# The Lost Diana

Extracted from Everybody's magazine, June 1923, pp. 37–81. Accompanying illustrations may be omitted.
Before the girl had paid the driver, a white-haired woman appeared at the door. “Oh, my dear, dear little Kerry!” she called, her arms outheld.
A Novel Complete in This Issue
The Lost Diana
   A Timid Little Girl Apparently from the Country with a Pretty Face and an Air of Extraordinary Quiet, as Though She Had Never Moved Quickly or Noisily and—New York
By Inez Haynes Irwin
Illustrations by R. K. Ryland
A YOUNG girl emerged timidly from the Grand Central Station, New York, one debonair morning in June, hesitated and stopped.
She looked round with eyes deeply shining under their thick lashes. A sense of holiday lifted her slender bosom with a sudden lithe leap of happiness.
Calling a taxi, she gave an address in the East Thirties. Apparently she was from the country. The plain, brown, ill-fitting suit which made such awkward havoc of her faint curves was provincial; the little brown-straw hat which covered the mass of her dusky hair was almost rustic. At first she sat primly in the middle of the taxi-seat, a brown traveling-bag clutched tightly in one modestly glov hand, a toy typewriter clutched closely in the other.
After an interval, as though impelled against her own wish, she turned her face to the open window. It was certainly a charming face, so exquisitly carved and so delicately textured that the eye of the body was certain to note beauty in it before the eye of the mind saw established character, incipient personality. Somehow, though, the major impression was not of activity or of vividness but of a singular stillness, an extraordinary quiet, as though she had never moved quickly or noisily in her life.
The taxi stopped before a small house, its bricks painted pink and its windows trimmed with green blinds—a modest, pleasant little house, whose eyes, draped between long hanging draperies of stiff lace and by short sash-curtains of soft muslin, presented at first no stare of life. But the instant the taxi stopped a white flash appeared at an upper window. The face—that of an elderly woman—smiled. A hand waved; the face withdrew. Before the girl had paid the driver, the owner of the face, a white-haired woman with a pair of noticeable eyes, appeared at the door.
“Oh, my dear, dear little Kerry!” she called, her arms outheld as she ran down the steps.
Kerry submitted to Mrs. Lane's tender embrace; then, perceiving the tears which increased the limpidity of the big dark eyes, eked it out with a series of ecstatic hugs. She looked about the little hall, at the hook-studded hat-rack, the striped wall-paper, the fresh white paint, the unobtrusive carpet, the tiny, graceful stairway with its slender rail.
“Oh, what a darling of a little house, Aunt K! Wasn't it too bad you had to turn it into a boarding-house when it would make such a lovely home for us?”
The dining-room was the front basement room—so low that it would have been too dark if every effort had not been made to lighten it.
“Oh, how sweet it is, Aunty K!” Kerry approved. “And everything is so fresh! You don't know how I like new things, light things, gay things!”
Aunty K. drew her niece to.the corner nearest the kitchen.
“This is where you will sit now,” she said. “I am going to put you beside Mr. Murray and opposite Mrs. Newhall. Mr. Murray is such a kind old gentleman he will make you feel at home at once. And Mrs. Newhall talks like a streak. She's nice, too.” She raised her voice to call, “Annie, you may bring the luncheon now!”
ANNIE—a heavy-browed, big-boned girl who clogged about with surprising briskness—brought in omelet, salad, milk and cake. The two women ate together, talked at their leisure. Mrs. Lane asked many questions. Kerry, eating with the sudden fresh hunger of youth, answered at length. A careful listener could have gained from the conversation the most important data of the young girl's simple history. She had lived all the twenty years of her unepisodic life in a tiny up-state village—Blue Valley. Her father had died two years ago, her mother recently. These two deaths had come at the end of lingering sicknesses in which, unaided, she had nursed them both. Mrs. Lane, her father's only sister—a boarding-house in New York on her hands—had had time only to attend the funeral. Now, except for Mrs. Lane, Kerry was alone in the world. She had come to New York to earn her living. Her funds did not allow her to go to a business college, but she had bought a small typewriter and a book of instructions. She was determined to teach herself stenography and typewriting.
All this was what her sentences said, but fancy richly promised more, much more. Romance lay in ambush for her at every corner. Adventure might leap on her from above. Not that she said all this definitely, or even hinted at it. It came out, a marvelous but unanalyzable by-product of her talk.
The door-bell rang.
“There! That's Miss Darling!” Mrs. Lane exclaimed. “She's always early—the first to come home to luncheon—and she's always forgetting her key. Let's get away before she sees us. Here; I want to show you my fine kitchen.”
The kitchen, lighted by perpetual gaslight, was big and neat.
“Where does that door lead?” asked the girl.
“Into the alley,” her aunt answered. “There used to be a big yard to this house, but it was sold to the people who built the church.”
“Oh, yes; I noticed that church,” Kerry said. “Next door, to the east.”
“No; not that. That's an old Episcopal church. We're set between two churches. The church I mean is the new Presbyterian church which faces on the south side of the next street. You'll see it all from your window. “I'll show, you now.”
Kerry followed her aunt upstairs. It was not a big house. Two rooms in the basement, three above that, three and a bath on the second floor, four over them. Mrs. Lane led the way to the top floor.
“This is your room, Kerry dear,” she said, opening the door at the back.
Kerry Lane crossed the threshold with a bounding step.
She stopped before the mirror and took off her hat. The great dark mass of her hair revealed itself—beautiful hair, strange hair—straight but springy with a kind of ferment in its dusky depths. But Kerry did not contemplate her hair. Those mirror-movements were purely mechanical. All the time she was looking about her.
“Why, what a beautiful window!” she exclaimed suddenly; a note of astonishment in her voice.
“I was waiting for you to notice that,” Mrs. Lane said, with an overbrimming pride. “It's an oriel window.”
The room had, in fact, two windows. The northern one was regular, rectangular. Over it, and behind muslin hangings, a white calendered curtain spread blankness. But the eastern one—that actually projected out of the room. It had a window-seat filled with cushions. Kerry ran to this, plumped kneeling upon it, pull the muslin hangings aside.
“Oh—and look at the garden! But how strange, how deserted it seems!”
“You see,” Mrs. Lane began, “years ago this house was the parsonage of the church you noticed—the old Episcopal church— the one next door. In those days, as I told you, a great big yard went with this house. But when they built the new Presbyterian church on the street above, they bought our yard. It is the back of the new Presbyterian church which you see coming up against your north window.”
BUT Kerry paid no attention to the north window. It was the east window—the oriel—that monopolized her attention. She unclasped the oval casement door and leaned out. It looked down upon the back yard of the house on the next street, and across the yard to a grim gray wall pierced with three high Gothic windows.
The yard was in size the rather commodious average of old New York yards. A slender tree rose in one corner, but garden-plats, garden paths had vanished in an infinity of weeds.
Mrs. Lane, with meticulous minuteness, was expounding the architectural sequestration of the garden.
“You see, it is built in between two churches. The Episcopal church is L-shaped; it runs round the corner. The part next to us is Sunday-school and lecture-hall. The main church is what you see across the garden. But the Presbyterian church was stopped by our house—apparently they would not sell this house to the church people. So, you see, that yard you are looking down into has church walls on three sides—south, east and west. We have no other back outlook except that house and yard. And your oriel—they say it was especially built for the minister—is the only window in the neighborhood that looks out on it, except, of course, those in the place to which the garden belongs.
Kerry, her hands resting lightly on the window-sill, inspected the house across the yard. Double wrought-iron balconies shaded the two lower stories. Over their grill-work thick vines, freshly painted with their luminous summer green, threw out a spume of filmy tendrils as they climbed. The windows were all closed and shuttered. Decades of dust and neglect molded upon them.
“Who lives there now?” Kerry asked.
“Nobody,” her aunt answered. “It belongs to an eccentric old bachelor—very rich, of course. He has lived for the past twenty years in Florence. Probably he never will come back to New York, but he says he wants his house in case he does.”
Kerry turned to the north window, snapped up the curtain with a decisive movement of her little hand. True to prophecy, a blank dark wall frowned starkly in her face. She blanked it doubly with the curtain.
“My own, own room! And in New York! Aunty K, I'm going to hug you again, and I warn you I shall keep on hugging you until I get used to the fact that I am really and truly here.”
Mrs. Lane submitted to this hug, and to subsequent ones, not only with equanimity but with an immediate response.
She was a striking woman. Her hair was as luxuriant as the black masses that bundled so awkwardly on Kerry's head, but it was more turbulent and it was quite white. And just as through Kerry's hair there ran a dusky glow like fire smoldering in its depths, in Mrs. Lane's appeared a silver-white incandescence. Mrs. Lane's brows and lashes had not changed color. But although they made a berry-brown contrast with that massed rough silver, they harmonized perfectly with the big, limpid brown eyes. They were extraordinary eyes. Even the curious ashen linelessness of her face, its impassivity, its inflexibility could not belie their expressiveness. Her figure had gone the misshapen way of uncared-for middle age, but there was almost a savage vigor to her movements.
“My room's across the way in the front of the house,” Mrs. Lane explained. “At first, I thought you might like a front room better; but I finally decided you'd rather have the window on the garden.”
“You were quite right,” Kerry admitted. “I much prefer the window and the garden.”
“Oh, while I think of it,” her aunt continued, “I've got something for you.” With one of her vigorous, swooping movements she disappeared from the room. In another moment she came back, a great crumpled white-tissue-paper bundle under her arm. Unrolling it on the bed, she displayed, first, a pair of gold slippers, a little worn, of a curious, old-fashioned cut, high-heeled and with broad crystal buckles. Then came—old, too—a big Spanish shawl in a soft, faded sage-green silk. It was deeply hung with a green-silk fringe, brilliantly embroidered at the corners with massed flowers in orange, rose, cherry, and with vines in every shade of green.
“These were your mother's,” .Aunty K explained. “I've kept them I don't know how long.”
“Oh, Aunty K, how beautiful—how beautiful!”
Kerry plumped down on the bed and swiftly took her shoes off.
“You're got your mother's feet,” Mrs. Lane commented, “the same beautiful high instep. Fit you perfectly, don't they?”
With her skirts pulled up, Kerry marched about the room, her down-bent eyes fixed on her golden progress. Tiring of this finally, she threw the shawl about her, examining in the mirror the effect on her slender shoulders of this burden of brilliant embroidery, ran her fingers through the trailing, intricately-knotted fringe.
“That fringe is all hand-tied,” Aunty K explained.
“It's wonderful!” Kerry agreed. Reverting to the slippers, she jumped up on a chair and surveyed her feet in the mirror.
“Now,” said Mrs. Lane presently, “I guess I'd better get back to the kitchen and see how the girls are making out alone. Would you like to come down into the dining-room now and meet all the folks?”
“No,” Kerry decided instantly; “I think I'll wait until dinner. When my trunk comes I'll put on something else. You mustn't expect, though, that I have got any pretty clothes, Aunty K. You know what Blue Valley is like.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Lane reassured her. “After you're settled, perhaps you'll feel like doing some shopping. We'll see if we can't run down some bargains. If you come down-stairs, be sure to draw the curtains over your window. That will keep the room cool for to-night.”
LEFT alone, Kerry went first to the oriel window, and hanging her slim length to a perilous proportion out of it, carefully surveyed the garden again, surveyed quite as carefully the house. English sparrows were going about their noisy business; otherwise the quiet of a sultry, breezeless metropolitan heat lay on the jungle of weeds and bushes.
After a while Kerry pulled herself back into the room, drew the curtain over the white glare of the sun. Then she moved the bed against the window and, opening her little brown traveling-bag, disposed the trifling toilet-articles which it contained on the bureau-top and in bureau drawers. Last, she lifted the miniature typewriter onto the little white table and opened the case. Presently, with slow and amateurish movements, she inserted a sheet of typewriting paper in its vitals, began a slow and amateurish tapping of the keys. When Mrs. Lane returned she was still absorbed.
“Everybody's gone now,” said Mrs. Lane, “and the house is empty. Don't you want me to show you the rooms?”
“Yes; do,” Kerry begged. “I like to see where people live.”
That journey of inspection started with Mr. Murray's room, the first-floor front (what should have been the drawing-room) and ended with Miss Darling's second-floor-front hall bedroom. Mrs. Lane stopped in each room to give a description of the occupant. Names swirled through Kerry's mind—Udell, Bale, Twirter, Newhall, Nickel. She listened with the interest of a girl who has met few people in the course of her life. Their vivid, brisk, closely-woven talk was twice broken. Twice the strands had to be caught up and twisted into a braid again.
These two interruptions proceeded from people who had come to look at rooms.
“I've let the room across the hall from yours,” Mrs. Lane remarked on her first return.
“The one with the windows looking right out on the church wall?”
“Yes. A young girl's taken it, and glad she was to get anything. She told me she tramped this neighborhood for three days. Her name's Ryan—Delight Ryan. She's no older than you, I should say, and pretty! Pretty as a picture. It will be nice to have a girl so close to you, won't it?”
“Yes; I'll like that,” Kerry agreed eagerly.
“She saw your door open and seemed to think that was the room I had to let; for she stepped in before I could tell her it was already taken. She was crazy about it. She spoke of how pretty the window was and the white furniture and the fresh new curtains. I sort of think she was working up to offering more money than she thought I was getting for it. But when I told her my niece had it, she didn't say anything more about money. She's an unusually pretty girl—black hair and gray eyes. Her hair's cut short in the neck, the way so many wear it now, and curls up at the ends. Full of life, too.”
From the second interruption Mrs. Lane returned no less jubilant.
“You've brought me luck, Kerry,” she declared. “I've let my last room. Another girl. I say 'girl;' she is really a married woman, but she seems only a girl—not a day older than you, I should think. A widow, she told me. A war-widow, I guess. Her mourning is so fresh and she looks so sad. Pretty as paint. She wanted your room, too. I had closed the door, but she seemed to sense that it would have an outlook, and asked if it was let. When I said it was, she asked if she could see it. So I showed it to her. She stood on tiptoe for a full minute, staring toward your oriel as though she'd like to sit in the window-seat. But you'd moved your bed over so she couldn't even look out. She seemed to know the neighborhood. She asked me if our house didn't back up onto the old Van Dordrecht place. She was full of questions about the Van Dordrecht house, but of course I hadn't much to tell her. She said she was grateful to find a spot to lay her head. She had been trapesing round this vicinity for two days. Paid in advance. Her name's Deane—Mrs. Deane.”
These interruptions came early in the afternoon. Later, there occurred another.
“It's your trunk,” Mrs. Lane called up to her niece, relaying the information from the second floor as Annie had relayed it from the first. “I'm having it sent right up.”
THE two women retired to Kerry's room, unpacked the little, old, pinkish-papered, brown-lined trunk that looked as though it had come out of a country garret.
Kerry took off her white blouse and the skirt of her little brown suit, hung them both carefully on hangers in the closet, poured water into the bowl. In the midst of her ablutions the bell rang.
“There! There's the evening paper!” Mrs. Lane exclaimed. “Do you mind if I run right down and get it? The war got me into the habit of reading the news at once.”
“Of course I don't.” Kerry laughed a little.
Mrs. Lane's step, returning, was not so light as going. She was apparently lost in the news.
“Anything important?” Kerry's fresh voice called in its lightest accent, as her aunt's slow steps started up the second flight.
“Nothing very important.” Mrs. Lane's voice came a little muffled, as though, with bent head, she read as she walked. “An interesting story on the first page. There's a young girl disappeared from a wealthy family in New York——”
“A young girl!” Kerry's voice made soprano repetition.
“Her name's Diana Darnston. She seems to have been kidnaped——”
“Kidnaped!” Kerry's voice, almost treble now, repeated the word. But apparently her attention did not catch even on this. She pulled out the pins from her hair, and it fell in a great mass, fine but springy, dark yet warmly rutilant below her waist. She slashed at it ruthlessly with a wide, long comb.
“Yes. It is very sensational.” Mrs. Lane was now ascending the stairs with her usual swiftness. “The girl was to come into twenty million dollars—maybe more—on her twenty-first birthday—June twenty-first. Seems they have always kept her close for fear something might happen to her. She had never been anywhere alone in her life. And this morning she just disappeared as though she'd melted into air. Nobody saw her leave the house. She had no friends or lovers—” Mrs. Lane's voice, growing lighter, had been coming nearer, and nearer, and now Mrs. Lane herself appeared in the doorway. “Does this interest you, Kerry?” she asked.
Creamy-shouldered, dusky-haired, vivid-lipped, Kerry cast a glance at her aunt by way of her own reflection in the mirror—a glance radiant and agitated.
“Very much,” she answered. “Keep right on if you don't mind my interrupting to ask you questions. I am still so excited, Aunty K, that a girl's being kidnaped seems a mere trifle to me.”
“They don't know she was kidnaped,” Mrs. Lane admitted. “Only, if she wasn't, they can't see why she would run away. She had everything a girl could possibly want, and she was going to have twenty million dollars or even more in a month or so.”
“Of course she has eloped with somebody,” Kerry decided.
“Perhaps. But they say she had no lover that anybody ever knew of.”
“Who is 'they'?” Kerry demanded.
“Her aunt and uncle, a Mr. and Mrs.”—Mrs. Lane consulted the paper again—“Guirk. Queer name, isn't it? They say she has never been alone with a man in her life. It seems that when she was a child the aunt was afraid that she'd be kidnaped and when she grew up that somebody would marry her for her money. And so they have always watched her as a cat would a mouse.”
Kerry burst into a rill of laughter.
“Aunty K, this girl bores me. How does it happen you're so interested?”
Her aunt laughed, but did not answer the question.
“There's the dinner-gong. Come right down, my dear, just as soon as you are dressed. I want you to meet everybody in the house. Just think! I have three new people at the table to-night.”
The excitement which had been mounting in Kerry all the afternoon now actually exploded. She finished her dressing in a kind of frenzy. She wanted to meet these new people and she feared to meet them. She gave a last glance at the mirror. She was dressed so simply that there was little chance of any detail being wrong. Nevertheless, she surveyed herself with minute interest. Then she darted out of the room, flew down the three flights of stairs like some winged creature. The last step almost precipitated her into the dining-room. For an instant she paused in the doorway.
“Diana Darnston,” were the first words that she heard.
IMMEDIATELY following Kerry's appearance, Mrs. Lane flashed into the dining-room, introduced her to the circle of boarders and then flashed kitchenward. To Kerry's consciousness, the Mr. Murray who sat at her left, the Mr. Bale who sat at her right, the Mrs. Newhall who sat directly opposite came out sharply from the ring of faces. The rest melted in a blur under her embarrassed gaze.
Perhaps old Mr. Murray guessed her confusion. At any rate, he opened conversation at once and, without waiting for her comments, went on from sentence to sentence.
“We have been expecting you, Miss Lane, for nearly a week. Your aunt has been so excited over your visit that I told her she'd burst if it was put off. She has shown us all her pictures of you, so that we feel as if we knew you, too. I must say, though, I don't think they flatter you any.” The glance he gave the little figure, very modest in its light-colored silk gown, but widely luminous as to excited gray eyes and vividly colorful as to softly parted lips, was a brief one. “Snap-shots don't flatter as a rule. You will find it hot in New York at this time of year, but not unpleasant. I hope you like the city.”
“My aunt is not more excited than I am,” Kerry averred. “I haven't been able to sleep for ever so many nights at the thought of coming to live in New York.”
“I know just how you feel.” Mrs. Newhall reeinforced Mr. Murray's overtures with a chatty kind of friendliness. “I come from down Maine way—Center View. I go home every summer. I've known the time that, when the train drew into the Grand Central Station, I'd get so keyed up my heart would beat something awful. But after twenty-five years of going and coming, you get accustomed to it.”
Mrs. Newhall's middle-age-and-past was as comfortable as Mr. Murray's was meager. Her features were little and squeezed, and they were all crowded together into the middle of her round, good-natured face. Her complexion was turning yellow, and she used too much of a glaring violet-white powder. While she talked, she surveyed with satisfaction the glitter of the rings on her faded old hands. When she ceased to talk—automatically—her eyes went to the mirror opposite, and she examined with appreciation a profile lighted by the sparkle of diamond ear-drops.
“Have you ever been in New York before, Miss Lane?” a woman's voice asked from the other end of the table.
Kerry craned forward to meet the eye of her interlocutor. Out of the buzz of names which her aunt had let loose in her mind emerged miraculously one. And it was the one which went with that large pink face, craftily diminished by down-drooping loosenesses of hay-colored hair. “Darling”—that was the name—“Darling.”
“Only a few times, Miss Darling, and not for long.”
“It takes a long time to know New York,” Miss Darling informed her, with a slight touch of patronage. “It's a charming city, and yet sometimes I wish I might never see it again. I——”
But here she was interrupted by an arrival. Mrs. Lane bustled in from the kitchen to introduce Mrs. Deane. Kerry settled herself back out of the conversation.
Mrs. Deane acknowledged the introductions with a faint bow and a murmur so low that it was virtually inaudible. After a moment that formality which a new arrival sets fell on them all. Miss Darling examined the newcomer with a narrow-eyed scrutiny which rapidly developed a quality of disapproval. Mrs. Deane herself was apparently more embarrassed than anybody. She kept her hands in her lap, and her head drooped as though her eyes were bent on them. Kerry studied her stealthily.
LITTLE, slender, a girl for years, she was dressed in the shimmerless black of mourning, mitigated only by dabs of white at the neck and wrists—her only ornament a small chased-gold ring on her left hand. It was not strange that her head drooped when one considered the weight of hair it carried. Heavily waved, elaborately curled, twisted, interwoven, it massed to almost a grotesque disproportion of dense blackness. She was olive-colored, and but for the warmth of her drooped mouth might have seemed ill. But when finally Miss Darling addressed a remark to her and her eyelids came up, the flash of the green-gray irises under them set all ideas of ill health flying. Her eyes were big and brilliant, but they were tragic in expression. Their sadness, however, in no wise diminished their aliveness. In the dead olive pallor of her face they were like insets of a very thin, exquisitely-clear green ice. And with the light of those eyes illuminating her face, she suddenly became alert—a tingling, electrifying bit of womanhood.
Mr. Nickel, a thin young man who sat on Miss Darling's right, was the first to recover from this invasion of beauty and sadness.
“Have you seen the evening papers, Mrs. Deane? We are all going nuts on the Darnston case.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Deane answered, her voice languid and low. “I have looked them over. It is a very strange case, isn't it?”
“The latest editions say,” Chester Bale intoned, in his high, vibrating voice, “that they've already offered a reward of fifty thousand dollars for the girl, alive or dead.”
“Fifty thousand dollars!” Joe Nickel repeated. “Fifty thousand! My hevings! I'm going to take a day off and just look at girls.”
“Why do you call it 'taking a day off'?” Miss Darling demurred. This brilliant stroke of sarcasm convulsed the table. The Twirter twins went off into spasms of giggles.
“They've had a lot of tragedy in that family,” swiftly interpolated Mrs. Newhall, bridling for a moment, but rewarding herself in the mirror. “That was a strange thing about the girl's twin brother being drowned. Did they ever find the body?”
“Oh, yes,” Mr. Murray answered her. “About two months after he disappeared. What a pity, when the lad had such a future!”
“Perhaps it wasn't his body they found,” Mrs. Newhall suggested. “Perhaps he ran away.”
“But what would be his motive?” Mr. Murray objected. “Pretending to be dead if he wasn't dead.”
“Who'd kick a fortune of twenty millions in the face?” Mr. Bale demanded.
Again conversation was interrupted by a newcomer. And again, as though electrically warned, Mrs. Lane flashed from the kitchen to make the introductions.
This time it was Miss Ryan. No interval of embarrassment manifested itself in Miss Ryan's case, and no interval of constrained silence. Miss Ryan received and responded to the introductions with a coolness almost chiseled. She seated herself beside Mrs. Newhall, unfolded her napkin, poured herself out some water and took up the thread of conversation as though she had been there all the time.
“You're talking about the Darnston case? Isn't it weird? I've read every evening paper, and they all say the same thing. Nobody in that family or any of the servants has any idea how the girl got out of the house if she went of her own accord, or how she was taken out if she was abducted. Nobody can guess how she put it over. Isn't it enough to make one believe in levitation or spiritualism, or the ouija-board or any of those queer things? I think she threw herself out of the bedroom window into the river. You can perfectly see how she might get into a suicidal condition worrying over her brother's death.”
Quite openly the boarding-house circle studied the author of these vivacious remarks. The faint disapproval which Mrs. Deane's appearance had developed in Miss Darling's eyes deepened, as they scrutinized Miss Ryan, to a definite antagonism.
“You'd better give that tip to Tom Udell when he comes in. Miss Ryan,” Joe Nickel suggested. “He's on the Evening Planet.”
“I guess I'll be more interested in what he has to say than he will in what I have to say,” Miss Ryan admitted, and she laughed.
Her laugh was as pretty as a bird's voice. But that was not strange. She herself was so impregnated with prettiness that there was a surplus plenty to heap high the silver cup of her mirth. She was little and slender, dark and vivid, active and graceful. Her short hair clustered richly about the olive pointedness of her face. She was always shaking it back with a toss of her head. Her head did not droop. It always tilted upward, as though held deliberately at that angle to display a lovely sloping line of neck. After Mrs. Lane turned on the electricity the light seemed always to be catching in her large eyes—gray, apparently, but made azure by velvety blue-black pupils, to catch on the little edge of pearl which her smile disclosed—to catch there and stay.
BEFORE anybody could reassure her on this point, she turned the subject swiftly. “Has anybody seen Elsie Lennore's latest film?”
“Yes,” answered the ubiquitous Mr. Nickel; “and, take it from me, it's a hummer! It's a wiz!”
“I guess I'll go to-night, then,” Miss Ryan decided. “I heard it wasn't so good as the last.”
“Say!” Joe Nickel burst out, with the air of one who has suddenly made an astounding discovery. “You look like Elsie Lennore! You're a ringer for her. Did any one ever tell you that, Miss Ryan?”
“Al)out a million,” Miss Ryan admitted serenely. “I can't see it myself, though.”
“But you do your hair exactly as she does.” Miss Darling's glance was oblique, but the suggestion was voiced in her most dulcet tone.
“No,” Miss Ryan came back; “she does hers exactly as I do mine.”
“Who is Elsie Lennore?” Kerry interrupted.
A hum of amusement ran along the table.
“Just think of anybody who's never heard of Elsie Lennore!” Mr. Bale lilted at the end of it.
Kerry colored so furiously that her confusion had almost a panic in it. It was Mr. Murray who made kindly explanation.
“She's the most successful woman movie star in the world, Miss Lane, and her manager—Macgill—is the most successful in the business. A Macgill film is always a success. Her salary is more than twice that of the President of the United States. And she gets a big share of the profits besides. Don't you have movies in that village of yours up-state? What's its name——”
“Blue Valley,” Kerry prompted him. “No; there are no movies there. It's a tiny, tiny place. There are movies in neighboring towns, but I have never been to one. And I have never happened to hear of Elsie Lennore. You see. I've had responsibilities. There's been sickness in the family—” Kerry hesitated.
“My goodness!” Miss Ryan remarked in an aside to Mrs. Deane, who received the comment with a faint, absent smile. “Blue Valley must be a dead little burg.” But aloud she addressed herself to Kerry. “I will show you some pictures I have of Elsie Lennore. By the way, do you know that she is in New York and that she's lost her ring? She's advertising for it in all the evening papers. Small gold ring, heavily chased, the ad says. It's the one she always wears. I've often noticed it on her hands in close-ups. Must be a mascot of some kind.”
“Yes; I read the ad,” Joe Nickel coincided, “and I've noticed the ring.”
“I wonder why she says, 'Return to Elsie Lennore personally,'” Miss Ryan went on. “I should think she'd have somebody else—Macgill, for instance—appear for her. I see she gives Macgill's office as her address. And I should think she'd realize that people would expect a big reward from her.”
“Yes,” Joe Nickel said, with an air of uncanny shrewdness. “But that struck me as foxy. You see, the ad says there's no intrinsic value to the ring. She hopes to tempt the finder by a big reward and the chance to meet Elsie Lennore personally.”
“But do you believe she'll really see the finder?” Miss Ryan asked.
“You bet she won't! She's never been interviewed. She's the hardest person to see—they say it's easier to get to the President of the United States. You see, her graft consists in looking like a child. They don't want the world to know that she's a woman. That's why she keeps so close. You'll see she'll be very quiet here in New York. None of the reporters will get to her. No; probably one of her secretaries would act for her.”
“Or Macgill, perhaps,” Miss Ryan suggested carelessly.
“Oh, no,” Nickel said, with an air of omniscience. “Macgill would never bother about such a picayune affair. He's almost as hard to get to as Elsie Lennore herself. By the way, did you know that there'd been rumors of a break between her and Macgill?”
“No! For goodness' sake! What's it all about?”
“I don't know. They say she left Macgill once to come to New York to talk to Giddings, of the Sidro Films. But Macgill caught up with her in Chicago. They patched it up and she returned to California.”
“Oh, here's Tom!” Mr. Bale ejaculated suddenly. “What's the dope on the Darnston case, Tom?”
MR. UDELL smiled, but his smile was a fleeting one, and he immediately curtained it under a look of importance. Mr. Udell was the possessor of a drab-haired, drab-eyed, drab-skinned face from which hung a nose so large that for a long time it arrested all observation of his other features. At Bale's question his importance increased to a portentous degree.
“It's a very strange case,” he commented; “very strange. There's a lot behind it all that hasn't got into the papers yet.”
“But what do they suspect?” Nickel continued encouragingly. “Did she elope? Was it an unhappy love-affair? Was it suicide? Miss Ryan here— Oh, by the way, shake hands with Miss Ryan, Tom. Meet Mr. Udell, Miss Ryan, and, while you're about it, Tom, Mrs. Deane and Miss Lane— Miss Ryan thinks she threw herself out of the window into the river.”
Mr. Udell presented his nose and, in instant sequence, a bow to the three ladies.
“Pleased to meet you, I'm sure. Not a chance!” He disposed tersely of Miss Ryan's theory. “All the windows in the house that looked on the river are screened in iron. She couldn't have got through them—there isn't space enough. The only other places where she could have thrown herself off are the roof and the back-yard wall. And she didn't go onto the roof or into the yard that morning. That's flat.”
“What does she look like?” Miss Ryan demanded. “And why didn't they publish her picture?”
“That's one of the things which makes the case so difficult. They haven't a picture of her—none of any kind.”
“Mercy! How strange!” Mrs. Newhall commented. “How's that, I wonder?”
“Well, several reasons. Her aunt—this Mrs. Guirk—said they were planning to have photographs taken on her twenty-first birthday. Now she's heartbroken it wasn't done before, of course. It seems the old woman's never permitted the slightest publicity about the twins. She's always had a wheel that somebody would kidnap them and bold them for ransom. She's never had their pictures taken for fear that in some way the papers would get hold of them and there'd be big Sunday stories about the millionaire kids.”
“How are they going to find her, then?” Miss Ryan demanded.
“Well, it won't be easy,” Tom Udell promised, with the grimness of those who have inside information. “The old girl doesn't give a very good idea of Diana—she has no gift of description.” He fixed his eyes on Miss Ryan's face. “Little and slim—oval-faced—olive complexion—hair almost black and lots of it. Mrs. Guirk says she could sit on it.”
“In these days, when everybody has short hair,” Miss Ryan interpolated, “that will make it easy to identify her.”
“No, it won't,” Tom Udell stated positively; “for she cut it off before she ran away.”
“How do they know she cut it off?” Miss Ryan demurred.
“They found a long hank of hair on the floor behind the bureau. Apparently, as fast as she cut it off she laid it on the top of her bureau, then burned it all up in the fireplace. One lock had slipped behind, and they found it.”
“Say—is that right or is it just newspaper talk?” Bale tremuloed.
Udell impaled him with a shaft of drab-colored sufferance.
“A friend of mine on the Planet held the hair in his hand.” He disposed of Bale's tenor objection.
“What color are her eyes?” Kerry asked.
“Mrs. Guirk makes a point of her eyes,” Tom Udell answered, transfixing Kerry with his nose. “She says her eyes are the hardest to describe of anything about her. She said hazel, but she added that they all depended on the color the girl was wearing. Sometimes they looked blue, sometimes gray and sometimes green—she's seen them when they were even yellow.”
Mrs. Deane hesitatingly broke into the conversation.
“What did she wear when she left the house?”
Mr. Udell wheeled his nose from Kerry's direction and aimed it at Mrs. Deane.
“Gray,” he answered tersely. “All gray. Gray suit, gray hat, gray shoes and gray stockings. The only thing she took away with her was a gold ring she wore on her left hand. It belonged to her mother—a little gold ring, heavy chased—like your wedding-ring, Mrs. Deane.”
MRS. DEANE looked at the golden glitter on the white ringed finger of her dimpled left hand as though from a new point of view. Others surveyed that glitter, too.
“But I can't understand what was her motive in running away.” Kerry's eager voice laid a delicious interrogative freshness along the silence.
“The Guirks did not think the motive was hers at all,” Tom Udell answered. “They think she was abducted.”
“But if she cut her hair herself,” Mr. Murray said in his faded old voice, “she was deliberately disguising herself. She must have gone of her own accord.”
“Of course she went of her own accord,” Tom Udell agreed a little impatiently. “The Guirks think somebody actually got into the house, chloroformed her and cut her hair off. But that's all tommy-rot. Whenever she went, or wherever she went, she went willingly.”
“Well, what kind of girl was she?” Miss Darling asked.
“Nobody knows much about her now,” Udell answered. “There's not been time enough to go into that.”
“She may be married—to the chauffeur—or something,” Chester Bale put in jocularly.
“But if she's married,” Mr. Murray demurred, “there's no reason why she shouldn't come forward and admit it to-morrow.”
“Say!” Joe Nickel burst out. His face had assumed a look of preternatural cunning. “If that girl dies, the Guirks come into all the money, don't they?”
“Take a jitney, Joe!” Udell ordered, with a succinct but kindly patronage. “Everybody's thought of that, but it don't hold water. For one reason, they don't need money. Old Darnston left them five million apiece twenty years ago. Every one figures it's a great deal more by now. If the Guirks had five millions then, you can bet they've got a good deal more now. They are people of the highest respectability—pillars of the church and all that. And then it's as plain as the nose on your face that they love the girl to death.”
“What do the Guirks look like?” Kerry inquired.
“Oh, Mrs. Guirk's an awfully nice old party,” Udell admitted, with the condescension that he always displayed toward people whose private affairs became his by reason of their getting into the papers. “You'd trust her with your last cent. She's oldish and fat and roly-poly, with a big, round, motherly face. As calm and loving and placid as the family cow. Looks like the old grandmother you used to visit every summer in the country.
“What's Guirk like?” Mr. Murray inquired.
“Oh, a sort of old, Santa-Claus-looking party,” Udell vouchsafed languidly; “not fat, though—thin and white-haired, like his wife, and with all the whiskers in the world—the kind that is always Santa Claus for the Sunday-school Christmas tree. Warner—that's the man we put on the job—said you've seen them both at prayer-meeting a hundred times when you were a kid. What do you think? Guirk, giving Warner the eye, offers him a drink. Guirk explains that he is a prohibitionist himself but he keeps a little for friends. Warner accepts with alacrity, you betchyeh. Warner expects some swell vintage, Eighteen hundred at least. When he comes to imbibe, what d'you suppose it is? Some of the old lady's elderberry wine she put up last summer.”
Udell's cosmopolitan audience laughed loud and long at this delicious provincialism. There came a murmur from Mrs. Newhall:
“If only my husband were alive! He had the most wonderful faculty. He always guessed who committed murders. I used to say it was a gift, but he said it was only brains.”
IT WAS after nine o'clock when Kerry returned to her room. Dusk was concentrating to darkness. She pulled the curtain away from a sky so full with the shimmer of stars that her passing gaze caught on it. An instant she stood, vaguely disturbed by the mystery of those far-off sidereal fires—wondering——
And then voices caught in her listening ear; perfume laved her. Her eyes, sinking, sought the secret garden.
For another interval, longer this time, she stood still, too paralyzed to move, too stark with amazement to utter the exclamation which hung visibly between her parted lips.
The secret garden had gone—disappeared—vanished so completely that it might have floated off into space like a bubble—and in its place a scene from the “Arabian Nights.”
Kerr' did not, in the conventional gesture of surprise, rub her eyes. She became, if possible, only a little more still, and she continued to stare, stupefied, breathless.
A rug, so big that it filled the garden, had been laid down over the cut weeds, a great rectangle of gleaming, golden plush, touched at irregular intervals with an Oriental pattern in blue, Along the gray-church wall to the east, set in golden tubs symmetrically arranged between Gothic windows, there rose, as round as the circle Giotto drew, great green balls of bay-trees. At one side hung a canopied hammock, blue and gold, too. It was piled with cushions. Which was stranger, the Cubist shapes of those cushions or the Futurist colors, Kerry could not decide. And they were trimmed kaleidoscopically with patches of contrasting colors, inset with mirrors, webbed with embroidery, bordered with fur, hung with tassels of black. Kerry's eye caught on a great irregular splash—like ink—on a big circular cushion of carmine, then passed to other wonders—a lengthwise three-part mirror, framed in carved silver, standing near the hammock. Here, there, yonder, great silken umbrellas, like monstrous mushroom bubbles of thin gold, suspending lanterns which, repeating all the gay colors in the cushions, flushed the garden with a golden light. And the focus of all this—a big round table, jet-black and shining, with golden sphinx-heads boldly carved on its three legs. On the table a light that poured yellow radiance, a tennis-racket, a trio of tennis-balls, glass flagons holding brilliantly gleaming liquids, a heap of pearl-colored lace, a tiny half-opened fan, a trio of infinitesimal jeweled boxes——
It was at this table, sipping coffee from cups of white china lacquered in a black geometric pattern, or drinking glittering liquids from tiny glasses, that four people—three men and a woman—sat. And those people——
Back of them, the door of the house, opening on a cave of gloom, suddenly became luminous. Light poured through cascading tendrils of vines. Emerged an old Chinaman, so withered and dried that he looked like a forked autumn branch from whose angles swung Chinese clothes of shining black. He bore a silver tray on which was arranged a siphon of soda, a silver bowl of ice, two whisky-bottles. white-shod, light-footed, he drifted as noiselessly as a blow-n autumn leaf across the silken surface of the yellow rug, noiselessly placed the contents of the tray on the ebony surface of the table, noiselessly drifted back into the house. An infinitesimal furry dog—snow-white—scampered after him, a rill of bells marking the tiny leaps of its progress. As though roused by his fairy-tinkle, the black patch on the hammock stirred, lifted, and gradually ballooned into an enormous cat.
The men, Kerry decided instantly, looked like the men you saw everywhere. At first she gave them scant attention. But the woman— Kerry stared and stared. She was talking, talking with such an exuberance of phrase, talking with such a flurry of gesture, talking at so impetuous a speed that at times her excitement pulled her up from her chair and sent her walking about the garden, small hands clasped at her back, small head pulled high on a slender neck to the loveliest of scornful lines, chin, whimsically peaked, pointing upward. She was young. She was dark. She was beautiful. She was—yes; she was the tallest woman that Kerry had ever seen. She wore a gown—Kerry's experience offered no parallel for the glisteny, gleamy, goldeny stuff—as slim as an umbrella-case. It turned the woman into a great golden serpent. It had no neck—that gown. It had no sleeves. It had no back. It was held on over the shoulders by strings of golden beads.
As for the woman's face— Eyes! They were not eyes, but great gray dusky stars, visibly rayed. Mouth! Not a mouth at all but a crimson rose with a nap like velvet. Hair! Her hair was more surprising than either. Black as carved jet, it turned her brow to alabaster, changed her ears to coral; it tried to thrust pallor into the olive of her skin. Failing in this, it rose to an elaborate height, was itself re enforced by a high, scoop-shaped tortoise shell comb. From her ears hung earrings of cut jade, shaped like little lanterns which, dropping tassels of pearls, swept the shoulders. About the neck flowed a string of pearls which, knotted at the waist, dripped to the knees.
Kerry could not hear what the Golden Serpent was saying. Only a murmur came to her ears. Her remarks were all addressed to one man, and he was the one whom Kerry could see most easily.
AFTER a while Kerry could remove her eyes from the woman to the man—a tall, gaunt figure in a gray summer suit, topped by a head of straight, cropped red hair. His eyelashes were so long that only Kerry's intuition could have discovered that the eyes back of them went with the long Celtic lines of his face. He sat impassive, silent, almost moveless, under the Golden Serpent's flow of oratory. Once he dumped the pipe he was smoking, refilled it, thumbed the tobacco down, lighted it from a silver box which, scratched at the side, emitted flame, puffed it. But these motions flowed one into the other with the ease of long practise. They seemed only to accent his quiet.
The other men sat silent—not embarrassed, Kerry decided—a little as though this scene had occurred before and they were calmly waiting for the rebellion to end.
Such a phenomenon did occur. The lady threw her head back, hurled at the object of her abuse a basilisk glance.
“Joshua,” she cried, and she inveighed high heaven with an uplifted bijou fist, “I hate the sight of you, and I curse the day I ever laid eyes on you!”
One of the other men opened conversation with Joshua with what Kerry felt to be a slightly embarrassed air. But this wore away as he himself took the floor, describing—no, Kerry decided, explaining—something. He waxed enthusiastic after a while, even exhortatory. He also tended to emphasize his speech with gesture. He was a young man, stoutish, much better-looking than Joshua. His face maintained chisel contours, even through a kind of facial fatness. His hair was of an indeterminate yellow-brown, but his short, stiffly-cut mustache was sheer gold. His eyes came forward, a little enlarged by rimless glasses.
He whom the Golden Serpent called “Joshua” listened moveless, again non-committal, his long lashes covering his Irish eyes, his pipe emitting regular volleys of smoke.
The third man—his gray lounging-suit made Kerry decide that the tennis-racket belonged to him—alone remained absolutely silent. His back was turned to Kerry. His arms were apparently folded. She liked the whip-lash strength of the slender seated figure; she wished he would turn. His eyes—were they, Kerry wondered, fixed on the Golden Serpent's brilliant face? Somehow he interested her more than the other three.
And then, while Kerry questioned if the deadlock in the conversation would keep the scene fixed under her gaze all night long, there came a swift turn in events. As though suddenly called by the hypnotic power of Kerry's intense gaze, the Golden Serpent lifted her eyes to the oriel window.
Kerry was seized, not with the panic which so often attacks eavesdroppers but with the paralysis which sometimes envelops them. For a moment she could not move. The Golden Serpent suffered no such paralysis. Her sharpened gaze did not waver. But apparently she murmured something which called the men's attention to her find.
But as the three pairs of masculine eyes impaled her, the inhibition which lay on Kerry dropped away. She leaped from her seat and hurried to the farthest corner of the room, stood with her face to the wall, her slender hands veiling the blushes which surged fiercely up to her hair. How long she stood there she did not know. For her mind, whipped by her embarrassment to a merry-go-round, brought back to her memory whirling details of the scenes she had just witnessed. After an instant they seemed to stop—to stay painted on the inside of her lids.
And then—plop!—something fell on the floor beside her. She picked up a tennis- ball. About it, by means of an elastic band, was wound a folded paper. She opened it with trembling hands.
    Cinderella:
    Or shall we call you Cendrillon? We like the French form. Will you come to play with us in our garden for a while?
The Vamp. Josh the Ogre. Jay the Hick. Fax the Ne'er-do-Well.
For a moment Kerry stood quite still. And as she stood all kinds of thoughts revolved in her mind—a mad longing to say, “Yes;” a sense of indiscretion, perhaps peril; a madder longing to say, “Yes;” a thought of Aunty K; a madder longing still to say——
She wrote on another paper:
    Yes. If you will open the gate to your garden, I can come through our back door.
Cendrillon.
    I prefer the French form, too.
She threw her mother's shawl over her shoulders. Then a thought seized her. She changed into the little gold slippers. She opened her door gently, stepped to the hall, listened. Oh, terror! Something sounded. But it was only a sudden bass snore. Stillness again.
Once in the kitchen she found the door easily enough and pulled the bolt. The cool touch of the outdoor air revealed to her that her cheeks were blazing. Just in front, the wide door of the garden lay open. She crept toward it. A thick, warm smother of perfume, exotic, caressing, enveloped her like a thrown blanket. She remembered now that, when she looked out of her window, perfume had caught her——
The four were all talking again—absorbed now. Even the third man was eloquent. He gesticulated. As Kerry paused, trembling like a hare on the threshold, his voice rushed upon her. Even in that panic of embarrassment she realized that she liked the sound of it. It was clean-cut, but it had a warm undertone—a something that, troubling even the night, stirred to a palpitance Kerry's very soul. Then she caught two words and she smiled inwardly, smiled outwardly. It must be the same all over N«w York that night—one inexhaustible topic of conversation. Was it the news sensation of the day which had spawned that violent argument?
“Diana Darnston” were the two words which greeted her entrance.
THE third man—the one whose face she had not yet seen—rose and came forward to meet her.
Kerry was conscious of a shock of disappointment. He was long and lean in figure. He was long and lean in face. His features wandered at their crooked, irregular will across his weather-beaten skin. His ears stood up batlike, red as the wattles of a turkey-cock. But——
“Welcome, Cendrillon!” he said—and he smiled and held out his hand. Quite simply, Kerry placed her hand in his. “You come on feet winged with flames,” he added.
He drew her onto the rug. Her high heels sank in its plushy softness.
“We're mighty glad you came,” he went on, still smiling. “You looked so—so”—he seemed to reach after a word; apparently he found one, but not the right one, for he attacked the adjective with a little diffidence—“so quaint, so like a miniature up there in your oriel window—all eyes. I assure you, Cendrillon, your eyes were as big as that table-top—and as black, though now I see they're gray. At any rate, we could not resist inviting you to join us.”
But here the Golden Serpent interrupted. She had not risen; she lolled in her chair.
“And we'd fought so long that in another moment there would have been murder. You've saved me from the electric chair.” She paused and coolly studied Kerry. And then, with a pounce that almost made Kerry jump and that pulled the Golden Serpent out of her seat and up to the last inch of her astonishing height: “Say—that's some shawl you're wearing! Spanish isn't it, Cendrillon?” She advanced. Kerry drew it off and handed it to her.
As she approached Kerry made a discovery, made another, made more—many— Those wide, starry eyes! They were the result of little blobs of black which rayed her eyelashes, and of artificially contrived, reenforcing, augmenting lid-shadows. That velvet-rose mouth! The lips were covered with a moist smear—a crimson deeper than blood and richer. Those glittering pink-ended fingers! In repose, they appeared to be dyed a deep strawberry. But, strangest of all, as she neared she slowly diminished in height. Heels high, mounting hair higher, Spanish comb highest—they had all helped to draw the Golden Serpent's figure out.
“Joshua!” she screamed suddenly. “A Spanish disguise! Nobody would ever recognize me. That never once entered my mind. Joshua, send somebody to-morrow to ransack this town for all the Spanish shawls in it.” She threw Kerry's shawl over her shoulders.
IN THE mirror she studied herself keenly. Absently she reached to the table for the tiny jeweled boxes. One—a square one—opened, displayed a feathery fluff. She powdered her face, neck and shoulders. The other—slender—shot, at the touch of a spring, a crimson cylinder against her lips. Her mouth bloomed like a suddenly opened blood-red blossom. She smeared it so thickly that it compelled her to hold her lips with a delicious stiff poutiness. A moment more she gazed at herself, as at a picture whose purchase she was considering.
“My mind is made up!” she exclaimed exultantly. “Joshua, get that—my mind is made up!” She turned to Kerry. “Thank you, Cendrillon. You have given me the great idea.” All her keenness melted in a smile softly charming. Kerry saw that her gray eyes were not gray at all. Close, they showed great, excited night-black pupils, surrounded by a narrow ring of yellow. They were like precious stones of an unbelievable brilliancy—a gray that was made up of a blue-black and gold. Suddenly she threw her arms about Kerry. She did not kiss her, but she bunted her exactly as though she were a little calf and Kerry the mother cow; then she gave her a little shake.
“I like you, Cendrillon,” she announced, with crisp certainty; “we shall be friends.”
The Golden Serpent lit a cigarette. The little white tube smoking between her fingers added to her costume the final Spanish touch.
“Call me 'godmother,' Cendrillon,” she directed. “I'm going to be your fairy godmother, you little country mouse, you!”
“Thank you, godmother,” Kerry managed to say. “Yes; I am a country girl. I just arrived in New York from up-state. I am terribly ignorant of everything. Why, when I told them at the table to-night that I'd never seen Elsie Lennore——”
“You've never seen Elsie Lennore?” the Golden Serpent interrupted her.
“No,” Kerry faltered.
The Golden Serpent turned a stupefied gaze on Joshua.
“You've never seen Elsie Lennore?” Joshua repeated in an amazement that equaled the Golden Serpent's. “You've never seen— Cendrillon, I congratulate you. Sometimes I wish I'd never seen her myself.”
For the first time the Golden Serpent laughed. And that laughter—a chain of liquid bubbles dropping from a golden string—should have bewitched the very night.
Kerry sank into a seat, tried to efface herself. The men gf the party seemed suddenly to appreciate the degree of her shyness. They turned away from her. They began at once to talk. Joshua started it.
“Oh, it's all the same old thing, believe me,” he insisted, with a touch of cynicism. Apparently he was reverting to the topic which Kerry's entrance had interrupted. “I am too old a New York bird to be worked up by this girl-disappearance thing. In a week or two they'll find her, married probably. That always happens. Does it inspire you, Jay?” He turned to the second man. “It might be a good idea——”
“Not yet,” Jay answered. “To tell the truth, I've only looked at the papers.”
“Let's not talk about it,” the Golden Serpent broke in petulantly. “I'm tired of this Diana Darnston already. My head aches. Great goodness! How heavy this hair is!”
With characteristic swiftness both hands flew upward and—amazingly, unbelievably—she lifted her hair. Yes; lifted it. Massed curls, serried waves, twisted tendrils, high comb, all came off. As though it were a cap, she placed it on the table. Her own hair proved to le equally black, but short. She dashed her fingers through it. It broke at once into springy clusters of curls. In an instant—just as she had changed from a tall woman to a woman of Kerry's height—she changed from a mature woman to a girl of Kerry's age. Kerry stared, startled. The Golden Serpent caught her gaze, laughed. Then suddenly her face in a grimace of uneasiness.
“I had forgotten you were here, Cendrillon. Of course you didn't know this wig was a—was—a disguise, and so— Cendrillon”—that uneasiness in her face began to tremble in her voice—“I'll have to ask you to promise something, Cendrillon.” Kerry did not speak, but she looked at her godmother inquiringly. “You see, nobody knows I'm here. This wig, as I said, is a disguise. I can't tell you why yet. But I will some time—in a few weeks. Promise me, Cendrillon, you will tell nobody about this evening—this garden—me—anything!”
“I promise,” Kerry agreed, after a pause in which she seemed to weigh this consideration with that.
“Another thing,” the Golden Serpent charged her eagerly: “Would you mind pinning something over your window, so that nobody coming into your room can look down upon the garden?”
“Yes,” Kerry agreed again; “I will gladly do that. I don't want anybody— You see, nobody knows I'm in the garden. I have something to conceal now as well as wu.”
OUT the Golden Serpent was not even listening. Her face had a curious expression, as though she listened to an inner suggestion, as though something in her own talk was making comment in her mind.
“Disguise!” she repeated. “Disguise!” Instantly Kerry seemed to pass out of her consciousness as if she had actually vanished from the garden. She flashed about in the direction of the two men. She threaded a catlike path between them, suddenly dropped in one lithe motion to a crosslegged bundle on the rug at their feet. “That's the big idea!” she announced dynamically. She plunged into exposition, vehement but deliberately low-voiced.
Kerry caught only phrases: “A disguise! Don't let them suspect— Seem a masquerade or a game.”
With a sudden agreeing enthusiasm Jay took up her thesis.
“A disguise—yes—a masquerade or a game of some sort. Guess half-way through—or give it to them straight at the beginning—you can always get away with that—” He turned from Kerry and dropped his voice. Apparently the volume of speech which he poured out expounded these themes. Kerry heard nothing but emphasizing phrases.
The Golden Serpent drank it down.
“Let them know!” she ordered. “Let them know! From the beginning, let them know!” A pause. Then, suddenly: “That's it! That's it! We've got it! We've got it! I register joy. I register triumph. I register victory!”
She leaped to her feet and whirled about the yard in an improvised Spanish dance, her fingers dropping crisp, castanet-like snaps. She ended on a high pose, her hands flicking the air, her head thrown back—a bit blurred by a swirl of fringe.
“Come into the house!” she commanded. “Right this minute! Joshua, you old ogre you—for he is an ogre, Cendrillon—I've got you beaten to submission. Come up-stairs, where we can have quiet. We can work the whole game out now while the idea's fresh. Excuse me, Cendrillon, for a while. Fax'll take care of you. We'll be back presently.” And then, walking be tween the two men, interrupting them at will but paying no attention to their answers, she swept them into the house.
At the door she froze into one of the immobilities which were even more astonishing than her catlike swoops. Then she flew back to Kerry's side.
“Be very good to Fax, Cendrillon,” she whispered in her ear. “He's just come back from four years over there—two with the French and two with the Americans. He doesn't know it yet, but he's crazy—crazy as a coot.” She lifted her head. “I'm telling Cendrillon that you're crazy, Fax.” Then she flitted into the house.
Fax's first remark was a question, was strange:
“Cendrillon, are you Mrs. Cendrillon or are you Miss Cendrillon?”
Kerry uncurled a little crimson smile.
“I am Miss Cendrillon.” She uncovered a wider smile, which unloosed a glitter of white. “You don't know how much it amuses me to think of being Mrs. Anything.”
“You're not engaged to anybody?” Fax more strangely asked.
Kerry's smile distilled into liquid mirth.
“I should say I wasn't!”
Fax's third question was strangest of all.
“Cendrillon,” it was, “will you marry me?” Then, before she could speak, “Now, don't say—don't say—” Suddenly he commanded. Then, “I beg of you—” Now he entreated. “Don't say all those futile, foolish things that people are expected to say—that you're so surprised, that you're——”
“I won't,” Kerry promised him. “I'm not surprised. If this garden can happen, why shouldn't proposals happen? I don't know why you shouldn't ask me to marry you the first time you see me. I have always thought that the only kind of love which counts—the kind that happens at sight.”
“But how do you know I love you? I've only asked you to marry me.”
“Your voice told me the first time you spoke,” Kerry assured him.
“My voice was right. I got it the instant you came in that door, with your eyes like saucers filled with melted, velvety night and your feet shod with flame. But I really didn't think I'd ask you to marry me to-night. I thought I might wait until to-morrow. Don't answer me, though——”
“Oh, no; I wasn't going to answer you,” Kerry protested easily.
“I'm glad you understand,” Fax approved. “But I want you to keep it in mind. Oh, I am glad you understand! I think it strange, though, that you do. Most everybody doesn't.”
“I will keep it in mind,” Kerry promised again. She added: “It's not surprising to me that I understand. People don't have to speak to me. All my life has been understanding the unexpressed, hearing the unspoken, seeing the invisible. But how is it that you do? I never expected that anybody else could. Certainly not a man.”
“It was being over there, I suspect,” Fax explained. “You see, I was demobilized only last week. Things happened to most of us. I'm not the same. None of us came back the same. And the world's not the same, either. There's a new one. I will show it to you. A11 the rest of my life is going to be just looking at that new world—and looking at it with you!”
“Looking at it,” Kerry repeated. “How do you look at the new world?”
“By living here,” Fax explained. “And there—and yonder—and betwixt and between and beyond—and back of all that. And by working at all kinds of jobs and knowing all kinds of people.”
“I—I don't understand,” Kerry faltered.
“I am going all over the world”—Fax amplified his words—“literally all over the world. At my pleasure and in my own way. I shall stop here and there, anywhere or nowhere, as I please. Here in this city I'll be Labor striking for its rights. There in that city I'll be Capital struggling for its privileges. Yonder I'll be the tax-collector. Betwixt I'll be the tramp on the roadside, and beyond I'll be the judge that tries him. I'll sell jewels for a living, and I'll hang paper. I'll run my own motors, and I'll turn conductor. I'll write for newspapers, and I'll print them. I'll be a waiter and guest in the same restaurant. I'll clerk it at the hotel where a year ago I lived in a suite. I will—” He interrupted himself, as though his theme had run down. “Aren't those flowers wonderful?” he suddenly demanded.
HER head in a swirl of ideas, mutely Kerry followed his glance. It rested on the church wall to the west—the one that she could not see from her oriel. Banked against it, growing from boxes concealed by their own vines, were strange white flowers, exotically shaped—pitchers and butterflies, elfin boats——
She followed the lead he offered.
“This morning this place was as remote and forsaken as the garden in Shelley's 'Sensitive Plant.' How did it all happen?”
“Cendrillon”—Fax smiled his beautiful, friendly smile—“your godmother is a magician. Whatever she plans happens.”
“How beautiful she is!” Kerry breathed,
“Yes; she's beautiful,” Fax agreed. “Not so beautiful as you, though.”
“Beautiful as me!” Kerry replied in amazement. She added sternly: “I am afraid you are going insane. Or is it a joke?”
“No; it's not a joke. I don't indulge in that kind of joking. You're a still moon, Cendrillon, but what a candle-power!”
“I—I—” Kerry made an abashed gesture with both her hands. “I want to believe you,” she confessed abjectly. And then, as though she must open other channels to draw off her embarrassment: “But what gaiety she has! What spirit!”
“She has what we call 'temperament,'” Fax explained. “This means that she's one of those people who only have to be natural to advertise themselves.”
“I see—I see! One must know people well to guess such clever things about them.”
“I did not meet her until to-night. It wasn't until she took her wig off that I suspected—” Fax broke off, with a con fusion so instant that his whole face mimicked the turkey-wattles red of his ears. “She's going to have a fountain here,” he concluded, his voice suddenly businesslike.
“Oh!” Kerry breathed. “That's all the garden needs—a fountain.”
And then interruption came. The Golden Serpent, soft brief curls whirling, came down the steps from the house. She snatched Kerry's shawl from her shoulders and flew with it, spritelike, about the garden. This time, she held it above her head, lengthwise. It scrolled upward. The thin old fringe turned to a thin green flame. She danced, manipulating it like a banner. The two men, following her, resumed their seats.
“Cendrillon,” the Golden Serpent boasted, pausing breathless at Kerry's side, “I've won the greatest battle I ever fought in my life. And, believe me, I have fought some battles. But I've won. I've conquered the redoubtable Joshua. Josh, I crown you king of men.” She swept up the rejected wig from the table and placed it on Joshua's head. Too small, of course, it perched on his red curls like some grotesque black-luster ornament, making caricature of the brick-tinted, Irish contours beneath. “And you, Jay, I crown you king of poets.” She tore recklessly at the orchids, tied a slender tail of them about his brow.
JOSHUA smoked impassively on, his gaze, like his thoughts, obviously elsewhere. Jay blushed and cast his eyes downward. The Golden Serpent laughed impishly. But suddenly her attention veered.
“Cendrillon, what can I give you? You've brought me luck. You don't know how happy you've made me to-night.”
“I'm glad,” Kerry said simply. And then they both started—Fax as though a shell had exploded; the rest a little as though they, too, had been to a war. For above—but so close that, at its impulsion, the air bit through their bodies—the church clock announced midnight. They all laughed a little. But Kerry rose.
“You're not going, Cendrillon?” her godmother protested. “Why, I'm just getting into the spirit of the party!”
“It's a convention with Cendrillons to vanish at twelve o'clock,” Kerry reminded her.
“All right. But listen! I'll tell you what I'll do with you: I'll give you a dinner. A week from to-night. Something—I can't tell you what—compels me to vanish from New York for a while. I can come back once, for one night, just a week from tonight. Will you come to my dinner, Cendrillon?”
“Oh, I will come!”
“What time would you like that dinner, Cendrillon? For my sake, put it late. I like things late.”
“Ten o'clock?” Kerry questioned tentatively.
“Ten o'clock it shall be. Good-night, then!” The Golden Serpent kissed her. “One thing,” she added: “Are you good at keeping secrets? It is very important that you tell nobody about all this, Cendrillon. Nobody must know that I am here.”
“I am very good at keeping secrets,” Kerry assured her. “I have a little closet in my own mind where I shut them up. And I always remember not to open the door.”
Kerry returned the “Good-nights” of Jay and Joshua; but Fax rose and conducted her out of the garden, through the garden gate to the back door of Mrs. Lane's house.
“May I come to see you, Cendrillon?” he asked.
“No,” Kerry answered; “I have just this day come to live with my aunt. She doesn't know I am in this garden at this moment, and, you see, I can't tell her, I should have great difficulty in explaining you. After a while, perhaps— You will be at the dinner?”
“You betchyeh!” But although Fax's accent was fervent, he seemed, in another instant, to meditate. “I shall be very busy the next week. You see, they've put me on the Darnston case.”
“Put you on? I don't understand. Who are 'they'?”
“My paper. The Sphere. I was a reporter before I went overseas, and I've gone back to the old job. I'll be hot on that girl's trail for the next week.”
“Why do they want to find her,” Kerry inquired, “if everybody's so sure that she'll return on her birthday, and it's only two or three weeks off?”
“Well, for one thing, there's that matter of the fifty thousand dollars' reward. But with the press it's a matter of pride. I'd like powerfully to bring Diana Darnston into camp. It would be breaking all records. However, the story in itself is a marvel. I am keen to get to work on it. But listen, Cendrillon; I can't see you, you say? May I write to you?”
“Oh, no. I couldn't explain your letters—really.”
“How can I get them to you? Wait! I'll tell you. With many simoleons I'll bribe Wong—that's the Chinese man—to slip a letter under the garden gate every night. Will you come down and get it?” Pause. “Will you?”
Pause. Then, in Kerry's softest breath,
“Yes.”
“Will you answer them?”
Pause. Then, in Kerry's most decided accent,
“No.”
“A11 right. Listen, Cendrillon——”
“No; don't go yet! Wait a moment! Wait,I say. Just one more thing: It is true, as you say, that Cendrillons always vanish at midnight. But sometimes they leave a slipper behind. Can't I have one of those golden slippers, so that, when I wake up to-morrow. I'll know I didn't dream you?”
“Why — why — I — I — they were my mother's!”
Another pause.
“Please!” It was Fax's voice.
Then came in the darkness a swish of drapery. Something passed from a little smooth hand to a hard, muscular one. As Kerry ascended the stairs to her room, one foot made a firm step on the carpet. But the other sank softly into its nap.
WHEN Mrs. Lane came into her niece's bedroom the next morning, she found Kerry up and moving about a semidarkened room, her newly washed cheeks gleaming freshly, her eyes, each of them, holding a muted star. Kerry's bed still held the new position close to the oriel; it was all made up. Kerry had pinned her mother's shawl over the window. The light was a tender undersea green.
“Have you a headache, dear?” her aunt asked anxiously.
“No; I never felt better.” And, as though to prove her statement, Kerry confronted her aunt with eyes in which single stars seemed suddenly to burst into whole constellations. “But, although it's cool enough nights here, I thought I could keep it cooler during the day by screening the window. Isn't this light soft?” she added, as if suddenly remembering something. “I'm going to take all the care of my room. Aunty K. I don't want anybody to come into it but you and me.”
However, the instant her aunt was gone Kerry darted to the window and looked down again on the secret garden.
Yes; it was there! She had not dreamed last night. There was the great gold-and-blue rug, the bay trees, the blue-and-gold umbrellas, the hammock, the table. Her godmother and Joshua and Jay—and—yes; Fax must be real.
She said nothing of her last night's experiences to anybody in the house—not even to her aunt. After breakfast she opened her typewriter and went busily to work. She occupied herself the whole morning. Then lunch came, with the denuded luncheon-table and more talk about the Darnston case. The afternoon broke itself into talks with her aunt, a little more practise on her typewriter, a nap. Then it was dinner-time and a full table, more and more talk about the Darnston case, finally, bed——
A dull program it sounds just retailing it. Certainly it held nothing to account for Kerry's accelerating excitement. For it must have been excitement that made the stars in her eyes flare like blown fires, that brought a brilliant fever to her cheeks, a perpetual crimson ferment to her lips. However, outwardly she was quite serene. From nine o'clock on, her door locked against interruption, she sat at the window, her chin in her hands—waiting. After a long, long, long time, a band of light slashed the dark wall. Then came the hesitant trip down the first flight of stairs, the noiseless crawl over the second flight, the silent creep down the third, the opening of the rusty door, the frightened tiptoeing dash into the alley—and—then——
Alone in her room, her fingers, suddenly unadroit, pulled open a big square envelope. The letter began, “Cendrillon, my love——”
The next night there was a second letter, and the next night, a third, and the next night a fourth.
“He wraps a big rug about her and throws her over his shoulder. He carries her down-stairs.”
In the mean time Kerry was getting acquainted with the people in the boarding-house, and they were getting acquainted with her. She liked them all because they all interested her. But, in the very nature of things, it was the women—and especially the three idle ones—Mrs. Newhall, Mrs. Deane and Miss Ryan—with whom she became most intimate.
The boarders, in their turn, liked her. They liked her primarily—human nature being what it is—because obviously they interested her. From the point of view of the men she must have seemed at first the unassertive little-mouse type, from that of the women the harmless, unrivaling kind, and to both sexes the understanding sort which invites confidence and confidences. She listened with a strange intentness to everything they said to her. Listened—it was more an absorption. She drank conversation down.
In the matter of looks—although she was as unconscious of this as the wren of the rivalry of the nightingale or of the bird of paradise—she had to endure constant comparison with Mrs. Deane and Miss Ryan. Both these women possessed beauty—beauty definite, established, perfected—beauty of an instantly explosive quality. Miss Ryan's personality surged with a sparkling vivacity; Mrs. Deane's held a somber shade of tragedy. These two had, moreover, an extra charm. Kerry held an expected and definitely understood place in the household. As Mrs. Lane's niece, her coming had been prepared for. Mrs. Lane had put all the boarders in possession of the simple facts of her up-state history; they had even seen her pictures. But of Miss Ryan and Mrs. Deane they knew little. And they came to know nothing more, for these girls divulged nothing. Indeed, gradually there grew up about them a delicious aura of mystery.
The Darnston case continued to be the main topic of conversation.
The second day of the story there appeared in the press a plan of the Guirk house, a description of the neighborhood, careful biographies of members of both the Guirk and Darnston families, a list of people who had called at the Guirk house on the day that Diana Darnston disappeared. They were the milkman, the newsboy, the postman, and, later, a pair of employees from Smyrniande's on Fifth Avenue—the dealer from whom Mrs. Guirk had brought her fine collection of Turkish rugs.
From all accounts, the first three visitors had no importance in the case. Of the other two, one, named Coney, was only the driver of one of Smyrniande's delivery auto trucks. The other, Simpson, was a sales clerk who had been in Smyrniande's employ for twenty years. Simpson, at Mrs. Guirk's request—this was her custom when she contemplated a purchase—brought a truck-load of rugs to the old house in the Eighties. The big room on the upper story, which had been in succession nursery, playroom, gymnasium, was being turned, because of its exceptional view over the river, into an up-stairs living-room. It was to cover its large floor-space that Mrs. Guirk was purchasing more rugs.
Simpson, assisted by Coney, had spread the rugs, one after another, on the floor. Diana Darnston, the heroine of the mysterious vanishing, had stood by, apparently as interested as her aunt in the proceedings. After an hour—it must then have been half-past ten—she complained that she was tired and retired to her room on the floor below. A little before eleven, Simpson, with whom Mrs. Guirk had nearly twenty years of business acquaintance, left, accompanied by his assistant. Mrs. Guirk saw them to the head of the stairs before returning to inspect her purchases. When the luncheon-bell sounded, she knocked at Diana's door on her way down-stairs. There was no answer, and after an interval she opened the door. The room was empty. The Guirks searched the house thoroughly, discovered the lock of hair, and then immediately called the police. The rest was already history.
BY THE third day the papers were flooded with the details of Diana Darnston's life. There were biographical accounts—with pictures—of every one who had been associated with the twins from the Guirks down through the tutor and the governess who had instructed their childhood to the meager list of all the servants the Guirks had ever employed. On a few points they all agreed. Dana had been a quick, lively boy. Diana had been a quiet, gentle girl. The Guirks took the greatest possible care of the twins. After Dana's death, Diana, brooding on her brother's untimely end, had become so melancholy that they had all kept watch on her.
The Guirks were the sole executors of the Darnston will, the sole guardians of the children. Guirk, it appeared, managed the estate himself, assisted by Johnson, McCune & Johnson, his lawyers, who maintained a heavy legal silence to all interviewers. On the third day it came out that the children had an aunt, Hannah Dana—Mrs. Darnston's sister—living in the Orient, and that the Guirks did not know her present address. The Guirks, it was hinted, had had a misunderstanding with her when the twins were young, and the thing had never been patched up.
“I NEVER heard of such an unfortunate woman as that Mrs. Guirk,” Mrs. Newhall commented acidly. “Her sister-in-law's relations get mad with her; her nephew gets drowned; her niece gets kidnaped or murdered, or runs away or something.”
“It does look as if there was a jinx on the old girl,” Joe Nickel admitted.
“Tell me all about this sister, Mr. Udell,” Miss Darling implored. “I haven't had a chance to read the papers to-night, and I'm nearly exploding with curiosity. Really, I never in all my life was so thrilled by any newspaper mystery. I ought not to let myself get so carried away. I assure you, though, I dream of it nights.”
“Well, it seems,” Udell proceeded, “when Anstress was a girl——”
“Anstress?” Mrs. Newhall exclaimed. “Who's Anstress?”
“Mrs. Guirk,” Udell answered.
“Anstress! I never heard tell of such a name,” Mrs. Newhall persisted.
“Old New England monniker,” Udell threw in languidly.
“It is not a common name, but I have heard it,” Mr. Murray informed them.
“Well, it seems that his Money-bags—old Darnston, father of the twins—married a woman by the name of Dana—Rebecca Dana. Rebecca had a younger sister, Hannah. About fifteen years ago, after Darnston's death, Hannah quarrels with the Guirks in regard to some money matters. Then Hannah, who seems to be a queer bird, has some sort of a breakdown and beats it to the Orient for rest and change. Then she just naturally disappeared; at least, nobody's heard from her since.”
“That's where the girl is!” Mrs. Deane put in. “In the Orient with Aunt Hannah.”
“Wait a moment!” Udell ordered good-naturedly. “Hold your horses! In the first place, Diana's never had any communication with Hannah—nor Dana, nor any of them.”
“How do you know that?” Delight Ryan asked, in the extreme of skepticism.
“Well, how could she? This Diana person was guarded to the very limit. You'd have thought she was Mabel Hohenzollern or Gertie Hapsburg or Lizzie Romanoff—or something. She never received a letter, and she never sent a letter that the Guirks didn't see. She never went to school. She was never permitted to walk on the street alone.”
“Well, I don't get it yet,” Miss Darling remonstrated, “why she was so guarded.”
“I thought I told you,” Udell explained patiently, “that it was Anstress's wheel that somebody might kidnap her for her money. She worried all the time about this, and especially after the boy was drowned.”
“Well, I must say it's mighty peculiar!” Mrs. Newhall put in.
“So do many,” Udell reassured her.
“What sort of a house is it?” Mrs. Deane inquired.
“Oh, just what the papers say—very elegant. A beautiful home—a beautiful home.”
“When does she come of age?” Joe Nickel asked.
“In three weeks or so—June twenty-first.”
“Safely married,” Joe Nickel prophesied. “Holding out her little paw for the twenty millions.”
“What do the police think of this?” asked Mr. Murray.
“Well,” promptly answered the omniscient Mr. Udell, “when a girl disappears, you know, the first police theory is always that it's a love-affair—gone off to meet her man or something. But nobody has dug up anything to show that Diana Darnston ever looked at a man—not even a flirtation. That's out. The second is kidnaping. The Police Department favors that. The district-attorney's office favors suicide—they're going into all the sales of poison—only, if she took that route, where's the body? Their best idea is she's drowned herself.”
“The queer thing about it all,” Kerry interposed, “is that I can't seem to get any clear idea of this girl. What kind of person was she?”
“Well it is baffling,” replied the source of information. “There doesn't seem to be anything special about her. She was sort of dopy, as I get it—dull—not much pep to her. Read all the time. And moped a good deal, I think.”
“In short, as stupid as anybody who will have twenty millions is bound to be,” Miss Darling insisted scornfully. It appeared in all these conversations that Miss Darling had that contempt for the intellectual capacity of the merely moneyed which is the chief solace of the unmoneyed.
Notwithstanding all this excitement, the week that elapsed between Kerry's first visit to the garden and the night of the future dinner went by on wings, if on wings at all, which seemed to drag leaden weights. If it had not been for those nightly letters, getting thicker and thicker with every Wong mail, Kerry would have believed that Time, unjustly prejudiced against her, was standing still, his feet securely caught on one second—and that second the second when she left the garden.
BUT through all those unending days currents were crossing and crosscurrents were crisscrossing each other in their boarding-house life. One morning, on her way up-stairs, Mrs. Newhall opened her door and called Kerry into her room. Mrs. Newhall never descended to the breakfast-table. Annie brought her a late breakfast on her tray, and she consumed it comfortably in bed. When Kerry entered, Mrs. Newhall had risen. Attired in a loose negligee of a thin purplish silk, profusely trimmed with lace, she was just manicuring her nails.
“Do sit down, my dear,” she invited, her voice almost sunk to a whisper. “I want to have a talk with you on a very important matter—a very important matter. I have been waiting for a long time for this opportunity, but I thought I would make sure that everybody had left for work except you and your aunt. Annie tells me the house is quite empty this morning; even Mrs. Deane and Miss Ryan have gone shopping. Those two are always in the house. It seems to me such a curious thing that they never seem to want to go out. But it was not to say this that I called you in here. Miss Lane. It was a much more important matter—and a very delicate matter. But before I begin I want you to promise me you will treat what I am going to say as a confidence.”
Kerry gave the required assurance. She sat looking curiously at Mrs. Newhall, wondering.
“My dear, it's in regard to the Darnston case. I think I have a clue. But I thought I'd like to talk it over with somebody whom I could trust before I made up my mind what to do. Did you notice, the other night, when Mr. Udell was describing Diana Darnston, that he happened to look straight at Mrs. Deane? It was almost as if he were describing her. Don't you see how perfectly she fits all the accounts in the paper? Little and dark—olive skin—gray eyes?”
“Yes, she does,” Kerry agreed, “although I have never thought of it before. But,” she went on very simply, though a little pleadingly, “don't you think, dear Mrs. Newhall, with the offer of fifty thousand dollars reward, that all over New York wherever people meet a little dark girl with gray eyes they will wonder if she isn't Diana Darnston? In fact, the papers all say that the Guirks have been overrun with people wiring or telephoning to give clues that always prove false, that their mail is full of snap-shots of strange girls sent by people who are sure they have found Diana Darnston.”
“Yes; that's true enough,” Mrs. Newhall agreed. “But there's another thing: Don't you remember the papers all spoke of a plain, chased gold ring that Diana Darnston was wearing? Well, Mrs. Deane was wearing a plain, chased gold ring that night—don't you remember?”
“I'm afraid I don't,” Kerry confessed.
“Well, she did.”
“But hundreds of people in New York,” Kerry began feebly; “thousands,” she added, with increasing conviction; “millions”—she came to a reckless climax—“must be wearing plain, chased gold rings.”
“But,” Mrs. Newhall concluded triumphantly, “Mrs. Deane hasn't worn her ring since that night. I've looked for it every meal.”
“Perhaps she didn't really love Mr. Deane,” Kerry theorized weakly, “and doesn't want to wear his ring any more.”
“Nonsense, my child! But that's not all.” Mrs. Newhall's voice sank to a whisper again. “My dear, be sure you never mention this. Why I tell you, I don't know. But something happened the other day—a very suspicious thing. I was going up the stairs to your floor to return a book to Miss Ryan. I had my bedroom slippers on. They're made of felt, and I suppose my feet made no sound. It happened that you and your aunt were down-stairs in the dining room, and Miss Ryan, as I afterward discovered, was out. There was nobody on your floor but Mrs. Deane. Her door was ajar—just a little. Coming up-stairs, just as my head raised above the level of the hall floor, some sound caused me to turn toward her room. Her door was open a crack. I looked straight into it, straight under the bed in the direction of the window. Mrs. Deane had dropped something. She was on the floor—on her hands and knees—searching. And, my dear—” Mrs. Newhall paused impressively. Her voice deepened and lowered by another shade. “My dear, she had short hair. It seems that all that hair she wears is false. Her own hair is short and dark and with a little curl in it—very pretty. Don't you remember that Mr. Udell told us that Diana Darnston cut her hair off before she ran away?”
“But, Mrs. Newhall,” Kerry said, “if it was Miss Darnston's idea to disguise herself by cutting off her hair, what would be her object in wearing a wig?”
Mrs. Newhall cocked her eye in the direction of the trilling canary and meditated a moment.
“Well, of course,” she began slowly, “when you put it to me that way, it does seem a foolish thing to do. But, on the other hand, what possible object can Mrs. Deane have in disguising herself?”
“Of course I don't know that,” Kerry answered, “and of course I can't guess. And, besides, I don't see what business it is of ours.”
Mrs. Newhall took another tack.
“She's a very unhappy girl, don't you think?”
“Yes; I think she is,” Kerry agreed. “But as to the matter of the wig and the short hair, you know yourself what a craze there is for short hair. Perhaps Mrs. Deane wants her hair to be long again, and wears false hair in the mean time.”
Mrs. Newhall did not look convinced.
“However, I will tell you what decision I came to,” she said, after a meditative moment or two. “I made up my mind that I'd do nothing about it. Heavens knows I need that fifty-thousand-dollar reward as much as anybody. No; I don't mean that. I don't need it as much as some, but I want it as much as anybody. But I said to myself: 'Nettie Niles, that poor girl is in trouble of some kind. If she isn't Diana Darnston, she's run off from something else. She doesn't want people to know she's here. Don't you be the one to make it harder for her.' But I did feel as though I wanted to talk it over with somebody. I beg you, my dear, not to breathe a word of this to anybody. It might get us into trouble. But that's not the worst of it. It might get that sweet young thing—a widow, too—into a worse trouble.”
Kerry delivered this second promise even more easily than the first.
MRS. DEANE was a very unhappy woman—to Kerry's sensitive perception that was as plain as though printed on her forehead. Yes; she was sad, tragically sad, and Mrs. Newhall was right—she was a little mysterious. She made no allusions to her own circumstances after a first simple statement that she was waiting in New York to meet relatives who were going to take her immediately to Europe. That she was waiting there could be no doubt. She waited with every fiber of her being and in every instant of her day. This was the more noticeable in that she had apparently no talent for killing time. And then she seemed to dread going out. She stayed indoors constantly; in fact, except for an occasional early, heavily veiled morning invasion of the shopping district, and a late, also heavily veiled walk in the direction of the river, she never left the house. The fruit of that shopping expedition was mainly books. Her mantel was gradually accumulating a pile of paper-covered novels. Apparently every day she raced through one and sometimes two. She read far into the night.
Early in the morning after her evening in the secret garden, Kerry had arranged and dusted her room. The window-seat was piled with cushions. As Kerry started to shake them, her eyes caught on what stiffened her to a kind of paralysis. It was a hairpin. Unusually long, unusually slender, Kerry had never seen another like it except— The big structure of hair which massed on Mrs. Deane's head was pegged down by just such hairpins!
Mrs. Deane must have entered the room while she was gone. If she had knocked and there was no response, perhaps she had justified herself in opening the door as an extra effort to make sure that Kerry was not there. The next inevitable action was, of course, to close the door and withdraw. But apparently Mrs. Deane had not done that. Perhaps attracted by the sound of voices, she had walked over to the window. But this hairpin was resting in a hollow of one of the pillows—a hollow, round and deep, as though a head, careful not to appear above the rim of the window-sill, had lain there for a long time.
THE dinner at the end of the week was coming nearer—and nearer—and nearer. And every night the letters, thrust by the faithful Wong under the garden gate, were growing longer—and longer—and longer. And every moment Kerry's eyes were glowing happier—and happier—and happier.
Before she stole down-stairs, Kerry pulled her mother's shawl away from the window and peered down into the secret garden. Prospero had waved his magic wand again. Still blue and gold, picked with rain bow colors, glittering with mirrors and slashed with black—everything was as it had been the night of her first magic visit. Now, though, her trained senses caught the smell of flowers, the tinkle of falling water. And the big, shining-topped ebony table was set for dinner—five places. It laid a final emphasis on the colorfulness of the scene. Rounds of white china splashed with scarlet and yellow and orange and blue and green; files of silver, slim and glittering; lines of glasses, their bowls flaring like iridescent flower-cups at the end of long stems—from Kerry's oriel they seemed to radiate, a five-pointed star, about the table-center. Fax, lying in the hammock, his hands clasped at the back of his neck, fixed a steady eye on Kerry's oriel. As the window turned suddenly into a frame for her dusky head, he waved his hand and leaped to his feet.
Kerry stole down the stairs with all her former care redoubled. In a few seconds the still air was touching her cheeks with fingers cooled in dew.
Other fingers seized hers. But they had a human warmth—firmness. They seemed to take possession of her whole being.
“I didn't dream you, did I?” Fax said. “I was sure I had, and yet I kept insisting to myself that I hadn't. Perhaps this is a part of the dream, but—oh, boy—if it is, it's some dream! And you're in gray to-night—I like gray. You're like a wonderful little velvet-plumaged gray bird. I like women to wear soft colors—faint gray and faded rose and foggy blue.” He paused. “Is this a dream?”
He drew her into the garden and over to the hammock. He seated her at one end, massing the cushions back of her with a touch as deft as that of a nurse. Then he sank into the cushions at the other end, stopped the gentle oscillation of the hammock with a stern foot set firmly on the ground.
“Did you ever get my letters?” he asked presently.
“I hope so,” Kerry answered. “One came every night.”
“That's the correct number,” Fax assured her. “Has it ever occurred to you, young woman, how many answers you owe me?”
“Yes. I'll repay them all some day,” Kerry promised.
“With interest,” Fax demanded, “simple and compound?”
But here came the commotion—a rustle of silky fabrics, a tapping of tiny heels, a scented air—which could but presage one thing—the entrance of Kerry's godmother. The Golden Serpent darted out of the house. Back of her, at his normal, melancholy pace, came Jay. Joshua, his long legs making little of the journey, strolled in the rear.
“Cendrillon,” the Golden Serpent called at sight of Kerry, “I am glad to see you! I can't catalogue for you all the luck you brought me a week ago when we met. Bundles, boxes, bushels, barrels! Everything has gone right and the way I want it. I'm so happy! And in”—she cast her eyes to the moon and appeared to take counsel with it—“just two weeks you will know all about it. But I can't tell you now.”
“I am glad,” Kerry said, with all her accustomed simple graveness.
The Golden Serpent turned to her.
“You have told nobody about me?”
“Nobody, godmother.”
“Nobody but you has looked through your window?”
“Nobody, godmother.”
“Are you absolutely sure?”
Kerry's lips apparently opened to form the word “sure.” And then the memory flashed across her of the hairpin she had found among the cushions. A sense of trouble poured upon her. And yet some generous instinct warned her to keep silent in regard to Mrs. Deane.
“Not anybody that I know of,” she amended. “Certainly not since I was here; for I take care of my own room, and when I was not in I locked the door.”
“After two weeks,” the Golden Serpent repeated buoyantly, “I shall not mind. And then—I'll tell the world!”
“Two weeks!” Fax repeated. “Those are going to be two busy weeks in my young life, and two weeks from to-day is going to be an important day in all our lives. It's Diana Darnston's birthday!”
“The date,” Joshua put in, “that she appears in the lawyer's office with her new husband and a demand for the twenty million.”
“Well, of course that's what everybody thinks,” Fax admitted. “I've been on the Darnston case for a week now, and I'm not so sure myself.”
“What's your dope?” Joshua asked.
“Nothing,” Fax admitted. “I'm no nearer a solution of the darned thing than I was the day the story broke. It certainly is one fine young mystery. But sometimes, even when you've found nothing definite, you get a sense of things. And, somehow, I can't believe that this is just a case of a girl running away to get married.”
“All right,” Joshua persisted. “We'll see.”
“Oh, let's cut out the Diana Darnston case!” the Golden Serpent put in pettishly. “It bores me. And nobody has said a word about my new gown.”
“It's only because it's such a knock-out that we're still gasping for breath,” Fax assured her.
The gown was as great a contrast to the golden umbrella-case, which she had worn the first time Kerry saw her, as gown could possibly be. It was of tulle, the palest fog—no—mist-blue, of a quality as sheerly light and floating as possible. Here and there sprays of beads of a delicate silveriness made it look like a cloud on which the moon is shining. The neck and much of the back were bare; but wide, drifting films of tulle, which hung from the shoulders, tried at times to obscure these expanses of olive flesh. The short skirt was held out by a pair of concentric hoops. Kerry's godmother looked as though she was suspended in a tulle-hung bird-cage. She wore her high wig no longer; her short dark hair dropped in soft curls against her white neck. Her eyes seemed immense—great pools of velvet blackness, through which ran a golden stream. Her silver-shod feet made infinitesimal flashes on the soft rug.
DINNER was over.
The men had pushed away from the table and were smoking comfortably. They were talking, and again they were considering the Darnston case. And, as before, Kerry was listening—absorbing, rather. At times her eyes would sweep the table. And then, always, wonder starred them, as though she were thinking that what she saw could not possibly exist.
Presently Wong materialized noiselessly in the doorway, advanced with his tray, began to dismantle the table.
The Golden Serpent, with a long sigh, pulled herself out of the hammock, to which she had retired.
“Ah, well—more work to be done!” she exclaimed discontentedly. “Always more work to be done! I have had one little interval of paradise, of rest from spying eyes—” She broke off abruptly. “I suppose that's all I can expect. Come on, bully boys,” she continued in an instant; “I still have an hour's work in me. And at this moment I can give it. Five minutes more, however, and I shall be lost. Come, my hearties! Make hay before the rain comes. Gather ye rosebuds before the rose-worm appears.”
She drew herself upright. And then, with one of her impulses of lightning energy, she leaped to her feet and ran, full speed, into the house. Her mist-blue wings pulled filmy trails through the air. Her silver feet made glittering streaks on the grass. Jay and Joshua followed her at a quiet gait.
The silence which opened their first tête-à-tête did not, in the case of Kerry and Fax, manifest itself at their second one. This time it was Kerry who broke it, and she broke it in an excited voice immediately they were alone.
“OH, TELL me about the Darnston case!” she begged, her eager eyes wide as a child's. Fax smiled. “You said such unsatisfactory things about it in your letters,” Kerry reproached him.
“I had something better to write about in my letters,” Fax reminded her. “But of course you are interested—everybody is. And I am going to tell you all about it. But—” He paused and appeared to change what might have been warning to simple statement. “This is something I have told nobody. You understand—nobody! I am going to give you just the impression that I've got—all the things, in short, that I can't possibly write—even for the Sphere.”
Kerry gave a little jerk of excitement strong enough to flop her chair up and down. Fax laughed.
“All right; I'll start at once. First of all, I don't get the impression of the Guirks that every reporter got. They're a pair of vultures. They're the most evil birds of prey I ever laid my eyes on. They're unclean. They're horrible. That old woman has a mouth full of little black shark's teeth and a jaw that drops hideously away, without any chin, into a great, flabby, unctuous throatful of fat. She has an eye that makes me shudder. It's as dead as the eye of a boiled fish. That's Anstress.”
Fax paused momentarily to go through the motions of lighting a pipe.
“As for James—well, James has all the avarice and covetousness and acquisitiveness in the world concentrated and raised to the nth power. He is cold, cruel, grasping, calculating. He hasn't a red corpuscle in his body or a kindly impulse in his soul. In contrast with that awful oily fatness of his wife, he's as thin and dried as a bleached bone, and as white and hard.”
“But I—” Kerry began; “I—I hardly know how to frame this—I don't like to say it,” she tried to take it up. “Of what are you accusing those two old people?” she ended suddenly, throwing diplomacy to the winds.
“I am accusing them,” Fax said gravely, “of making away with their niece.”
“But how—when?”
“I don't know how or when or where,” Fax stated, with a simplicity as great as Kerry's own. “But the river is on the other side of the garden wall. The boy died that way——”
“Why don't other people suspect this?”
“Perhaps they do.”
“Why don't they say it, then?”
“In the first place, it's libelous, and, of course, no paper would print it. But when you come to look at the whole affair closely, why should they think it? Remember, with me it's only an impression, an intuition— I've told you how I leap to things nowadays. Then consider the reputation those Guirks have built up. Remember that they have never missed going to meeting, as they would say, any Sunday of their life. Remember Guirk's one of the pillars of their church. They half support it. Remember that they are supposed to give annually to charities what seems like a young fortune.”
“Surely,” Kerry interrupted, “you will admit that they have taken the best possible care of those children?”
Fax interrupted himself to take a long puff at his pipe.
“Care! Yes; if you say it quick.” He paused reflectively. “That fortune,” he remarked finally; “it will bear looking into. I think I'm going after that when I get the more immediate stuff off my hands. The solution may lie there. The Guirks—which means James—are sole trustees. Where is the accumulation? James Guirk knows. Suppose he has been feathering his own nest. The twins come of age and demand an accounting. He has hitherto been able to escape polite inquiries into his private affairs through the power of what may be one of the great American fortunes. But now—the shoe goes on the other foot. The Darnston twins have that power. His alternative is jail if the twins ever reach twenty-one alive, and an enormous fortune if they don't. This may be speculation, but there are the facts. Now, go back to the care they've shown in bringing up the twins. Looked at from another point of view, that care turns into a different motive. They appeared to take great care of them because they needed an excuse for keeping them sequestered, and they wanted to keep them completely sequestered so that when the time came——”
Kerry's mind broke from the leading-strings in which Fax was drawing it, leaped a stage ahead or two.
“You mean they actually threw the boy—Dana—into the river?”
“No; not exactly that,” Fax answered. “My idea is that they let him drown himself.”
Kerry's brows twisted.
“I don't understand——”
“Listen to me,” Fax ordered tolerantly; “I'm going to tell you the story just as I see it. Then you can tell me what you think of it. I'll start at the beginning—in the year 1898, to be accurate. Once upon a time twin children were born to a pair of people called Darnston who—at the time—lived during the winter in New York and during the summer in a little New England village called Field Harbor, in which they had been brought up. Mr. Darnston seems to have been a typical Yankee, long, thin, blue-eyed and sandy-haired, but able as the deuce—a kind of genius in his way. Mrs. Darnston, who was a Miss Dana, was twenty years younger than he. She died when the twins were born. She was a lovely thing. Anstress showed me a flock of pictures—a delicious, little, softly-rounded dark girl—with gray eyes, Anstress said. Admeh Darnston had early in life made a fortune—a big fortune—in the West. He was a lumber king. He died when he was not yet fifty, leaving these twin children six years old—Diana and Dana. By the way, I wonder why he called her 'Diana.' My feeling is that it was a revulsion against a family of Bible names—Anstress, Admeh. Even his wife's name was Rebecca and her sister's name Hannah. I don't understand his choice. I like those sturdy old Bible names myself.”
“I DON'T,” Kerry laughed; “and you wouldn't if you were I. I was named after my aunt. My aunt and I are the most unfortunate of women. What do you suppose they named us? Kerrenhappuch.”
Fax whistled.
“You were stung!”
“I call her 'K' and she calls me 'Kerry.'”
“Kerry's pretty,” Fax commented. “I suppose I shall call you that—when I don't call you 'Cendrillon.'” Then he went on with his story. “Admeh Darnston had an older sister, Anstress, who married James Guirk. His wife, Rebecca Dana, had a sister, Hannah Dana, who never married. When Admeh Darnston died he left Anstress and James five millions each. He left each of the children twenty millions—not a penny of which they could touch until they were twenty-one. The Guirks were made executors, guardians of the twins, trustees, everything. The provision was that, if either of the twins died before reaching that age, his fortune went to the other; if both died, all the money was to go to Anstress. And he commended the twins to Anstress's care. So Anstress brought them up. The first thing she did after getting control of the children was to move from Field Harbor, where they were brought up, to New York. They went into the old Darnston house—a big brownstone barn of a place, flush up against the East River.
“It's a terrible place, although the situation is beautiful. The side windows open out on the river; front and back windows show glimpses of it. But every window is so grilled with ironwork and then so screened and doubly screened, first with heavy écru-lace curtains and then with voluminous plush draperies, that it's like living in perpetual night. The furniture is massive and cumbersome—bleak old mahogany or stark black walnut. It is filled with pictures that are mostly steel engravings and gloomy old bronzes, cold, sepulchral alabasters, mortuary marbles——”
“I think I can see it,” Kerry interrupted.
“It has, however, a big yard and a great flat roof, and these were the salvation of the twins. They were virtually brought up in that yard and on that roof.”
“The papers say Anstress was so afraid something would happen to Dana,” Kerry threw in, “that she would not even allow him to learn to swim.”
“Part of her scheme. She had a reason for that,” Fax assured her, “as you will presently understand. Also, she wouldn't allow him a camera. Nobody knows it but me.”
“And how did you find it out?” Kerry queried. “I beg your pardon if I am asking questions that I shouldn't.”
“On the contrary, ask all you want. I found out about the camera in this way: A few years ago a family by the name of Mangan moved into the house next door. The oldest child, Lawrence, was a boy of about Dana's age. The two boys carried on a surreptitious friendship until Anstress discovered it and stopped it. It seems she always broke up any friendships with other children. Two or three ears ago the Mangan family moved away. It occurred to me to look them up.
“I talked with the boy. He happened to mention that Dana borrowed his camera one day and took some pictures of Diana. Young Mangan got them developed for him. You can imagine how I felt at the prospect of digging up a picture of that girl when nobody else has been able to find one. But when I inquired further—being very careful not to seem too eager—I found that Mangan hadn't any of these pictures. Dana kept the films. Anstress doesn't know this. She's positive that the children never had their pictures taken, and I, for one, think she believes it. I didn't undeceive her. Moreover, young Mangan himself says Dana told him that, except a boat and an automobile, a camera was the only thing that he was not permitted to have.”
“I can understand about the boat and the automobile.” Kerry's voice was a mere thread of meditative perplexity. “But the camera——”
“That's easy to explain,” Fax said. “Photographs lead to publicity. The whole Guirk game was to let as few people as possible know even of the existence of the Darnston twins.” He stopped and puffed with a kind of explosive excitement at his pipe. “Deuce take it! It's the most maddening case I've ever encountered; for I can't rid myself of a conviction—it strikes me every time I talk with the Guirks—that they are really sincere in wanting to get Diana back. I feel that they're as much puzzled by her disappearance as I.” He sighed in a balked manner.
Kerry sighed, too.
“I don't believe any of it,” she admitted, frankly. “It doesn't convince me.”
“Well, sometimes I don't convince myself,” Fax admitted, with equal candor. “But now let's go on with the human side of it. Let's admit for a moment that the Guirks want the forty million dollars and want it enough to commit murder to get it. Take the boy. They decide to put him out of the way, because he is a boy and because it will be easier to get rid of the girl with him gone. He always has been crazy to go on the river, but they won't let him get into a boat. He's always been crazy to drive an automobile, but they won't let him get into a machine. He's always been crazy to swim, but they won't let him go near the water. They won't even permit him to take swimming-lessons. They themselves go out rowing on the river every pleasant evening in the spring and fall. There's always a boat tied up close to the river wall. Take a high-spirited boy, sick to death of this chaperonage. He'd sure steal out some night and take a row by himself.”
“But how would he get out,” Kerry demanded, “with the watch they kept on him?”
“I don't know. But boys always do get out.” Fax smiled his perturbing smile. “I always did. Even girls do sometimes, you know.”
“Yes,” Kerry admitted; “I always did.”
THEY laughed a little at their mutual vagabondage.
“So, on one of these secret expeditions, the boy drowns. Understand me, my theory is that they didn't kill him—they just let him kill himself. So that's the end of Dana. Now, take the case of the girl. The boy's interesting—but he's dead. At least, that's everybody's conviction but mine. So let's consider him dead. And now the girl. I don't get her entirely—I'm baffled by a sense of mystery. I am speaking of her personality. Still, with what I've got, I've tried to reconstruct her.”
“Tell me,” Kerry begged, with another one of her childlike bounces.
Fax smiled into her excited eyes.
“Oh, how you tempt me to talk of—other things!” He sighed, and then, as though with an effort, he went on: “I seem to get Dana easily enough—a high-spirited, self-willed lad whom James and Anstress found very difficult to rule. But when it comes to Diana—well, Diana was quite a different person.”
“How can you say that?” Kerry demanded. “None of the papers seem to know anything about her?”
“I know they don't. But I do. Or, at least, I think I do. She was studious and read a great deal. They speak of her as moping about the house and let it go at that. But sometimes when you've thought a great deal about somebody you've never met, you get to feel that you know him. Now, I know Diana Darnston. I almost see her there. In the first place, I'm sure she is beautiful——”
KERRY unlocked a peal of laughter. It was so spontaneous—that laughter—yet so incongruous, issuing from her quiet, wistful composure, that she herself looked startled by it.
Fax contemplated her, startled also. And he continued to stare.
“Do it again!” he ordered finally. “It's the best thing in your act.”
Kerry flushed slightly. And then her eyelashes dropped.
“Please go on,” she besought him. “I laughed because it seemed so young, somehow, to say you were sure Diana Darnston was beautiful.”
“Laugh on, unappreciative one!” Fax ordered. “I will, however, call to your remembrance an ancient axiom in regard to the situation of those who laugh last. And then I will pass lightly to the next point. Diana seems to have lived in that house like a little ghost—drifting from room to room without talk or laughter, always gentle, always silent, always still. Especially was this true after the boy died——”
“I wish you wouldn't say 'died,'” Kerry objected. “You've put it into my head that he might not be dead after all, and I am going to go on thinking that.”
“Fine business!” Fax encouraged her. “He may be alive, of course. In my mind there's a reasonable doubt. But that Diana's alive I'm sure—as sure as I am that you are. She was a great reader. She read all the time—poetry, for the most part. I looked over the books in their library. The poems had all been much read, and marked. The other books had not been touched. Some of them were not even cut.
“Well then, she's silent and gentle and still. She's been kept so close that she has a mind like a sheet of paper. She's probably more divinely innocent than any being we've ever known. Oh, I know I'm rhapsodizing,” he admitted, as Kerry's limpid laughter, like a caged thing suddenly freed, sped across the space between them. “But her mind! Talk about sensitive plates! That girl's mind was so white and clear that every impression—every least tiny impression—wrote itself there. She grows up mothered and fathered by a pair of harpies, a pair of as ice-cold—no; death-cold—resistless old vampires as ever lived. At first she accepts them as children do, as an inevitable part of the inevitable scheme of things. But she, in addition to a mind, has brains. So, I fancy, had both children, for that matter. And out of the evil atmosphere, out of the black planning that surrounds them, as such things come to children, the sinister intention finally reaches them. In an indefinite number of whispered councils they set each other in these convictions. I can see the picture—can't you?—the two perplexed young creatures sitting night after night, watching the changes in the electric signs across the river, whispering their confidences in each other's ear, clinging to each other mentally and spiritually. Their way of life is unnatural, they tell each other; other children lead no such existence. Not only that, but Aunt Anstress and Uncle James don't really love them—they dislike them; they hate them. Just where the glide came—I mean that point when the twins realized that not only did the Guirks hate them but they intended, for the sake of the forty million dollars, to put them out of the way, I don't know. But when it did come——”
“You don't know it came at all,” Kerry insisted.
“No; of course I don't know any of this. I am only following out a line of conjecture which, in my opinion, seems to account for all the circumstances. Finally, the twins decide to escape. They can't both go at once. There's no way that that can be managed. But if one can get away, he can help the other. Then the discussion narrows to the question: Who shall go first? The boy, of course. By what road? The river, inevitably. Dana can't swim, you understand, and he can't row. But he thinks he can manage under cover of the night, if once he can contrive to get into the boat, to paddle himself somewhere. One night he pulls this off. He rows up the river, lands, smashes the boat up, sets it afloat and conceals himself. By some method which I have not as yet succeeded in working out, he keeps in touch with his sister. Ultimately a body is found which the Guirks accept—and genuinely, perhaps—as his. It is given a proper burial, and life in the old brownstone house goes on as somberly as ever.”
“You draw a horrid picture,” Kerry commented disconsolately.
“In the mean time the Guirks pretend that they are much worried about the effect of Dana's death on Diana. They make much talk of her melancholia, drop hints to the servants, ask them to spy on her, increase their watchfulness. In spite of this—in some inexplicable way—the boy pulls off his sister's escape.”
“I'd like to believe all you say,” Kerry declared, as Fax's story came to end. “At least, not quite all. I would hate to think that two old people could be so wicked as you represent the Guirks. On the other hand, I want both these young people to live and have their chance at life. But I must admit it sounds awfully romantic to me. And from some points of view your theory doesn't seem to hold water. You credit Dana with abilities, it seems to me, far beyond his years. You don't seem to keep in mind he's only a boy. Moreover, he's absolutely inexperienced; he has no money. How could he plan out such a clever campaign?”
“I'll admit you've got me there. But I'm not telling you how he did it. I'm only saying I think he did it. Of course, it might be that somebody outside is engineering the whole campaign——”
“Have you the faintest suspicion who that third party could be?” Kerry queried.
“Well, of course there's one member of the family who has never been accounted for.”
“You mean Aunt Hannah?”
“Yes.”
“But I thought she disappeared into the Orient?”
“She did.”
“And did she ever come back?”
“Not so far as anybody knows.”
“Then——”
“But how could anybody know—if she wanted to keep her return a secret? I haven't any evidence to justify such a suspicion, and yet, of course, she might have come back and run the thing.”
“Allow,” Kerry arraigned him; “allow that everything you say is true. Allow that the boy did not drown, that his plan succeeded, that he got away in safety and devoted himself to trying to free his sister. Allow that he did manage to get into communication with her—I call your attention to the fact that you don't say how.”
Fax admitted the truth of this indictment with a nod.
“I'll say there are holes everywhere in my story.”
“However, allow all this, for the sake of argument—then how did the girl get out of the house?”
“In Diana's bedroom,” Fax began easily, “hangs a picture. Diana Darnston must have looked at it so many times that finally it failed to register, took its place with those things, that looking at every day, we don't see at all. And then, suddenly, one day she saw it again. But now it held a sudden startling significance for her—it opened the door. It is the 'Meeting of Cæsar and Cleopatra.' Do you know it? By Gérôme, I think.”
“Oh, describe it to me!”
“The scene is that of an Egyptian room. Julius Cæsar has been sitting at a table, has risen from his seat hurriedly—risen, in surprise, wonder, a sense of delicious panic, of inevitable romance. Cleopatra has been brought suddenly and unexpectedly into his presence. She stands before him, beautiful, alluring—nothing of the conventional enchantress about her. Yet she's the Serpent of old Nile all right—bewildering, tempting in the extreme. The point of my story is that she made this entrance by a ruse.” Fax paused. His voice sank a little, but none the less there rang through it a note of exultation. “She was brought into Cæsar's presence wrapped up in a rug!”
“You mean—” Kerry's words snagged on a little breathless catch in her voice.
“I mean that Diana Darnston escaped in the rugs that Mrs. Guirk was looking at!”
KERRY considered this, her face the theatre of a dozen films of skepticism, amusement, interest, uncertainty.
“But the papers all say the clerk was one that Mrs. Guirk had bought rugs of for years—that he had been in Smyrniande's employ ever since they started.”
“All true, too,” Fax agreed. “Oswald Simpson's a dapper, harmless, talkative little man—perfectly adapted to get along with customers, especially when they are middle-aged women grossly ignorant and fatuously convinced of their own connoisseurship.”
“But, then, how—” Kerry began. She stopped, started another line of interrogation. “But the other man said the same thing.”
“True. To all of us. But the other man, Jim Coney, though trusted, was not an old employee. He quit his job. He had only been with Smyrniande a year. All the reporters saw him and talk with him—I among them. He seemed a mere hulk of inarticulate workman. It occurred to me to-day to go back to the place where he lived. He had left. Nobody knew where he had gone. I've spent the whole day trying to trace him. I can't. He's disappeared.”
“How did they do it?” Kerry' asked in a vexed voice. “Oh, I feel so stupid not thinking of anything like this!”
“Simpson, the little gabby guy, came to the Guirks' house in the street-car. Coney, the assistant, brought the rugs in a big covered motor-truck—the kind of hermetically sealed van that has a back door running up to the top. Coney, who's a giant for strength, carried these rugs in wads on his shoulder to the big room up-stairs. Remember he's a whale of a man who can juggle a grand piano. He and Simpson spent an hour spreading the rugs for Anstress. In the mean time Diana has been standing round, watching the proceedings and occasionally making a comment. She is a little listless, and after a while she says she's tired, decides to go down to her room. There she gets ready for her flight. Cuts one lock of hair off for a blind and drops it behind the bureau. Anstress continues to examine the rugs, finally makes a choice. Simpson disappears. Coney packs the rejected rugs in piles and lugs them down-stairs. On one of these trips, as previously arranged—and, of course, unknown to Simpson—he meets Diana. He wraps a big rug about her and throws her over his shoulder. He carries her down-stairs, puts her into the covered wagon, drives away, delivering rugs here and there. In the mean time, inside the van, Diana is changing her clothes. Somewhere along the road, in some quiet spot, Coney drops Diana. There's a hotel near, or a taxi waiting, or, more likely, a private car—or something. Anyway, she disappears.”
“But where, in that case,” Kerry asked, “is she now?”
Fax made a gesture of despair.
“That's not fair,” he charged her. “I can perform marvels for you, but not miracles. Of course I don't know where she is. But what would I give to know!” He shook his head in a fresh access of disappointment. “How I would like to solve it! Of course, we'll all know the twenty-first of June, which is her birthday, and then, you remember, automatically she becomes safe from the Guirks. It's the longest day in the year, by the way. It won't be the longest day in the year for me,” he prophesied grimly; “that will be the day before.”
“But it's all so silly—her waiting until her birthday,” Kerry objected. “Suppose the Guirks had no idea of making away with her—remember, I don't yet adopt your theory—certainly they could not do it in the few days that remain. The eyes of the world are on them now.”
“Why not? They are a pair of Napoleons. Their whole play is that she's mentally depressed over the death of her brother. If they could get her in their possession again, why could they not throw her immediately into the river? Why would not that seem suicide—that she had fallen a victim to melancholia, while half-demented had run away and, on being found, had killed herself?”
“They could,” Kerry admitted; “but of course they wouldn't. Nobody would dare do that.”
“CENDRILLON, Kerrenhappuch, Kerry,” Fax began quietly, “that pair of malevolent old crooks could dare and would dare anything—and they'd get away with it, too. All they've got in the way of character and ability—and, believe me, they've got a lot—is evil, essential, concentrated malevolence. Well, we'll all know in a week. But how I wish I could get at the truth ahead of the dénouement—if it's only the minute before the curtain falls on the last act! I'm not even hinting at all this in the paper. I can't prove it. If I should print it I would only put some one else on the track; and I am hoping for the incident or discovery which will confirm it. But what do you think of my story as a whole?”
“I will admit I find it fascinating. It has its inconsistencies—what you call 'holes,' and although I think it's more to your credit as a fiction-writer than as a reporter, somehow it persists. Oh, how I wish I could read every newspaper account now in the light of what you've said! What are you going to do this week—I mean, in regard to the Darnston case?”
“I'm going over to Field Harbor to get on the trail of Aunt Hannah. She doesn't seem to interest anybody but me, but she interests me powerfully. Incidentally, of course. I'll look up the whole family.”
“You'll tell me all about it when you come back?” Kerry asked.
“Of course.”
For a moment silence fell between them. And then Fax spoke.
“Cendrillon, you can help me now. You will remember all these facts that I have given you—I mean, in regard to both the girl and the boy, won't you?”
Kerry nodded vigorously.
“Of course I will! How could I forget a word?”
“Well then, I want you to do something for me.” And then, as a look of alarm spread over Kerry's face: “Oh, nothing that will mean action. You won't have to tell your aunt. It's only a job of thinking and imagining.”
“I can think,” Kerry said, with a slight emphasis of pride. “And I can imagine. All my life has been thinking and imagining.”
“I want you to imagine yourself Diana Darnston. I mean the Diana Darnston that I have sketched for you—not the Diana Darnston that the papers have described. I want you to put yourself in her place. I want you to work out, if you can, how, if you were placed in that situation, you your self would get into communication with the outside world.”
Kerry burst into prolonged laughter.
“In other words, you are asking me to solve the mystery that the cleverest minds in New York can't unravel.”
“I am not asking you to solve it. I am just asking you to put yourself in that girl's place and try to help me by the use of a girl's psychology. Your mind is so clear, so virgin— It is not filled up with all the truck that litters the minds of most women.”
“But it would be too late to be of any help to you,” Kerry objected. “I sha'n't see you for another week. And the day after that is Diana Darnston's birthday.”
“I know that as well as you. I don't care anything about the newspapers now. The reward has never meant anything to me, anyway. But I'd like to work the puzzle out in my own mind before Diana walks into her lawyer's office and solves it for the world. Of course I don't know that you can help me. But, somehow, I trust to that instant imagination of yours.”
Kerry looked perplexed. Then her eyes sparkled.
“I'll try,” she promised gaily. “I'd like awfully to help you. I'll do my best. Who knows but I shall be the one to find the key! I feel as though I were working out a superproblem in higher mathematics.” She mused, obviously thinking of that problem. Then, after a long silence, “I have a plan,” Kerry said. “There's going to be an empty room—a Mrs. Deane is going away soon. Then I want you to apply for it. We'll set the date and the hour when I see you at godmother's dinner.”
“Then we'll be living in the same house together!” Fax exclaimed.
“The very same house,” Kerry acceded.
“But I'm going to keep on writing to you,” Fax said.
“Oh, do!” Kerry breathed. “I can't get along without your letters now. There was only one drawback to seeing you to-night again and that was that I wouldn't get a letter.”
“Oh, yes, you will,” Fax informed her. “I have one in my pocket now.”
“Oh, give it to me!” Kerry demanded.
A SQUARE envelope passed from his hand to hers. Kerry sat holding it. For a moment they only looked at each other. Kerry's gray eyes, meeting Fax's blue ones, became suddenly so soft that it was as though their sparkling starriness had melted. But Fax's eyes, meeting hers, might have suddenly lighted bonfires.
“It was sweet of you to think to write the letter—” Kerry's voice had run down almost to inaudibility. And then the church bell broke the silence with twelve sonorous strokes.
Kerry jumped to her feet. The Golden Serpent—Jay, a measurable distance behind her; Joshua, with his drawling gait, last of all—came flying out of the house.
“It's really very unfair being a Cinderella,” Kerry herself objected, “because you simply must vanish at twelve o'clock.”
“But the third night Cinderella didn't vanish at all, you remember,” the Golden Serpent reminded her.
“But that was because they had a prince for her,” Kerry returned. “If you want me to stay the third time, you must have a prince for me.”
“I will buy you a prince,” the Golden Serpent promised. “You have brought me so much luck that that's the least I can do for you. Why, I'd even be willing to purchase a carpenter or a plumber for you. And in these days carpenters and plumbers cost money. Remember, Cendrillon, you are not to mention that I am here. And don't take the curtain down from your window.”
“I will remember,” Kerry said.
“After the next time, Cendrillon,” her godmother went on, “you may tell the world. But don't forget not to tell it now.”
“I won't forget,” Kerry said.
KERRY woke the next morning into a troubled world. The trouble lay, she realized after a moment, not without, in the dewy, still, world that encompassed her, but within, in her own consciousness. An unpleasant experience lay before her, and she knew it. However, she set her teeth. But she did not seek that unpleasant experience; she let it find her. After breakfast and after the regular long morning talk with Aunty K over the process of making beds and rendering bedrooms orderly again, she returned to her room. She sat down before her little typewriter and assiduously went through the exercises prescribed by the omniscient pamphlet. But her look was absent; her eyes wandered from the page, and her fingers, which were now becoming each day more nimble, stumbled on the keys. More and more frequently she glanced in the direction of the door, as though she expected something to happen. Throughout an uneventful day the feeling persisted. Finally, with a sudden air of resolution, she went to Mrs. Deane's room, knocked on her door. When she came out, half an hour later, she left Mrs. Deane weeping. Her own face was very grave.
She did not leave her room again, except for meals, after that. After dinner she returned down-stairs to excuse herself for not accompanying Mrs. Lane on her evening walk.
She found her aunt hatted, gloved, veiled, patiently waiting.
“Oh, Kerry, leave this book with Miss Ryan as you pass,” she said to her niece, as Kerry started up-stairs again. “I promised to lend it to her.”
Kerry continued along the hall toward her own room. Miss Ryan's door was exactly opposite her own. She knocked. There followed a sound which she translated as a summons to enter. She opened the door. There was nobody there. But even as she stood on the threshold, Miss Ryan emerged from her closet, her blouse off, the slender arms and a great scallop of her satiny olive neck bare. At the sight of Kerry her hand flashed to her neck, clutched into convulsive concealment something that hung there at the end of a fine gold chain.
“Oh, Miss Ryan,” Kerry said, her eyes, apparently absent, wandering over the room, “here's the book aunty promised you. Excuse me for bursting in on you the way I did. I thought I heard you say, 'Come in!'”
“You heard me say, 'Darn it!'” Miss Ryan admitted, with even more than her usual vivacity, her hand still holding the object on the end of the chain. “All my hat-boxes suddenly tumbled forward from the shelf on my head.”
As Kerry opened her own door, mentally she went over the little incident. Her mind had retained the picture of Miss Ryan standing in the frame of the closet door—before her hand had flashed to her neck. There occurred to her—inevitably it would—the amusing coincidence of Miss Darling's talk and of Tom Udell's words the night of her arrival at the boarding-house. Tom Udell had said, “Diana Darnston's only ornament was a small, chased gold ring.”
Miss Ryan's slender dark fingers, flying with convulsive haste upward, had covered a small, chased gold ring!
More than half that night Kerry lay awake. And all the night her latest letter lay caught in the laces of her nightgown over her heart. At intervals, as anxiety, even panic, tore at her, she clutched it as though it were a guard against these unpleasant emotions, or a sanctuary from them, or perhaps even a touchstone which melted them. For she was beset with an other perplexity. She had seen Mrs. Deane's head appearing above the sill of her oriel last night; but later, after Mrs. Deane had disappeared, she had seen another head there. But the second invader of her room—the short, closely-cropped head presenting a very different outline from Mrs. Deane's puffed contour—was undoubtedly Miss Ryan.
For a week affairs drifted as usual in the “Maison Lane,” as Joe Nickel liked to call it. In the mean time the Darnston case was still a front-page feature in the newspapers. Normally it would have retired to the back pages within the nine days allotted to wonder. But the fact that it might be solved dramatically on the twenty-first of June kept curiosity agog—kept Diana Darnston to the fore.
Then there came the period when the newspapers, having exhausted nearly every other possibility, went on the trail of Aunt Hannah; by now she was the leading feature—save for Diana Darnston herself. She alone, among the minor characters, suggested mystery. But nothing, except for some dark suggestions of the Bulletin, turned up to throw any light on Aunt Hannah's whereabouts or to suggest any relation with the case. The proved facts remained exactly the same as when Aunt Hannah appeared on the stage. To wit:
When the children were five, the Guirks and Aunt Hannah had a quarrel. Immediately afterward Aunt Hannah had a long, lingering illness, which resulted in a nervous breakdown. As soon as she was well she departed for the Orient. That was the last anybody had seen of her. She was traced to the steamer which bore her across the Pacific from San Francisco. A Tokyo correspondent proved from an old register that she had lived for a week in the Orient Hotel. Then silence—then darkness——
And all the time absorbed old Father Time was weaving, between the first and second dinner in the secret garden, a fort night which seemed longer than any year Kerry had ever known. Closely spun, finely woven, not an hour, not a minute, not a second was scanted. Every night on the back of her calendar Kerry marked off small blocks of hours, large blocks of minutes, larger blocks of seconds in the hope of bringing the second dinner nearer. And once she took her little clock and shook it furiously. But—alas!—the effect of this was not to speed up Father Time, but only to break the clock.
WHEN Kerry crossed the threshold of the secret garden, a slim dark figure, suddenly materializing out of the twilight, confronted her. Not Fax, not Joshua, not Jay—it was her godmother. She stood there, slender finger to smiling lip, a moon of mischief in each of her great yellow-gray eyes.
“Not a word,” she breathed, “I'm planning a surprise for the men. They can't come into the garden until I tell them.”
She took Kerry's frail, soft little hand in her smooth, decisive, bigger one. She led her through the empty garden, past a table gorgeous with the trappings of another dinner, up the balcony steps into the house. There was no light, and Kerry, still following the guidance of that smooth, decisive hand, stumbled up the stairway to th« fifth floor. Darkness there. But the Golden Serpent turned a door-knob. Entering the big room into which the door swung, Kerry seemed to dive into an ocean of light.
It was a bedroom such as she had never seen—the walls hung with tapestries which pictured to her swift, startled glances shadowy vistas leading deep into deer-haunted forests; a huge bed canopied in golden brocade; delicately carved furniture upholstered in the same golden brocade, A wide dressing-case, backed by a huge three-part looking-glass, spread to her view enameled boxes in brilliant colors, articles of the toilet in gold and pearl, candlesticks, tiny swinging mirrors.
On the bed lay what might be translated into a gown, although superficially it looked like a film of ivory-colored-dawn luster which had floated in through the window. But beside it, obvious enough, were satin slippers, silk stockings.
“I am going to dress you up,” the Golden Serpent said. “I am tired of seeing you in those mousy dresses. I am all in black to-night, and you shall wear all white.”
The black, shining fabric of the Golden Serpent's gown clung to her close, dropped long fringes of black. It was supplemented by a floating black scarf, black-satin slippers. Neck, arms and shoulders were bared in slashing triangles. Except for the olive whiteness of these areas, there was not a flash of color anywhere. Yes; one—or two. From her ears hung, at the end of tiny chains, enormous canary-colored diamonds.
“Now take off that brown thing,” the Golden Serpent ordered, “and those horrid country slippers, and put on these.”
Kerry obeyed blindly.
The Golden Serpent lifted the ivory-colored shred from the bed, drew it over Kerry's head, shoulders, hips—snapped here, hooked there, pulled it down the entire length of its Paris-made slimness.
“Now look at yourself,” she commanded.
Kerry stared into the eyes of the snowy, gleaming stranger in the long mirror—stared, amazed. And the stranger, no less startled, stared—stared, amazed at her. Kerry had, of course, looked innumerable times at her own neck and arms and shoulders, looked at them with the incurious, unnoting glance of the uninterested. It was strange to find the shining ivory gown—sleeveless, deeply cut at the front and back—blending with their ivory silkiness, and blending so seamlessly that she looked like a statuette carved from some ivory-lustered substance. The beautiful, heavily soft fabric did other magic things. It made her gray eyes a darker gray and her crimson lips a deeper crimson. In some incredible way it seemed to whip up that strange ferment which glowed in her dusky hair.
Whatever the three men thought, it was quite apparent that, for an astonished moment, they could not express that thought. But when Kerry, eyelashes down in her first real shyness, descended the steps to her chair, it was in the midst of a flurry of admiring phrases. Fax alone was silent. When she was seated, he leaned over her.
“Did they dig you up at Tanagra?” he demanded.
KERRY'S third Arabian Nights' banquet was over. But the five still sat about the table, talking. And still, the spell of new beauty on her, Kerry asked herself if she were dreaming. If she were, she hoped fervently that she would never wake.
The others were discussing the ominpresent Darnston case. Kerry listened in a delicious daze.
“I maintain,” Joshua insisted obstinately, “that she's married. The extras will begin to come out in the middle of to-morrow morning to announce it.”
“Poor devil!” Jay's misanthropy on the subject of matrimony never missed a chance to explode in cynicism.
“No; I don't feel it's a case of runaway marriage,” Fax asserted, with a slight touch of irritation. “I don't know what it is, but, somehow, I don't feel it's that.”
Kerry listened with half an ear, for Fax was only repeating what he had written for the Sphere. But that preoccupation of hers, it would seem, was not all the languor of dreams; it carried another interest. At intervals, which apparently she tried to make irregular, her eyes went up to the oriel window of her room, examined it, carefully dropped again. A dim light burned in that room, so that the window was faintly luminous. Anybody approaching the oriel would be made visible from the garden.
“Anyway, we'll know to-morrow,” Fax announced pessimistically. “It won't help my case any, of course, but it will relieve my natural curiosity. And it's time for a sensation. We can't keep this mystery hot much longer.”
“After all,” the Golden Serpent struck in briskly, “why wait until to-morrow for a sensation? Why not have one now? I've got a sensation up my sleeve, and I'm going to explode it now. Cendrillon, when you came into the garden that night, you didn't know who any one of us were, did you?”
“No.”
“And you didn't guess?”
“No.”
The Golden Serpent jumped from her chair. Raising her black-lace scarf aloft, she danced—rather, she floated—about the garden. Her little black-satin feet touched the rug so delicately that the onlookers might well have been puzzled as to whether she sustained that drifting scarf or whether it suspended her. Kerry's eyes, gleaming with dazzlement, followed her for an instant. Then the light in them died to a composed coolness. She lifted her glance to her oriel window. A head—that of a woman—appeared there. Kerry nodded slightly. The head withdrew.
Suddenly, with a swift step, decisive as a finale of a clog, the Golden Serpent ceased dancing. She walked sedately back to her chair. She stood there, her slim olive hand on its high, curved vermilion back.
“Cendrillon,” she announced, “permit me to introduce the real me—Elsie Lennore—at your service! Allow me to introduce my manager, the Napoleon of film-producers, whose name you must see nightly written among the stars—Mr. Joshua Macgill. Allow me to introduce a gentleman who is writing a film for me—Mr. Jay Harrideane, whose name will soon be with Joshua's. Allow me to introduce the star reporter of the New York Sphere, Mr.—— Oh, how this bores me! One minute is as long as I can be formal.”
With an air curiously preoccupied, and with none of the surprise Elsie Lennore expected, Kerry acknowledged these introductions.
“Let me introduce myself,” she said almost mechanically, “Kerrenhappuch Lane But please don't call me 'Kerrenhappuch'——”
“We certainly won't,” Elsie Lennore announced. “It sounds like a vaudeville team.”
“Call me 'Kerry,' if you will, unless——”
“I shall continue to call you 'Cendrillon,'” Elsie Lennore decided, “because it was as Cendrillon that you brought me luck.”
“What luck was it that I brought you?” Kerry asked curiously.
“You see,” Elsie Lennore began, “I'd always played one kind of part——”
“Yes, I know—a tomboy,” Cendrillon finished for her. “They've told me all about you in the boarding-house.”
“Yes; and I was tired of that sort of thing. I knew I could do something different. I wanted a picturesque, an interesting part. Vampires had gone out, but— And, of course, Joshua wouldn't let me. He was sure that I would be ruined if I changed my type. All this was in California. While he were fighting it out, I got a letter from a young man in Syracuse. He said that he had been studying my style and that he thought it was time for me to change. He had some ideas about a new departure for me if I was willing to make myself look different. His ideas interested me. His name was——”
“Harrideane,” Kerry supplied it for her again.
“Of course! My hair was short. But I got a beautiful black wig with a comb that made me nine feet tall. I had a long, slim dress made. I had my pictures taken in this new scenery and sent one of them to Harrideane, telling him to write a scenario about it. He did that, and I liked it so much that I wired him to hire a house for me in New York and took a train East, leaving a letter of explanation for Joshua——”
“Which meant,” Joshua interrupted grimly, “that I took the next train after hers.”
“Yes,” Elsie Lennore said, with satisfaction. “I knew he'd do that. Jay helped me fix up this little place. It hadn't been lived in for years. I had telegraphed to Jay to find a house for me; but he couldn't do it. Then I had the greatest piece of luck. I just happened to mention to Francis Y. Sullivan—my lawyer, you know—that I wanted to hire a house where no one could find me and, if possible, where no one could see me. He's attorney for the Van Dordrechts. Just that very day he'd begun to administer the estate of the last of the family, who died in Florence in May. No one but Mr. Sullivan knew that the house was for rent—the first time in thirty years. I came in the morning, and by night it was as you see it. Joshua arrived in the evening, bringing with him Fax, an old friend, whom he'd met on Fifth Avenue. We were talking over the new film when I happened to look up, and there you were in the window, with your eyes as big as saucers. I had a hunch to invite you down here. You know the rest. The reason I asked you not to tell about me was because I didn't want anybody to know where I was in New York. Of course you helped my game by not recognizing me. It was an awful blow, though, to meet somebody who had never seen—or heard of—Elsie Lennore.”
KERRY seemed to be listening with the closest attention to all this. Her eyes fixed themselves on Elsie Lennore's face, and yet it was apparent—to Fax, for instance—that it was only the shell of her hearing which listened. Inwardly, she waited for something else. At the end of Elsie Lennore's peroration that something came—a footstep. Kerry's eyes went to the garden gate. A figure appeared there—a woman. And Mrs. Deane, in her slender, shimmerless black, entered the garden. For an instant she stood, her eyelids down. Then they lifted, and her great green-gray eyes shot a glance of entreaty into their midst. The effect on the garden group was paralyzing.
When Kerry crossed the threshold of the secret garden, a slim dark figure, suddenly materializing out of the twilight, confronted her. “Not a word,” she breathed.
Elsie Lennore stared at her in incensed amazement—dumb for the first time in Kerry's experience with her. Joshua and Fax rose to their feet, stood in an equal stupefaction. But Jay Harrideane, after an instant of astounded immobility, hurried toward her.
“Glennye! Glennye!” he murmured brokenly, and his voice was all wonder and gladness. “Oh, my darling—I'm so glad!” He put his arm about her and, drawing her past the group, still crystallized in astonishment, led her into the house.
“She's his wife,” Kerry explained simply. “You didn't know, fairy godmother, when you made that melodramatic trip from California to New York, that you were going to ride right through a happy marriage. But you did. He was in business and unsuccessful. He wanted to make some money for her sake. When he was in college he used to write all the farces. He knew how much money there is in moving pictures, and he wanted to try it. He began to write scenarios; but he told nobody—not even his wife. He wanted to surprise her. However, his wife opened a desk drawer in his office one day and came across your photograph. In it you wore your big black wig. She didn't recognize Elsie Lennore. Who would? She said nothing, but she watched him. Next, she found your telegram asking him to meet you at the station in New York, and to hire a house for you. When Mr. Harrideane returned that night, she had gone, leaving a note accusing him of— But she came to New York herself and watched your meeting. She followed him all day. She saw him go into this house. Then you arrived. She watched those swift preparations you made to furnish it—all in a few hours. In the mean time she had looked over the neighborhood. There was one house, she calculated, which might have windows looking on this yard. That was the boarding-house my aunt keeps. She applied for a room, hoping to get one which had such a window. My aunt could not give her that, because there was only one such room, and I had it. But both nights that I have been here Mrs. Harrideane had watched us all from my window. When you took off your wig she saw that you were Elsie Lennore. Still, she suspected— I discovered that she had been in my room during my absence and accused her of it. Then she told me her story. From what I had heard you say, I guessed the truth— In fact, I arranged with her this little meeting. I hope you will forgive me.”
AND into the silence that fell upon the little group broke another unexpected arrival. Again in the alley an alien footstep sounded. And on this occasion Kerry was as startled as the others. With them, her gaze went to the garden gate, went with a look of surprise, of curiosity in which was mingled a little unpleasant anticipation. Again a figure appeared. It was Delight Ryan. The curiosity did not die out of Kerry's eyes, but the trouble did.
Miss Ryan came forward slowly, her crimson lips parted over her sparkling teeth. Again Fax arose. And again Elsie Lennore stared with an air of outrage. In a mitigated degree Kerry shared her emotion.
Miss Ryan was dressed with a meticulous care. Only a hand gifted with the maximum of sartorial cunning could have fashioned that slim, straight gown which made almost insolent parade of its lack of decoration. Of a blue almost black, it cast into high relief the whiteness of the little glistening gloves, the little glistening shoes, the little glistening hat over which a black wing slashed at a piquant angle.
“Miss Lennore,” Miss Ryan began in the suavest of accents, “you have been advertising for a ring. You dropped it in the taxi-cab which you took from the station the day you arrived in New York. When you left the cab at this house, I got in. In spite of your wig I recognized you at once. I found the ring when I left the cab. You say something about a reward in your advertisement. I have been waiting for a chance to see you personally to claim the only reward I want—an interview with Macgill. I have tried now for two years to get to him.”
“Films?”
“Yes.”
“Experience?”
“None; but I've had a test. They took my name. They said they'd send for me.”
Elsie Lennore extended her hand, peremptory palm upward. Miss Ryan advanced and laid the ring on its olive surface. Elsie Lennore examined it carefully.
“Yes; it's my ring.” She slipped it on her finger. “It's always been my mascot until I met Cendrillon. The only failure I've ever had was once when I didn't wear it. Yes; I'll give you an interview. You have a camera-face. You ought to screen well.” She raised her voice to imperious heights. “Joshua! Joshua!”
Macgill's gaunt height, surmounted by its thatch of Irish hair, appeared at one of the long French windows on the first floor.
“Joshua, I've promised this girl an interview with you!” Elsie Lennore called carelessly. “She's had no experience, but I think she'd register well.”
A look of resignation that was apparent to the group spread over Macgill's face.
“All right! Send her in.”
“Her name is——”
“Miss Ryan, Miss Lennore,” Kerry interrupted swiftly.
“If you will come into the house, Miss Ryan,” Macgill went on, after the curt nod which he dropped in their direction from the window, “we can have our talk in here. I have just ten minutes for you.”
THE evening was still comparatively young. Inside, in one room, the Harrideanes, their arms about each other, were exchanging those vows of eternal fidelity with a zest that only the newly reconciled know. Inside, in another room, Elsie Lennore, Delight Ryan and Joshua Macgill were exchanging the gossip of the film-world with a zest that only the newly acquainted know. Outside in the garden, Kerry and Fax were alone. Wong had cleared the table of all except the glittering crystals, the flowers. The moon had climbed higher in the sky. All zenith-silver now, it made the most of the trees and the bushes, of the Gothic windows, and of the fountain, which, in its turn, made the most of the moon.
“Your trip wasn't very successful, then,” Kerry said gently.
“No,” Fax admitted morosely. “I didn't turn up anything of any real consequence. Of course, as I told you in my letters, I'd found—I didn't mention it to-night, because I didn't feel like talking—that there wasn't the same feeling about the Guirks in Field Harbor that there was in New York. A lot of people there shared my view of them; only, they didn't express it the way I did. 'A pair of old skinflints;' 'Close as the bark of a tree;' 'Pinching the penny till it bleeds,' is the way they put it. I dug up a curious story about Anstress, though. When she was seven, she choked two kittens to death—deliberately, said the people who told me about her. Oh, they don't like the Guirks in Field Harbor, believe me!”
“I am glad you didn't tell the others about that,” Kerry murmured. “I think it's wise to wait until you have all the facts.”
“I've got to have them by to-morrow morning,” Fax remarked despairingly, “for them to do me any good. But have you been able, in the light of what I told you, to guess anything yourself about Diana?”
“I have been thinking it over,” Kerry admitted. “I did exactly what you advised. I put myself in that girl's place and tried to work out a plan of escape. Of course, I got awfully interested. And after a while ideas came. I am going to tell you it all, exactly as though it was a story that had happened.”
Fax refilled his pipe.
“Once upon a time—” he prodded her.
“I'll recapitulate in regard to money first,” Kerry began in a leisurely manner. “When Admeh Darnston died, he left fifty million dollars—twenty millions to each of his twin children and five millions apiece to his sister Anstress and her husband, James Guirk. He made the Guirks guardians of his twin children. There was no other close relative except Aunt Hannah—his wife's sister. He left her no money, because his wife had provided for her in her own will. Although she was not so rich as the others, Hannah was quite comfortable financially. Now, Admeh, of course, believed that his sister and her husband were a kindly, affectionate pair who would devote themselves to bringing up his two children. But they were nothing of the sort. They were a pair to whom nothing counted but money. They loved money so much that they were capable of doing anything for it. When they realized that if both the twins died they would be worth—plus their own ten million—fifty million dollars and more, they were confronted by a temptation too strong for them to resist. Admeh Darnston had not been dead six months before the Guirks made up their minds that they were going to get that money by fair means or foul.”
“So far so good,” Fax agreed.
“There was apparently no obstacle in their way when first they made up their minds to this. But as the months went by an obstacle developed—Aunt Hannah. Aunt Hannah was the kind of person you described in your letters—gentle, but strong, intuitive and resourceful. She was one of those people who get instantly other people's moods, emotions, characters, even; who, coming into a room, can feel what sort of scene she had invaded—just as animals scent in the air the presence of other animals or humans. How Aunt Hannah got it, I don't know. When she got it, or where she got it, I don't know; but somehow she breathed it in out of the air that the intention of that malevolent pair toward those two babies was criminal. I say, I don't know how she got it; but to make my story hold water, she must have guessed it. More than that, she must have accused them of it. Did she overhear them talking about it? I believe she did. And, as I say, I think she accused them of it. That was her mistake. Fighting in the dark, she might have won; her sixth sense would have helped. But fighting in the open, she had no more chance with them than a gazelle with a pair of wolves. What they said to her, I don't know. What they did to her, I don't know. But remember they had five million dollars apiece, and, for the time being, the control of over forty millions more. And money can accomplish almost anything.”
Kerry paused.
“I don't mind your stopping for breath,” Fax encouraged her. “One must breathe to live.”
“At any rate,” Kerry went on, unheeding, “suddenly Aunt Hannah broke down. You remember there were two or three years of nervous prostration when she was under the care of specialists and nurses all the time. In your letters you told me that she never once in that period permitted herself to see the Guirks. My theory is that they held over her something terrific with which, for the time, they terrorized her utterly. You have yourself said many times that people with money could do anything. Perhaps they threatened to get rid of her. Perhaps they threatened her with an asylum. At any rate, although they didn't stop her, they made her harmless for the time being. Aunt Hannah realized that she couldn't compete with them in the open. So, what happened?”
The question was not addressed to Fax, but he answered it promptly.
“Aunt Hannah disappeared.”
“Exactly. Aunt Hannah knew she could save the children from their fates only by disappearing. For two years she fought to regain her strength. Once she was herself again, she made her plans to leave the country—to go to the Orient. And she carried those plans out. But, in fact, she did not lose herself at all; she returned to the United States in exactly one month.”
“CENDRILLON, you ought to write fiction,” Fax approved.
“I am beginning to think so myself. Now, in the mean time the Guirks had gone to New York. They settled themselves in the old Darnston house in the Eighties. They produced a superficial effect of cultivating people socially, but the cultivation was all on the outside. They joined the church. They did everything that pillars of the church should do. They entertained church dignitaries and church societies; but they were careful never to make any real friends—any intimates. Nobody came to their house who knew anything about their real life. They engaged three servants at such wages as insured their staying with them always. Benton, the butler, was a middle-aged man as stupid as he looked. Mary, the Irish cook, had a head that nothing could penetrate. She was a little deaf, too. Rose, the second maid, was almost a moron.”
“Good work!” Fax urged her on. “That 'moron' is a touch of genius.”
“The Guirks gave out that they didn't want the existence of these millionaire children to be known, because the newspapers might write them up and because they were in fear of kidnapers. And so the Guirks never permitted the children out of the house unaccompanied. They never permitted the children to make any friends. Superficially, the Guirks seemed to be taking an extraordinary care of them; for although the twins possessed every toy known to childhood, they were never permitted to do anything dangerous. They could not learn to swim. They could not learn to drive a motor-car. The Guirks did not possess an automobile. Whenever it was necessary to go anywhere, they sent for a taxi. The Guirks themselves used, every evening, to row on the river; they had brought this rural habit from Field Harbor—but they never allowed the children to enter the boat. The boat was always there, though, tethered by the yard wall. The children saw it every day of their lives, but they never set foot in it. They could play in the yard, in the play-room, or on the roof, but nowhere else. The only recreation they had was flying kites—and they flew kites all the time. This, after lessons, occupied their afternoons. But evenings were long, dull periods, when they could only read; and so they had all the books they wanted—they had the newspapers and magazines. But I fancy people like you and me have no idea what the loneliness was like. Why, the only telephone in the house was in Mrs. Guirk's room. Sometimes the twins sat and watched the river-scenes, and at those times, just as the papers said, they used to enjoy the big electric advertising signs across the river which flashed in various colors advertisement after advertisement all the evening long. Those river-windows—every paper, of course, laid great stress on this—were grilled; so that there was no possibility of their falling out.”
“HURRY up, Cendrillon!” Fax prodded her. “You're only expanding what I've told you.”
“Wait!” Kerry ordered briefly. “Now, in the mean time the children were growing up. They had passed from little childhood to big childhood, from big childhood to boyhood and girlhood. From boyhood and girlhood they were approaching youth. And that is the period in the lives of these two babes in the wood that I find it most difficult to describe. Of course, at first the twins loved Aunt Anstress and Uncle James. Except for the tutors and governesses, who were changed every year, and the servants, their uncle and aunt constituted their entire world. The children continued to love them until— I don't know, of course, when that period came when they began to realize that Aunt Anstress and Uncle James did not really love them at all. It must have been rather late; for, you see, their lives were not at all like other children's lives. At first, when they began to realize this, they must have wondered why it was so. Then they began to resent it, began to try to circumvent that eternal espionage which surrounded them. They must have made some secret effort to rebel against it, because you yourself found out that they borrowed the camera from the boy next door in order that Dana might take some pictures of Diana. I mention this because it is important—in my version of this story. Don't forget”—Kerry sighed a long sigh—“it is such a difficult story to tell. It's so hard to simplify it.”
“I know,” Fax agreed. “You're only up against what the reporter is up against every day of his life.”
“Take Dana first, then. Here was a boy, big, strong, well grown for his years, muscular but lithe, very active. He was high-spirited, full, in short, of what people call 'pep.' Much earlier than Diana he began to resent the situation and, much stronger than Diana, to fight it. He rebelled first and inoculated Diana with his rebellion. But Diana it was who first got it that the intentions of the Guirks were criminal. I repeat I don't know how she got it. I can only explain this by the theory that the Guirks kept her mind so pure and clear that it was pure and clear enough to reflect their own intentions. These intentions were so black and hard that the Guirks could not prevent them from reflecting in those limpid depths. I can guess that it came first as a kind of depression, then an uneasiness, then a suspicion, then an espionage on her own account, then a conviction. Perhaps she shared this with Dana from the beginning; perhaps she didn't tell him until she was sure. At any rate, somewhere along their middle teens, the twins realized in its full enormity what the situation was. That marks the end of one era in their story, the beginning of another. Remember that business about the boat. Dana was expressly forbidden ever to get into it; nevertheless, there it was always—always it was there to tempt him. Of course he spoke to Diana a hundred, a thousand times of how he would like to row on the river some night after the Guirks had gone to bed. Constantly he kept on the lookout for a chance, but it never occurred to him to steal out late at night to try it until——
“Every night the Guirks examined all the windows in the house to see that they were locked—every night but one. Once one of the lower windows needed mending. A glazier was called in. He worked all the afternoon. Dana saw that that window was not locked when he left. The Guirks, perhaps by accident, perhaps by design, didn't examine the windows that night. And that night Dana crawled out, got into the boat and, while it still lay tied to the garden wall, made experiments in rowing as far as the length of the rope would permit. That was the beginning of a series of nocturnal adventures on the river. Diana never went with him, but Dana went alone again and again. He was determined to manage an escape, first for himself and then for his sister.”
Again Kerry breathed deeply.
“As you pass each mile-stone of this improvisation,” Fax commented in amusement, “you sigh as though you had accomplished one part of a great journey.”
“That's the way I feel,” Kerry admitted. “Now we're returning to Aunt Hannah. Aunt Hannah is back from the Orient—in the United States—in New York, to be explicit. She is living here secretly under an assumed name. She has but one idea in life, and that is to manage the escape of the Darnston twins before the Guirks killed them,and that will be some time before their twenty-first birthday. But how to get into communication with them? It would be fatal to let the Guirks know she was near. And, of course, the children, she knew, as the whole world now knows, were watched like a pair of great diamonds. But Aunt Hannah, as I said before, was a resourceful woman. Of course, Diana and Dana went to church every Sunday. Uncle James sat at the aisle-end of the middle double section of pews, Anstress next to him, then Diana, then Dana. This brought Dana against the partition that separated the two pews. One Sunday a stranger sat beside him in that pew. This stranger was a man. During the service he seemed a little inept at finding his place in the hymn-book, and Dana politely shared his with him. The man absently placed it beside him when the singing was over. When he returned the book to Dana at the close of the service, there was a sealed envelope in it. On it was written: 'Diana and Dana. Do not let your aunt and uncle see this.' Dana slipped it into his pocket.”
“I believe the greatest unknown female novelist in the world is talking to me now,” Fax applauded her briefly.
Kerry paid no attention.
“When Diana and Dana were next alone—and, of course, they were a great deal alone, and by choice always—they read the note. It was from Aunt Hannah. She told them that she was near them in New York and was planning their escape. She emphasized the necessity of action as soon as possible. She said: 'Correspondence of this kind is too dangerous. In the future, I will communicate with you by means of——'”
KERRY paused, and perhaps at no time in her narrative had she shown so concentrated a look.
“You have had two inspirations in regard to the disappearance of Diana—an intuition in regard to the real character of the Guirks and an idea as to how Diana managed her escape. I've had an inspiration, too. There was one detail in all the newspaper stories that stuck in my mind. And last night, when I was thinking this story out, suddenly— It was that picture all the newspapers drew of the twins sitting in their room night after night, watching the electric signs across the river. Have you ever seen those signs? Perhaps I am the only person in New York who has thought of them in connection with Diana's disappearance. I have them copied in typewriting in my room now. One of them contains all the letters in the alphabet.”
“Which one?” Fax answered quickly.
“Johnson's Birch Soap,” Kerry answered.
“I don't remember that,” Fax said thoughtfully, “but I have been gone for over five years.”
“Oh,” Kerry exclaimed, with a triumphant inflection, “if it's been put on within the last six years, that helps my story a lot. Suppose Aunt Hannah's letter ran like this: 'I will communicate with you by means of the new electric sign across the river, the one advertising Johnson's Birch Soap. It will begin to-night or to-morrow night. Watch for it. It contains a code. Pay no attention to it until nine o'clock. After that, when the colors begin to change, take down every second red letter and every second blue letter. They will make a message. Take it down in pencil. Study it until you are sure of everything it says. Then destroy what you have written. Destroy this note, too. To make certain, it will begin the message again sharp at ten o'clock and again at eleven. Keep your watches exactly on standard time. Nights when I have nothing to say, I will flash, 'No message,' and you may go to bed. Many of my messages will ask you questions. Reply by means of your kites. A white one will mean 'Yes.' A kite of any other color will mean 'No.' Two kites of different colors will mean 'I don't understand.'
“The twins read the note in whispers to each other until they had it fixed word for word in their memories. Then they destroyed it. But they didn't entirely understand until the next evening, when the new electric sign appeared across the river among the other signs which they had been watching for so many years. It advertised Johnson's Birch Soap. It read:
“Johnson's Birch Soap
For Particular Washing
In Toilet and Laundry,
Strong as an Ox,
Mild as a Breeze,
Gives Quick Lather.
“If you Study that legend carefully, you will see that it contains every letter in the alphabet.”
FAX drew from his pocket a stub lead-pencil and a wad of paper.
“Say that again slowly,” he asked. Fax's pencil flew in his rapid shorthand at Kerry's dictation.
“So it does!” he exclaimed, after a moment of calculation.
“It flashed those lines one by one,” Kerry went on, “in ordinary yellow lights. Then the whole legend comes out in yellow, and then breaks out into every color of the rainbow—one letter yellow, one red, one blue, one green, and so on. It remains so for half a minute, and then goes out and repeats the whole performance.
“Now, back to the twins. We can imagine them at nine o'clock watching with all their eyes when the full legend came up and became incandescent. They looked only for the red and blue letters. They watched until ten o'clock, when the same thing happened again—and again at eleven. Next morning the twins sent up a white kite.
“Now, we'll assume that this communication, by means of the electric sign, went on almost nightly. Of course, the messages had to be brief. But it is amazing how much you can get into a few words when you must. And sometimes the sign would 'talk,' as the twins perhaps call it, for half an hour at a time. Aunt Hannah gave them all they needed to know about herself, and revealed her plans. She intended to manage Dana's escape first. In this she was unconsciously assisted by the Guirks themselves. Of course, Dana had supposed these excursions on the river were not known. But they were known. All the time, the Guirks had tacitly permitted Dana to escape through the window that the glazier had mended, and of course they left the boat there to tempt him. One night, however, when Dana tried to get through his window, he found it locked. He wasn't satisfied. He tried all the others, tried the back door—all locked! A window in the second floor, however—and, as it happened, by a genuine accident—had been left open. From it he climbed, very softly, into the yard—crept to the river wall. The boat was gone. But as he passed the shed in the yard, dark as it was there, he caught a glimmer of light. He crawled over to the door, knelt down and looked through the key-hole. Uncle James was there, and the boat was there. There was a great ragged hole in the bottom of the boat, as though it had been smashed out by a blow from a sledge-hammer. And Uncle James was busily engaged in the process of gluing that ragged, broken piece of board, which he had smashed out, back into place. Much mystified, Dana crept up-stairs to bed. The next day he told Diana what he had seen. Diana explained easily enough——”
“Take another long breath!” Fax commanded.
Kerry obeyed.
“The Guirks had tempted him to steal away on the river. And now Uncle James had made the boat unseaworthy. Diana recalled to Dana that Uncle James had been a cabinet-maker in his youth. The next time Dana rowed the boat the broken board would melt away like tissue-paper, and, as he could not swim, he would drown. It proved conclusively that all their suspicions and Aunt Hannah's suspicions were justified. But what to do? However, Aunt Hannah had provided for just such an emergency in the letter that was passed to Dana in church. If ever there was necessity for quick action, the children were to send up that day a kite with a black tail. And from their window that night they must lower to just below the level of the water a hot-water bottle containing a message. After midnight, a dory would come along and get it.”
KERRY paused, breathless. Fax listened, breathless himself.
“Two nights later Dana Darnston went rowing on the river. He didn't return. There was hue and cry. Three days later the oarless boat, with a great hole stove in its bottom, was found floating in the harbor. Dana was never heard of again. Of course, Dana had rowed a few rods into the darkness and was then transferred to a boat which Aunt Hannah had waiting for him. Then something unforeseen happened. The United States declared war on Germany. As far as Diana was concerned, Dana's presence in New York was only a danger. Aunt Hannah was handling the case with her usual resourcefulness. She sent him West, and there he enlisted under an assumed name. That left Diana alone in the great, gloomy house in the Eighties, although at intervals the Saturday-night message would flash to her the news in his letters to Aunt Hannah. Of course, her state of mind was perpetual panic. She was worried about her brother, and she knew perfectly well now that the Guirks meant to make way with her. But she trusted to Aunt Hannah, and her trust was justified. After Dana's disappearance the Guirks started what was, in fact, a campaign to disqualify Diana mentally. Whenever she sat alone in her room, Anstress would break in upon her. 'You mustn't let yourself get so sad; it's dangerous,' she would say, or, 'This moping leads to melancholia and thoughts of death and suicide,' or, 'If you think too much of Dana you'll get so low-spirited that you'll want to kill yourself.' She harped all the time on Diana's growing sadness, her suicidal tendency. She warned the servants that Diana was in a state of dangerous melancholia. She never left the house without asking them to watch her. This was, of course, to prepare them all for the moment when Diana's body would be found in the river. Diana knew, and Aunt Hannah knew, that her doom was approaching. But how to get away?
“In the mean time Aunt Anstress decided to make the gym over into an up-stairs living-room. That gave her an opportunity to gratify her one extravagance—the accumulation off rugs. Suddenly, one night, a plan of escape flashed into Diana's mind. It was suggested—” Here Kerry smiled. “Now I'm plagiarizing you.”
“Steal my stuff as much as you want,” Fax prompted cheerfully.
“Her escape was suggested by the picture which hung beside her bed—'Cleopatra and Cæsar.' She outlined the scheme in a letter, and for the second time employed the hot-water-bottle post.
“Aunt Hannah's boat came, took her message. Aunt Hannah indicated her approval and her additions to Kerry's plan by means of the electric sign. Aunt Hannah approached Coney, Smyrniande's truck-driver, bribed him to help her. The rest is your story. I cannot better it. Diana was carried down-stairs in a pile of rugs and put into the delivery-motor. In that motor was a bag containing a fresh suit and a long letter of directions from Aunt Hannah. She changed there. At some distant spot—I imagine the delivery-yard of Smyrniande's store—unseen by anybody, she dropped out of the motor and joined Aunt Hannah.”
“Heavens, how I'd like to write that story!” Fax crowed. “But where did Aunt Hannah live and what has Diana been doing all this time? Imagine some more, my fair Scheherezade.”
“In Aunt Hannah's letter, she told Diana to go first to the Grand Central Station, emerge again in one of the train-crowds, take a taxi as though she had just come into New York on the train. Then, arriving at Aunt Hannah's house, and followed in a few hours by a trunkful of clothes, which Aunt Hannah had picked out for her, she was to pose as a young girl fresh from the country. By means of the electric sign, they had made the agreement—she and Aunt Hannah—that they would never say a word, even when they were alone, about the Guirks or the conditions of Diana's life with them until Diana Darnston's twenty-first birthday came. Their talk was always to be as though Diana had just come from the country; even, I reiterate, when they were alone, always, always! As a blind. Aunt Hannah had, all these years, been keeping a boarding-house. She had prepared the boarders for the coming of her niece—she had even shown them pictures of her—the pictures that Dana took with Lawrence Mangan's camera.”
Fax emitted a deep suspiration. Long ago he had smoked his cigarette out. Now he seemed for the first instant conscious of it. He began slapping the pockets of his coat to find his cigarettes. One hand explored his trousers pocket. Apparently it didn't find the cigarette-case, but it touched something unexpected. With a puzzled air Fax drew it forth—a crumpled sheet of paper. Half unnoting, he opened it—started—stared—turned white—turned a deep red——
“It's one minute to twelve,” Kerry faltered, “and I am——”
“You are Diana Darnston!” Fax anticipated her.
“How did you know?”
Fax handed her the paper. It was the note that she had thrown, tied to the tennis-ball, into the garden, accepting the Golden Serpent's invitation to join them.
“Oh! Oh! How stupid of me! It's the only bit of handwriting I've done since I left the Guirks, and I'd forgotten all about it. Of course there's hundreds of reproductions of my handwriting in the papers.”
“It's remained in the pocket where I shoved it ever since that night,” Fax said in a dead voice. “And I called myself a reporter!” He emitted a short, bitter laugh. “And I thought I had intuitions!”
“Love makes and unmakes intuition,” Kerry breathed softly.
“Love!” Fax laughed again with a bitter mirthlessness. “And I have been writing daily love-letters to a girl with a fortune of twenty millions! Please consider them all unwritten, Miss Darnston.”
But to this Diana, or Kerry, or Cendrillon paid no attention. Above them, the church clock was bombarding the air with the twelve strokes of midnight. And Diana, with a look of expectation, was staring in the direction of her oriel. With the last stroke of twelve a man's head appeared there, leaned out and surveyed the garden. Kerry waved her hand to him. The head disappeared instantly from its oval.
“Twenty million dollars can be given to that new world,” Kerry whispered, addressing no one in particular. Fax took no notice. He stared into space.
The others came pouring out of the house—Mrs. Deane with the gleam of triumphant happiness in her eyes, Miss Ryan with the sparkle of triumphant success in hers.
“We have talked so long,” Elsie Lennore said, “that we are all hungry again. Wong's getting us something delicious to eat. All the dinners have been your dinners, Cendrillon, and this shall be your supper.”
“Breakfast, rather,” Diana corrected, “and a birthday breakfast at that. For this is my birthday's I am twenty-one years old—and I am Diana Darnston!”
AN INTERVAL of stupefaction and then a volley of shrill hysterical ejaculations, questions, unheeded answers, demands for explanations. Diana it was who resolved it from its clamor to the quiet of another period of paralysis. For presently there came through the garden gate a young man in the uniform of a private in the United States army, four gold stripes on his right arm and the red band of demobilization on his left.
“This is my brother, Dana Darnston,” Diana announced, and she threw her arms about her twin, “lately demobilized from the United States army and hiding in Hoboken since, while waiting for this night.”
After her kiss, her head dropped for a long moment onto his shoulder. Dana's lids fell over something that glittered between his lashes.
“Aunt Hannah said you were in your room,” he explained, “and sent me up there. You weren't there, but I looked out of the window—” He patted his sister's drooped head. After a while,
“Dana dear, this is Elsie Lennore, the great—” Diana began, turning eyes full of a dewy shining on her godmother.
“Do you think you can tell any doughboy about Elsie Lennore?” Dana jeered. “I've come home to marry you, Miss Lennore.”
“I accept,” said Elsie Lennore.
“And Mr. and Mrs. Harrideane, Dana, and Miss Ryan and Mr. Macgill. And Dana dear, this is the gentleman I am engaged to marry. Excuse me, Fax, for introducing you this way. But I don't know your name yet.”
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1970, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 54 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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