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Thanks to Kedzie, Jim Dyckman, one of the richest men going and one of the decentest fellows alive, learned what it means to lie in shabby domicile and to salt dirty bread with tears; to be afraid to face the public that had fawned on him, and to understand the portion of the criminal and the pariah.

If she had brought such a message or implied it she would have walked right into the living-room of the parental hearts. But poor Kedzie lacked the genius and the inspiration of simplicity and frankness, and she marched up the steps in a panic which she disguised all too well in a pretense of scorn that proclaimed: "I am as good as you are. I have been in dozens of finer homes than this.

The moment the parson had done his worst a new Kedzie had appeared.

And some of those men that were corporals when I made my Ace, are Aces now as well and they're crawling up on my score! I'll have to fly all the time to catch up." But he wanted to take with him his beauty. He was jealous of Uncle Sam and afraid to trust Kedzie to him. The more inconvenient she became to him the more determined he grew to overcome the obstacles to her possession.

She remembered something, found it at last, an article she had glanced at and forgotten for the moment. She snatched it up and read. It discussed the earning powers of several film queens. It credited them with salaries ten or twenty times as much as hers. Two or three of them had companies of their own with their names at the head of their films. Kedzie groaned.

Adna raged back: "Give up a billion-dollar man for a fool poet? Not on your tintype!" Kedzie gave her father an admiring look. They were getting on sympathetic ground. They understood each other. Adna was encouraged to say: "If I was you, Kedzie, I'd just lay the facts before him. Maybe he could buy the feller off. You could probably get him mighty cheap." Mrs.

Any woman might have blazed with pride at being asked to marry Jim Dyckman. The little villager was almost consumed like another Semele scorched by Jupiter's rash approach. In Dyckman's clasp Kedzie felt how lonely she had been. She wanted to be gathered in from the dangers of the world, from poverty and from work.

They had speedily learned that Dyckman was in constant attendance on Kedzie, and that they were careless of the hours alone, careless of appearances. Gilfoyle never dreamed that the couple was chaperoned doubly by a certain lukewarmth of emotion and by an ambition to become man and wife. Gilfoyle imagined their relations to be as intimate as their opportunities permitted.

It made Kedzie cynical to see him haggle and ponder, trying to make the maximum hit with a minimum of ammunition. It made her more distrustful to see young men trying to flirt with her while they bought tributes of devotion to somebody else.

So he did, and he went the way of millions of lazy-minded, lazy- moraled husbands while Kedzie went the way of men and women who succeed by self-exploitation and count only that bad morals which is also bad business. And that was the status of the matrimonial adventure of the Gilfoyles for the present.