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They had left part of their souls on the field with their blood. It was a time when it seemed that nobody had a right to be unhappy who had life, health, shelter, and food. Yet America was perhaps as discontented as Europe. Kedzie had reason enough to make peace with life. Gilfoyle was as valuable a citizen as she. She might have helped to make him a good business man or a genuine poet.
Gilfoyle had done his best to teach her how wildly well a born New-Yorker can play the lute of emotion. To proclaim now that he was the anonymous husband of this glitterer on the billboard would have been a shocking confession. Gilfoyle swallowed his secret, but it made his heart flutter tremendously.
It was her name in the heavy type that caught the heavy eyes of Jim Dyckman at breakfast the next morning. It was thus that he came upon the fate of Thomas Gilfoyle, whose death had been the cause of all this pother. Before he could telephone Anita or Kedzie, as he mentally corrected himself he was informed that a Mr. Connery was at the door, asking for him.
Gilfoyle said, "You're no judge or else you're jealous." The two men read it, and said, "Mush!" and "Slushgusher!" but Marguerite's eyes belonged to Gilfoyle the rest of the evening, also her hands now and then. Remembering this, Gilfoyle was uneasy. One ought to be careful to keep an aseptic memory at home. Yet if this was not infidelity, what would be?
"I'm the husband of that shameless woman; that's who I am," Gilfoyle shrilled, a little cowed by Dyckman's stature. "Oh, you are, are you!" said Dyckman. "Well, you're the very chap I'm looking for. Come in, by all means." Connery, seeing that the initiative was slipping from Gilfoyle's flaccid hand, pushed forward with truculence. "None of that, you big bluff!
She did not see how she could get out of the tangled situation her whims, her necessities, and her fates had constructed about her. She had been more or less forced into a betrothal with the wealthy Jim Dyckman before she had dissolved her marriage with Tommie Gilfoyle. She could not find Gilfoyle, and she grew frenzied with the dread that her inability to find him might thwart all her dreams.
But it was good to have allies, and Kedzie went on: "By an' by Gilfoyle got the offer of a position in Chicago, and he couldn't get there without borrowing all I had. But I was glad enough to pay it to him. I'd 'a' paid his fare to the moon if he'd 'a' gone there.
It is the success of sin and the sin of success that cannot be forgiven. The little dancer whose foot had slipped on the wet marble of wealth was shaken almost to pieces by philosophic vibrations too big for her exquisite frame. They reminded her of her poet, of Tommie Gilfoyle, who was afraid of her and paid court to her. He appeared to her now as a radiant angel of redemption.
"If it's war she wants, cry havoc and let slip the sleuth hounds." He went to a drug-store and had his wounds sterilized and plastered, saying that a pet cat had scratched him. "Just so," said the drug clerk, with a grin. "Pet cats are very dangerous." Gilfoyle wanted to slug him, but he wanted his wounds dressed more.
"I come on East to clear things up, and I advised my daughter to tell you just the way things were as I always say to my children, use the truth and shame the devil." Kedzie was too busy to notice the outrage. She was thanking Heaven for her impulse to reveal the facts, realizing how appalling it would have been if Gilfoyle had been the first to inform Dyckman.
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