Chapter XI

It was more difficult to leave Ferroni's than it had been to enter it. It was Clancy's first experience in a restaurant that, she assumed--and correctly enough--was a fashionable one. And it was not merely the paying of the obsequious waiter that flustered Clancy. She felt like a wallflower at a college dance. Conscious that her clothing was not modish, she had slipped timidly across the room to join Grannis. Now, having tipped the waiter, she must walk lonesomely across the room to the door, certain that everyone present was sneering inwardly at the girl whose cavalier had deserted her.

For Clancy was like most other girls--a mixture of timidity and conceit. She knew that she was beautiful; likewise, she knew that she was ugly. With a man along, admiration springing from his eyes--Clancy felt assured. Alone, running the gantlet of observation--she felt hobbledehoyish, deserted.

As a matter of fact, people _were_ looking at her. Neither the cheap hat nor her demoded coiffure could hide the satiny luster of her black hair. Embarrassment lent added brilliance to her wonderful skin, and the awkwardness that self-consciousness always brings in its train could not rob her walk of its lissom grace. She almost ran the last few steps of her journey across the room, and seeing a flight of stairs directly before her, hastened down them, not waiting for the elevator.

She walked rapidly the few steps from the entrance to Ferroni's to Fifth Avenue, then turned south. The winter twilight, which is practically no twilight at all, had ended. The darkness brought security to Clancy. Also the chill air brought coolness to a forehead that had been flushed by youth's petty alarms.

It did more than that; it gave her perspective. She laughed, a somewhat cynical note in her mirth, which Zenith had never heard from the pretty lips of Clancy Deane. With a charge of murder in prospect, she had let herself be concerned over such matters as the fit of a skirt, the thickness of the soles of her shoes, the casual opinions of staring persons whom she probably would never see again, much less know.

She had placed Grannis's thousand-dollar bill in her pocketbook. She clasped the receptacle tightly as she crossed Forty-second Street, battling, upon the sidewalks and curbs, with the throng of commuters headed for the Grand Central Station. For a moment she was occupied in making her way through it, but another block down the avenue brought her to a backwater in the six-o'clock throng. She sauntered more slowly now, after the fashion of people who are engaged in thought.

Her instinct had been correct--Grannis was dishonest. His gift of a thousand dollars proved that. But why the gift? He knew, of course, that she was aware of his partnership with Zenda. His statement that he didn't want Zenda to know that he had seen her had been proof of his assumption of her knowledge of the partnership that existed between himself and the famous director. Then why did he dare do something that indicated disloyalty to his associate?

Why hadn't she made him take the money back? He had every right to assume that she was as dishonest as she seemed. She had permitted him to leave without protest. Further, with the five-dollar bill that he had put upon the table, she had paid the check. She made a mental note of the amount of the bill. Three dollars; and she had given the waiter fifty cents. One dollar and seventy-five cents, then--an exact half of the bill she owed to Grannis. She wouldn't let such a man buy her tea. Also, the change from the five-dollar bill, one dollar and a half. Three dollars and a quarter in all. Plus, of course, the thousand.

She felt tears, vexatious tears, in her eyes. She was in a mood when it would have been easy for her to slap a man's face. She had never done such a thing in her life--at least, not since a little child, and then it had been the face of a boy, not a man. But now, once again, minor things assumed the ascendency in her thoughts.

For even Grannis's attempt to bribe her--that was what it was--was a minor matter compared to the Beiner murder. She wondered what the evening papers would have to say further about that mystery.

A newsboy crying an extra at Thirty-fourth Street sold her a paper. She wanted to open it at once, but, somehow, she feared that reading a newspaper on a cold wintry evening would be most conspicuous on Fifth Avenue.

Even when she had secured a seat on a down-town 'bus, she was half afraid to open the paper. But, considering that practically everyone else in the vehicle was reading, she might safely open hers.

She found what she was looking for without difficulty. Her eyes were keen and the name "Beiner" leaped at her from an inside page. But the reporters had discovered nothing new to add to the morning account. A theory, half-heartedly advanced by the police, that possibly Beiner had killed himself was contradicted by the findings of the coroner, but if the police had any inkling as to the identity of the murderer, they had not confided in the reporters.

That was all. She began to feel justified in her course. To have gone to the police would have meant, even though the police had believed her story, scandal of the most hideous sort. She would have been compelled to tell that Beiner had embraced her, had tried to kiss, had-- She remembered the look in the murdered man's eyes, and blushed hotly at the recollection. She would never have been able to hold her head up again. For she knew that the uncharitable world always says, when a man has insulted a woman, "Well, she must have done _something herself_ to make him act that way."

But now she supposed, optimistically, that there must have been, in Beiner's desk, scores of letters and cards of introduction. Why on earth should she have worried herself by thinking that Fanchon DeLisle's card of introduction would have assumed any importance to the police? No matter what investigation the police set on foot, it would hardly be based on the fact that they had found Fanchon's card.

So then, as she had avoided discovery by the mere fact of not having gone to the police, and had thus avoided scandal, and as there was no prospect of discovery, she could congratulate herself on having shown good sense. That she had lost a matter of six hundred and fifty dollars, deposited in the Thespian Bank, was nothing. A good name is worth considerably more than that. Further, she might reasonably dare to withdraw that money--what of it she needed, at any rate--from the bank now. If the police had not by this time discovered the connection between Fanchon's card of introduction and the woman who had been observed upon the fire-escape of the Heberworth Building, they surely never would discover it.

The pocketbook in her hand no longer burned her. There was now no question about her returning Grannis's bribe. In fact, there never had been any question of this. But Clancy was one of those singularly honest persons who are given to self-analysis. Few of us are willing to do that, and still fewer are capable of doing it.

She wondered if it would not be best to do now what she should have done last Tuesday morning. If she went to Zenda and told him what Fay Marston had said to her, she would be doing Zenda a great favor. She was human. She could not keep from her thoughts the possibility of Zenda's returning that favor. And the only return of that favor for which she would ask, the only one that she'd accept, would be an opportunity in the films. The career which she had come to New York to adopt, and which rude chance had torn away from her, was capable of restoration now.

She had fled from Zenda's apartment because scandal had frightened her. The presence of a graver scandal had almost obliterated her fear of the first. She'd go to Zenda, tell him that his partner was deceiving him, plotting against him.

She could hardly wait to take off her coat when she reached her room in Mrs. Gerund's lodging-house. Using some of the note-paper that sold in Zenith as the last word in quiet luxury, she wrote to Zenda:

MY DEAR MR. ZENDA: I was frightened Monday night at your apartment,
and so I ran away. But to-day Mr. Grannis saw me and talked to me
and gave me a thousand dollars. He said that Mr. Weber could not
return to New York while there was any real evidence against him,
and that, as I had been told by Miss Marston that she was really
Mr. Weber's wife and that she helped him in his card-cheating, I
must keep my mouth shut. He said that he didn't want you to know
that he had met me. I think you ought to know that Mr. Grannis is
on Mr. Weber's side, and if you wish me to, I will call and tell
you all that I know.

Yours truly,
CLANCY DEANE.

In the telephone book down-stairs, under "Zenda Films," she found the address of his office on West Forty-fifth Street, and addressed the letter there.

Then she wrote to Grannis. She enclosed the thousand-dollar bill that he had given her. Her letter was a model of simplicity.

MY DEAR MR. GRANNIS:

I think you made a mistake.

Yours truly, CLANCY DEANE.

She addressed the letter to Grannis in care of the Zenda Films and then sealed them both. As she applied the stamps to the envelopes, she wondered whether or not she should have signed her name in the Zenda letter, "Florine Ladue."

She had thoroughly convinced herself that she had nothing to fear from the use of that name. The frights of yesterday and to-day were vanished.

Still, she had dropped the name of "Florine Ladue" as suddenly as she had assumed it. Zenda would write or telephone for her. If she signed herself as "Florine Ladue," she'd have to tell Mrs. Gerand about her _nom de théâtre_. And Clancy was the kind that keeps its business closely to itself. She was, despite her Irish strain, distinctly a New England product in this respect--as canny as a Scotchman.

So it was as "Clancy Deane" that she sent the letters. She walked to the corner of Thompson Street, found a letter-box, and then returned to the lodging-house. Up-stairs again, she heard the clang of the telephone-bell below. Her door was open, and she heard Mrs. Gerand answering.

She heard her name called aloud. She leaped from the chair; her hand went to her bosom. Then she laughed. She'd given Miss Sally Henderson her address and Mrs. Gerand's 'phone-number to-day. She managed to still the tumultuous beating of her heart before she reached the telephone. Then she smiled at her alarms. It was Mrs. Carey.

"Do be a dear thing, Miss Deane," she said. "I'm giving an impromptu dance at the studio, and I want you to come over."

Clancy was delighted.

"What time?" she asked.

"Oh, come along over now and dine with me. My guests won't arrive until ten, but there's lots of fixing to be done, and you look just the sort of girl that would be good at that. Sally Henderson's been telling me what a wonder you are. Right away?"

"As soon as I can dress," said Clancy. Her step was as light as her heart as she ran up-stairs.