Chapter THIRTEEN: I

Angelica was working in the back parlour the next afternoon with Sillon when Devery brought her in a letter. She smiled ironically and tucked it into her blouse, for she knew the writing.

"I wonder how he’ll be this time!" she reflected. "You can never tell. Maybe in an awful rage, or sad, or making love. Well, it doesn’t matter to me now. I’ve finished with him! But I was really nearly gone last night."

She had stopped short in her work and sat looking vacantly before her.

"I don’t know why I’m such a fool about that man. I don’t know what it is about him!"

II

She didn’t trouble to open his letter until she was ready to go home. Then, alone for a minute, she pulled it out and opened it, half sadly.

"No!" she cried suddenly. "No! I don’t believe it."

"What is it?" Devery called out from the next room.

"Nothing!" said Angelica, with stiff lips.

She hid the letter in her blouse in terror at the idea of its being seen. Then she was forced to bring it out again, to read it, to make sure.

Wanton, without a heart! You thing from the gutter, willing to give
your body to any man, while you keep your cold and poisonous heart
to yourself, for your own sordid aims! I swear to you I will never
let you destroy Eddie as you have me. It would be an outrage to
call you sister, to permit you to bear our name. I would rather
die. And I shall die. I have enlisted in the army. I shall soon be
sent to France, and I shall find Eddie there and tell him your
little history. Then I shall die. Nothing on earth can stop me. It
will be the supreme moment of my life when I tell Eddie, when I see
his face, and know that your shameless ends are frustrated--when I
know that you are really ruined.

"He won’t do it!" she tried to reassure herself. "He’s always making threats. He wouldn’t really do anything that might harm himself."

But she knew that Vincent didn’t always act from self-interest. His passions were very apt to overwhelm him, and malice was one of the strongest of his passions. He would enjoy exquisitely telling the wretched tale to Eddie.

For three months she didn’t draw a free breath. She tried to dismiss her terror from her mind. She said to herself, resolutely: "Don’t borrow trouble!" "Don’t worry about what may never happen!" "Don’t cross your bridges before you come to them," and all sorts of tags from her mother’s store. She faced Devery and Sillon every morning with the same hardy good-humour. She was dutiful and severe at home, as had become her custom, and to no living soul did she give the smallest hint of what she was enduring.

Every time a letter came from Eddie, or if a mail were missed, she expected the blow to fall, all her laboriously made plans to be destroyed, her pride and dignity trampled underfoot, all her life wrecked. She was utterly in the dark. She had no idea what was going on, or what had already happened, and she could take no steps to gain information. She could do nothing but wait.

Then came another letter from Vincent:

I am home on leave. That means that we shall very soon be going
over. Good-by, Angelica! I have a hard, bitterly hard task before
me. I must hurt Eddie and I must hurt you. As for me, there is
nothing before me but death. Deserted and ruined as I am, I long
for death. Your love was all that pleased me in life. With that
gone, there is nothing but a waste, bleak beyond endurance. I shall
only beg Eddie to forgive my vile treachery, as I beg you to
forgive my sins against you. Forget your presumptuous and wicked
dream of marrying that good man. That can never be. He will forgive
you, as he will forgive me, but he will never forget.

Good-by, Angelica. I give you to God!

VINCENT.

Asleep and awake that picture haunted her--a vision of Eddie, mud-stained, horribly pale, sitting on a box, with a candle flickering on the ground beside him, in a dugout with mud walls and great puddles of filthy water--the sort of thing she had seen in the cinema, ghastly, desolate, with an incessant play of rockets and bursting shells overhead; and Vincent standing before him in one of his fine attitudes, so handsome, so strong, so noble, telling him. She knew how he would dwell upon the details, with what colour he would describe her caresses, her kisses, heightening the temptation just as he would heighten his remorse.

It didn’t occur to her that Vincent might encounter some obstacles to a prompt meeting with his brother, with all the different services and all the vast battlefield to be considered. She fancied him being at once directed to Eddie’s dugout like a stranger in a village.

She lived in a long nightmare. She didn’t know how the blow would fall--whether she would come home to find a letter from Eddie, casting her off; whether Mrs. Russell would be there to tell her; whether she would have a letter from some stranger, a friend of Eddie’s--a lawyer, perhaps. But what she most feared was the idea of coming to Fine Feathers some morning and seeing Sillon and Devery suddenly turned hostile. She felt that she could not bear that. It would do for her.

But weeks went by, and nothing at all happened. One day, while she was in the back parlour, she heard Mrs. Russell’s voice in the front room; but the very tone of it reassured her. She wanted to buy a hat, and she wanted Angelica to let her have it cheap; so she was extraordinarily agreeable. She had, moreover, some sort of idea that it would help Angelica in the eyes of her partners to be seen in friendly converse with a lady like herself.

"I wish you’d come and see me!" she said. "I’m so lonely! They’ve all gone--Vincent, you know, and now poor Courtland’s been drafted. Dear me! It does seem as if they ought to be able to make up a big enough army out of those who wanted to fight, without dragging in the unwilling ones. Poor Courtland will make a very bad soldier; he hates it so. He’s too independent. Vincent was really marvelous. If you could have seen him in his uniform! And he told me to be sure, if I saw you, to tell you not to forget him. He even went to Polly and begged her to be reconciled to him before he left, perhaps never to return. I went to see her, too, to see if I could influence her; but what do you think? She’s adopted a baby, and she’s wrapped up in it. She says it fills her life, and she doesn’t want any one else. She’s very hard on Vincent. Those frightfully maternal women always are dreadfully hard on men, don’t you think? I’m not surprised at her adopting a child; she was so absorbed in the one she lost. I couldn’t do a thing with her. She said she had done with Vincent. Poor boy! She’s narrow--provincial. Awfully selfish, don’t you think?"

"I don’t know," said Angelica. "I suppose she can’t help how she feels."

"Well, I thought it was horrible to see her there, so happy with that baby, and so callous about her husband. Not even her own baby--some little waif she’s picked up. It’s a wretched, puny little thing, too; she has to give it the most unceasing care. I shouldn’t be surprised to hear any day that she’s lost it. Oh, my dear! What’s that heavenly mass of purple?"

"That’s a negligée I’m making," said Devery, thus addressed.

"Could I possibly wear purple?" inquired Mrs. Russell earnestly. "Do please let me see it! Oh, how _marvelous_! Could I _possibly_ slip it on?

"Am I _hideous_?" she asked Angelica anxiously, when she had got the purple garment on and stood before the long mirror.

"It’s not quite your style," said Angelica, with great seriousness. "I think--but Miss Devery will give you suggestions."

"A dark green," said Devery, "with dull, blackish blue overtones--not a floating thing like this, Mrs. Russell. You’re slender enough to stand a straight, narrow garment. Not exactly a negligée; I never advise them, there’s so little use in them; but what I call a boudoir gown."

"How much would it cost?" asked Mrs. Russell.

"One hundred dollars," said Devery.

Mrs. Russell looked at her, then at Angelica. They both had their professional manners, polite, deeply interested, but firm. There was no mercy to be had from them. She ordered the gown; then she bought a "sports hat" of Angelica for a staggering sum, and prepared to take her leave.

But now Miss Sillon came in, pleasant and businesslike.

"I’d be very pleased to make you a ten per cent discount, madam," she said; "or for any one personally introduced by our Miss Kennedy."

"Oh, Sillon!" said Angelica, when she had gone. "Wasn’t that nice of you? You can’t imagine how anything like that pleases her."

"Angélique, my child, we’d do more than that for you," said Sillon.

III

"Telephone, Mlle. Angélique!" cried Devery.

"Would you mind asking who? I’ve just got this thing pinned."

"It’s Mrs. Geraldine," Devery called. "Can’t you come?"

Angelica’s heart stood still.

"_This_ is it!" she thought. "Now it’s come!"

She went with leaden feet to the telephone in the back room, and sat down before it. She stared at the instrument for an instant in horror. What was it about to reveal?

She took up the receiver.

"Yes!" she said. "Is this you, Mrs. Geraldine?"

"Can you come to see me?" said that well-known voice. "There’s something----”

"_Why?_" she cried. "What is it? Is anything wrong?"

"The baby’s quite well; but there’s a piece of news you ought to know."

"Oh!" she gasped. "Oh, tell me! What?"

"Don’t lose your head, Angelica; but come when you can. I’ll be in all the afternoon. And don’t worry. It’s only that I think you ought to know before all the others."

She didn’t wait to hear the rest. She left the telephone and turned to her friends a distracted and blanched face.

"I’ve got to go!" she said.

"Is anything wrong?" asked Sillon kindly, alarmed by her look.

"Yes! I’ve got to go!"

"Can’t I go with you?"

"No, no, no!"

Angelica was pinning on her hat, without even a glance in the mirror, and was starting out when Devery stopped her.

"Your bag!" she said. "Or are you coming back to-day?"

"Never!" she cried. "Never!"

They stood together watching her go.

"Poor kid!" said Devery. "It must be something _very_ wrong!"

Angelica was out of sight, hurrying along the street, trembling with eagerness to embrace this anguish, to get it over, to be done with her torment.

She rang Polly’s bell, and Polly herself admitted her visitor. She looked ill and haggard, with eyes heavy and dull, and reddened with sleeplessness--or was it with tears?

"Come in," she said pleasantly. "Sit down, Angelica. Will you have a cup of tea?"

"Oh, _no_!" she cried. "Hurry up and tell me! They all know it? Eddie’s written! Oh, Mrs. Geraldine, I knew right away! Eddie’s written to say that Vincent’s told him. Oh, my God! He said he would, and he has! That’s what he went for. Oh, my God! All my life ruined! Oh, Mrs. Geraldine!"

"My dear, try to calm yourself," said Polly. "There--sit down. You’re making yourself ill. Vincent hasn’t told any one. He never will, Angelica."

"He said he would!"

"He never will. He’s dead."

Her voice broke in a faint sob.

"_Dead?_" cried Angelica. "Vincent? In the war?"

"The transport he was on, struck a mine."

"Then he never got there? He never told Eddie?"

"No."

"Oh, Mrs. Geraldine!" she cried. "Then I’m _safe_!"

Polly turned away.

"Don’t you feel _sorry_?" she asked. "He was very young to die."

Angelica shook her head.

"No, I can’t," she said; "not just now. I can’t feel anything but glad."

IV

She stopped on her way home to tell Sillon and Devery that "it was all right." She let them know, modestly, that there was a certain person now in France in whom she was profoundly interested, and that she had feared some bad news in regard to him. Then she went to a quiet little restaurant and ate a delicious little dinner all alone, and in the chilly, cloudy evening walked home--a long walk.

She was enjoying a feeling of exquisite and complete triumph. She had won! She was safe now, her troubles over. Certainly God had helped her. She was young, beautiful, beloved; she was about to be rich. She had made a gallant fight against great odds, and she had conquered.

She greeted her mother with unusual affection and was willing to talk with her for quite a time, about her business, about the shortcomings of the tenants, about everything in the world except what had happened. That she didn’t mention.

She began slowly to undress while her mother was still in the kitchen, ironing a collar for her to wear the next day. She looked at herself in the mirror, in her dainty camisole--a beautiful woman, with her delicate bare arms, her slender shoulders, her curious, glowing black eyes in her pale and lovely face----

And suddenly, almost as if she saw it in the glass beside her own, another face, fierce, hawk-like, rigid and white, with bright hair spread out and floating as if in the sea. Her dead lover!