“You don’t realize it, probably,” she protested, “but you look like a - a war god. Your face is horrible.”
“I will turn my back, if it will help any,” I said stormily, “but if you expect me to look anything but murderous, why, you don’t know what I am going through with. That’s all.”
The story of her meeting with the Curtis woman was brief enough. They had met in Rome first, where Alison and her mother had taken a villa for a year. Mrs. Curtis had hovered on the ragged edges of society there, pleading the poverty of the south since the war as a reason for not going out more. There was talk of a brother, but Alison had not seen him, and after a scandal which implicated Mrs. Curtis and a young attache of the Austrian embassy, Alison had been forbidden to see the woman.
“The women had never liked her, anyhow,” she said. “She did unconventional things, and they are very conventional there. And they said she did not always pay her - her gambling debts. I didn’t like them. I thought they didn’t like her because she was poor - and popular. Then - we came home, and I almost forgot her, but last spring, when mother was not well - she had taken grandfather to the Riviera, and it always uses her up - we went to Virginia Hot Springs, and we met them there, the brother, too, this time. His name was Sullivan, Harry Pinckney Sullivan.”
“I know. Go on.”
“Mother had a nurse, and I was alone a great deal, and they were very kind to me. I - I saw a lot of them. The brother rather attracted me, partly - partly because he did not make love to me. He even seemed to avoid me, and I was piqued. I had been spoiled, I suppose. Most of the other men I knew had - had - ”
“I know that, too,” I said bitterly, and moved away from her a trifle. I was brutal, but the whole story was a long torture. I think she knew what I was suffering, for she showed no resentment.
“It was early and there were few people around - none that I cared about. And mother and the nurse played cribbage eternally, until I felt as though the little pegs were driven into my brain. And when Mrs. Curtis arranged drives and picnics, I - I slipped away and went. I suppose you won’t believe me, but I had never done that kind of thing before, and I - well, I have paid up, I think.”
“What sort of looking chap was Sullivan?” I demanded. I had got up and was pacing back and forward on the sand. I remember kicking savagely at a bit of water-soaked board that lay in my way.
“Very handsome - as large as you are, but fair, and even more erect.”
I drew my shoulders up sharply. I am straight enough, but I was fairly sagging with jealous rage.
“When mother began to get around, somebody told her that I had been going about with Mrs. Curtis and her brother, and we had a dreadful time. I was dragged home like a bad child. Did anybody ever do that to you?”
“Nobody ever cared. I was born an orphan,” I said, with a cheerless attempt at levity. “Go on.”
“If Mrs. Curtis knew, she never said anything. She wrote me charming letters, and in the summer, when they went to Cresson, she asked me to visit her there. I was too proud to let her know that I could not go where I wished, and so - I sent Polly, my maid, to her aunt’s in the country, pretended to go to Seal Harbor, and really went to Cresson. You see I warned you it would be an unpleasant story.”
I went over and stood in front of her. All the accumulated jealousy of the last few weeks had been fired by what she told me. If Sullivan had come across the sands just then, I think I would have strangled him with my hands, out of pure hate.
“Did you marry him?” I demanded. My voice sounded hoarse and strange in my ears. “That’s all I want to know. Did you marry him?”
“No.”
I drew a long breath.
“You - cared about him?”
She hesitated.
“No,” she said finally. “I did not care about him.”
I sat down on the edge of the boat and mopped my hot face. I was heartily ashamed of myself, and mingled with my abasement was a great relief. If she had not married him, and had not cared for him, nothing else was of any importance.
“I was sorry, of course, the moment the train had started, but I had wired I was coming, and I could not go back, and then when I got there, the place was charming. There were no neighbors, but we fished and rode and motored, and - it was moonlight, like this.”
I put my hand over both of hers, clasped in her lap. “I know,” I acknowledged repentantly, “and - people do queer things when it is moonlight. The moon has got me to-night, Alison. If I am a boor, remember that, won’t you?”
Her fingers lay quiet under mine. “And so,” she went on with a little sigh, “I began to think perhaps I cared. But. all the time felt that there was something not quite right. Now and then Mrs. Curtis would say or do something that gave me a queer start, as if she had dropped a mask for a moment. And there was trouble with the servants; they were almost insolent. I couldn’t understand. I don’t know when it dawned on me that the old Baron Cavalcanti had been right when he said they were not my kind of people. But I wanted to get away, wanted it desperately.”
“Of course, they were not your kind,” I cried. “The man was married! The girl Jennie, a housemaid, was a spy in Mrs. Sullivan’s employ. If he had pretended to marry you I would have killed him! Not only that, but the man he murdered, Harrington, was his wife’s father. And I’ll see him hang by the neck yet if it takes every energy and every penny I possess.”
I could have told her so much more gently, have broken the shock for her; I have never been proud of that evening on the sand. I was alternately a boor and a ruffian - like a hurt youngster who passes the blow that has hurt him on to his playmate, that both may bawl together. And now Alison sat, white and cold, without speech.
“Married!” she said finally, in a small voice. “Why, I don’t think it is possible, is it? I - I was on my way to Baltimore to marry him myself, when the wreck came.”
“But you said you didn’t care for him!” I protested, my heavy masculine mind unable to jump the gaps in her
