the two had decided to drive all night, hoping to reach Haven-Towne and its one hotel before the sun should be high.

The morning hour of seven-thirty, however, had found the fuel tank almost empty. And as they waited for its filling, Mary, crooking a finger at the newsboy, explained:

“I thought we might look to see whether the daughter of Maximilian Randolph and her accident yesterday made any headlines.”

As the attendant held the gasoline nozzle to the mouth of the gurgling tank and patiently whistled a tune to himself, the two in the car turned the pages of the news-sheet and together scanned a succession of headlines that pointed up the humdrum news of the night and previous day: minor crimes; a new confession re an old prison break; a clever diagrammatic postulate of the probable most recent moves of the elusive…my God!… “the elusive Mayfair Mary,” it said!

Forrest peeped fearfully at his bride. But her eyes had not reached the item, plainly: they were glued upon one above it.

“Twenty-three people in automobile accidents yesterday, Dan, around Shore City alone! They’re all listed. Look! This long, rambling story…here to the left.”

He glanced to where she was reading; ran his eye along the successive phrases; came upon Mirabelle’s name.

“Look there!” he cried. “Just as you thought! And… Wow! Whoops! Will you take a gander at the next name! Did we have famous company in grief, last night!” He started to read aloud. “‘…Duchess of Bluecastle…’ …where my thumb is, see?… ‘who began to model for some of the most famous artists of London at the age of seventeen, because of the family’s dwindling fortunes. When her father, the Duke, died two years ago, she—being his only child—inherited the title of Duchess in her own right. A few months after this, however, the Duchess disappeared from London circles.’

“‘Diligent efforts have been made to locate Her Grace for the entailed ducal estates are shortly to be sold for inheritance taxes. One of the most active participants in the more or less under-cover search—which, incidentally, has reached international scope—is the prospective buyer of the estates, the one-time German Baron Herman von Aufschlidtzt, of the defunct Kaiser regime. To-day, the erstwhile Baron is simply Mr. Aufschlidtzt, naturalized in England decades ago, and informally known as “Can’t-Take-No Auffie.” Together with his extremely comfortable German fortune, he has been living in England ever since, and had, for the better part of two years, been an assiduous suitor of the young Bluecastle peeress. It is even suggested in some quarters that the wear and tear on the nerves of the latter, caused by this assiduousness, has been the chief factor in Her Grace’s vanishing.

“‘The bait the ex-Baron consistently held up to her was common knowledge in London: that if she would accept him as her spouse, he would present her, on the wedding day, with a gift of the complete liquidation of the debts and taxes encumbering the estates.

“‘Auffie has been unrelaxing, systematic and rigorous in his quiet search, and has spent a sizeable sum on two continents as well as in the Isles.

“‘Her Grace’s disappearance was keenly regretted in art circles because of the peculiar adaptability of her features to many types of beauty. Almost as many genres as exist are to be found among the murals, decorative exhibit paintings, calendars and posters for which she has posed. It was through the means of her numerous photographs in the press files that reporters recognized Her Grace last evening at sundown at the scene of the collision, though recognition came too late to allow of an interview. She and her escort were just pulling away in their car when she decided to enlist the aid of two things at once to repair the damage of the accident: one was the brilliant searchlight of the Highway Accident Detail truck, and the other was Her Grace’s famous heart-shaped gold vanity case, with her coat-of-arms engraved on the cover above her name, “Mary Gresham, Duchess of Bluecastle.”’”